I agree with W_D here--I try to balance my meals nutritionally. I also try to make my meals tasty! After all, these trips are supposed to be vacation! Life is far too short to spend forcing onself to eat horrible blah food!

There's a caveat, though. For trips of 5 days or less, I take quite a bit less food because I'm just not hungry for the first four or five days. This is a case of cutting serving sizes rather than eliminating tasty items. In fact, I tend to take more tasty items, like "Kind" bars to which I'm addicted, and cut back on the "good for me" stuff. I figure that I'm not going to get malnourished on a short trip, but I do need to keep up the calories. Of course the whole problem with this appetite business on short trips is that the hiker appetite appears when I finish the trip, when I no longer need the extra calories!

For a longer trip or a closely packed series of short trips, I'm more careful about nutritional requirements.

I loathe Mountain House! Most other ready-made freeze dried meals are, for me, too salty and too full of MSG, causing me indigestion and bloating. I tend to make my own dinners out of the one-dish meals I eat regularly at home. I cook up a pot of something, freeze a few meals to zap later at home (don't want to eat the same dish for a week!), and dry a couple of meals. If it's a new dish, I dry just one serving and try it at home to see how I like it. There's no point in dehydrating several if they don't pass the taste test!

I have also bought bulk freeze-dried items (mostly from Packit Gourmet) and added those to my home made meals. I make heavy use of couscous for pasta, since it doesn't require cooking (when rehydrated with the meal, it's fully cooked) and tastes fine (I use whole wheat). I must admit that couscous with spaghetti is a bit strange because there is no noodle-slurping factor, but it tastes just as good!

I strongly recommend "sarbar's" site, Trail Cooking. Lots of tasty recipes that take little preparation, often use easy-on-the-budget supermarket ingredients, and (If you use the "freezer bag" method) result in no dishwashing! (Did I ever mention how much I hate washing dishes?)