Recipe: Moroccan chicken stew

This recipe began life in Italy as a car-camping meal inspired by the cooking of a family in the campsite adjacent to ours. After returning home, Eric made it several more times at home with input from me as to improvements and adaptations. When it was time to start planning meals for the Nova Scotia trip, I thought it would be great to see if this would translate to a backpacker friendly version. Here's our first try, and may I say it was a rousing success!

Moroccan Chicken Stew a la Chignecto
Serves 3

Ingredients:
1 10- or 15-oz can of chicken, broken into small pieces
1 cup brine-cured (Spanish Queen) green olives, sliced
3 oz tomato paste
1 1/2 Tbsp Moroccan Tajine spice blend (a blend of cumin, pepper, cayenne, paprika, cinnamon, etc.)
1-2 cubes of chicken bullion (we used 3, and it was too salty)
2/3 of a head of cauliflower (fresh)
1 lemon
1 cup dry couscous

At home:
Dehydrate the chicken and olives according to the instructions of your food dehydrator. Dehydrate the tomato paste to make a tomato leather, and cut or tear it into small pieces. Combine the chicken, olives, tomato leather, spices and bullion in a zip-loc bag. Store the dry couscous in a separate bag. Pack the cauliflower and lemon as convenient.

On the trail:

1. Cover the dry ingredients in a covered pot with about an inch of water and let sit until the ingredients have begun to rehydrate and soften (maybe an hour, but if you have less time you'll just have to cook for longer). Break up the tomato leather with a spoon as much as possible. If you are still on the trail an hour before dinner time, you could just add water to the zip-loc bag and let it soak in your pack for a while.
   
2. When you are starting to get hungry, bring 1 cup of water to a boil. Stir in the couscous and let it sit covered for about 10 minutes. Fluff with a fork.
3. While the couscous water is coming to a boil, cut the fresh cauliflower into small florets. Slice the lemon, cut the rind off the slices, and separate into segments. The remaining round ends of the lemon can be squeezed into the pot for their juice, and any juice resulting from the slicing should be reserved and added as well. Add the cauliflower and lemon segments to the pot, and once the couscous pot has been removed from the stove, simmer the stew for about 10 minutes until the cauliflower is tender and the tomato leather has fully rehydrated to create a sauce. Serve over couscous.

Although the rehydrated olives weren't plump and juicy like at home, the flavors were all there. If desired (to save pack weight and space) you could probably dehydrate the cauliflower too, but the added crispness was nice, and cauliflower keeps pretty well. We all loved this dinner, and found that the spices and lemon woke up our taste buds after a day of hiking up and down hills.

The recipe format is stolen from "Lipsmackin' Backpacking" by Tim and Christine Conners, although I don't have the dry weight and nutritional information available. Even with the cauliflower, it didn't do too bad with respect to pack weight, and was probably one of our healthier meals on the trip (no butter, no oil, no cheese!).

MSR Sweetwater

When you're out in the wild, you need a pump to keep you from getting sick. That is, you need to keep your water nice and clear from things like giardia and cryptosporidium, both of which make you sick.

I originally purchased a Pur Scout for my water-filtration needs. It was perfectly okay. It pumped water from the creek, presumably cleaned it (I never got sick), and spewed it into my Nalgene bottle. It even had a nice little attachment so that it would stick into either a wide-mouth or narrow-mouth bottle. I'm a narrow-mouther, myself, although most everyone else I know is a wide-mouther. To each their own.

The problem with the Scout was its useable life - it didn't last very long, before getting all clogged up with gunk. Even prefiltering the water didn't help much. One trip was the useful lifetime of a filter. And the replacement filters cost nearly as much as the device itself. If I recall correctly, the Scout cost me $75, and replacement cartridges cost $60. That makes sense, considering that everything other than the filter is just a couple of pieces of plastic. Then, the scout crapped out on me during a trip. Luckily, a friend also brought along his filter - a Sweetwater. One look, and I was hooked.

First of all, the Sweetwater has a lever pump. Rather than a simple handle to grab on, you actually use leverage to pump the Sweetwater. This makes treatment a lot faster, and makes your hand cramp a lot less. Trust me, pumping a little bit of water is easy, but when you have to treat ten liters for the whole group, it gets tiring.

Secondly, the Sweetwater has a nice little outlet spray. When you overpressure the filter, it sprays out the outlet, instead of further munging up your filter. Now, you have to remember to point it away from you, or else the first spray will catch you by surprise, but it's a great feature. Eventually, as your filter clogs up, the spray will blow more and more often. This is when you would curse and go spend another $60 if you had a Scout. But....

This unit is field serviceable! That's right! Whip out the little brush, scrub the inside of the filter a few times, and voila! You're good to go again. I was so taken with this feature that I told the people I was with (most of whom are co-authors on this blog) about a gajillion times that the Sweetwater was field-serviceable. Bliss.

Sweetwater also makes a neato little gadget that you can attach to the outlet hose of the pump, so that you can screw it straight on to a Platypus. I'm sure we'll get around to reviewing the Platy, but suffice it to say - it rocks. You can probably hook this up to just about any other filter on the market, since it just mooshes in to the end of the outlet hose, which looks pretty standard. Definitely helpful, since when it's all screwed together, you don't have to worry about your Platy falling over and dumping its contents on the ground as you fill it up. This used to be a big problem, since the Platy is softsided, so its shape and center of gravity shift around as it gets filled up.

Theoretically, with two of these little doohickeys, and a dedicated dirty-water Platypus, one can rig a gravity filtration system for the Sweetwater. Basically, the dirty-water Platy goes up, and feeds down into the filter, which drips into the clean-water one. Never tried it, mainly because I don't want to carry around an extra Platy that I can't drink from. I'm sure I'd get them mixed up.

Interestingly, Sweetwater no longer exists as a company. A while back, Cascade Designs bought them (the people who make the Platypus). But then Cascade bought MSR, the makers of a competing pump-style purifier, and folded the Sweetwater into the MSR line. It looks like the Sweetwater is here to stay, it's the lower-end model where the original MSR one is the higher-end one. I can't speak to whether or not it's changed since then, though, any feedback on that would be awesome.

Even weirder, MSR makes a direct competitor to the Platypus line. I wonder if this is the end to the Beloved Platypus. But that's another tale.

Gear Review: The Crazy Creek Original Chair

On Friday I took possession of a royal blue Crazy Creek Original Chair. Today it got it's first field test at the Russian River Blues Festival. An entire day sitting on the ground and rocks in this chair ought to give me a pretty darn good idea of what it can hack.

This chair is small, light and minimal. A closed-cell foam seat and back with adjustable webbing straps to control the incline of the back and support you as you sit. The only frills are a zippered mesh pocket and a mesh bottle holder on the reverse of the seat back. There also is a pair of handles for ease of carrying.

We arrived at the festival at 10:30 am and stayed until about 6pm. Despite the seriously danceable tunes we spent almost the entire time sitting down, so this chair really got a workout. How did it fare?

I had a number of concerns for this piece of equipment. Chief among them were that it would not be comfortable and that the webbing straps would slip when stressed.

It turns out I needn't have been concerned about either of these things. Even after almost eight hours of sitting almost directly on the ground the chair was still comfortable (and, more importantly, my butt was not sore). The webbing straps were real troopers, not giving a bit even when I would recline, putting most of my weight into the back. The entire unit is built very well.

If I were to have one complaint about this gear it's that the thing doesn't breathe at all. The sun was really beating down on us and without any airflow my back and the back of my legs got very sweaty. Considering my surroundings this was not a problem but it might be something others may have to take into account depending upon the venue where the chair will be used.

Overall I am very pleased with this gear. It's very light, very comfortable and I anticipate it will be of great use for me for years to come. I highly suggest it for anyone who spends any time at outdoor events. Furthermore after the performance of this piece I'm very interested in learning more about the Backpacker Lite AIR model, which can be packed down very small and weighs in at under 600g. Sounds promising for those casual weeklong stints in the woods, methinks.

Gear Review: CamelBak Helena Hydration Pack

You know me. Right or wrong, I just don't do the hydration thing. Leave home with a liter of water, do a fifteen mile hike with 2000' elevation gain and return home with .75l of water.

Why, then, would I want a hydration pack? Truth? I didn't. When I walked into REI I was not looking for a new pack as such. I was just going in to pick up my store-delivered web order of a Crazy Creek folding chair for use at an outdoor music festival this weekend (a review of that piece of gear is forthcoming after said event). But, you know, since I'm there and I have a little time to kill in the lunch hour I might as well look around, right?

To be honest I have passively been in the market for a small day pack. I have my bases covered for large week-long backcountry trips with the fantastic Gregory. Medium-length trips (and all luggage needs) are covered by the REI pack I purchased last year. Solo day hikes? There's a Kelty hip pack which works brilliantly for me. But what about the day hike which requires a bit more material support, such as picnic fixin's? Which pack serves that need? None which I own, that's for sure. All are either far too large or too small.

This in mind, I naturally headed over to the pack section in REI. Browse, browse, browse. Everything is just way too big for what I'm picturing. As I'm browsing I accidentally strayed into the hydration pack region, which previously I had always avoided for the aforementioned reasons. It turns out that this was a very happy accident as my eyes lit on a pack which, in the immortal words of Goldilocks, was "just right."

The CamelBak Helena is designed specifically for women. Despite that (as women's pack usually don't work for me) the fit was remarkably comfortable. It has a narrow form factor yet manages to fit 1300 cu in of space in there, which is exactly what I was looking for. I admit to being put off both by the price and by the hydration feature of it ("Bladder? No thanks, I have one already...") but the size, shape and fit of the pack won me over. Water or not this would be a useful piece of equipment.

The timing of the purchase was ideal. Today it got its first field test as my friend Anna and I did a 10+ mile from the Bootjack Picnic Area on Mt. Tamalpais down to Stinson Beach and back. Unfortunately the scalding hot weather of the previous week did not carry through to today, minimizing the need for hydration. Thus I spent the day carrying three liters of water but drinking very little of it (that's an extra 6.3 lbs of weight, dangitall).

Aside from the self-inflicted waste of water capacity I have to say that the pack performed very well. It was plenty spacious enough to accommodate the meagre but tasty picnic I had brought for us to share on the beach. The Helena features a number of compartments to keep all the small bits of gear (keys, cameras and the like) from getting mixed up and lost. The key clip came in handy and I was grateful for it. The front pocket is perfect for stowing an extra layer and is a readily accessible location for a trail map. The entire pack can be stabilized well using the compression straps. For this trip that mostly just served to keep the food from getting battered against itself, but that was worth it. The shoulder straps are adjustable (though I did not need to change from the default fit). At times they rubbed against my shoulders a bit unpleasantly but it was nothing consistent or onerous. Someone with wider shoulders probably would not have minded. It also might have helped if I had used the chest strap. But as I enjoy, oh, say, breathing I didn't use it. It's just this prejudice I have, thus I didn't even try the chest strap. I did, however, use the waistbelt the entire time. The pack did not feel as comfortable without it. With the belt in use, however, the pack fit great and did not move, even when stooping to get under fallen trees across the path.

And the hydration? My experiences on this front are minimal so I cannot compare it to any other hydration system. All I can really say is that whenever I needed a drink I just grabbed the tube and a drink was there. I appreciated the addition of a valve to keep the three liters from accidentally getting emptied into the back end of my cute little Mazda 3. It was surprisingly pleasant not to have to keep fumbling for my Nalgene, I must admit.

The entire pack is probably slightly more than I care to manage for solo day hikes (high speed, low drag) but it's the perfect size for taking to events like outdoor music festivals and other day-long outings. I am pleased with it (even the hydration feature, I think) and look forward to many years of use.

The guy holding the camera must have been drunk

The guy holding the camera must have been drunk
Originally uploaded by ChrissyJ

Just kidding! I was using a tiny little tripod.

We recently returned from a 5 1/2 day trip around Cape Chignecto in Nova Scotia - a truly wonderful destination for backpacking. I'm sure that a trip report in some form is forthcoming... But for now, here is the hiking party, enjoying the incredible evening at the beach at Seal Cove. At this point, we had been on the trail for about 4 days and 20 miles or so, and still hadn't seen a single other person.

Why I love my Hennessey Hammock

1. It weighs less than 2 lbs. Beat that with a stick.
2. No sore back or stiff joints after a night sleeping on the hard ground. Wake up feeling refreshed and ready to hit the trail.
3. It's so cozy in there, like a little cocoon! I actually missed the feeling of waking up in my hammock the first night back in a real bed after 5 nights on the trail.
4. If your party includes snorers, you can set up your hammock far enough away to put them out of ear's reach.
5. You can wake up in the middle of the night to pee, read your book as late or early as you want, and not worry about waking up your traveling partners.
6. Great service - they replaced problematic accessories for us, no questions asked.
   
7. It bears repeating - as comfortable (IMO) as a real bed.
   

Jealous yet? Check out Hennessy Hammocks online or at your neighborhood REI. I recommend the Ultralight Backpacker Asym.

Welcome!

Welcome to the new blog. I make no guarantees whatsoever that this place will be updated all that often, but I do guarantee that all the content will be delicious. It will probably be uneven; lots of posts right after a trip, when energy is high, and then long droughts between posts.

The site will be used to post real-life reviews of gear, trail reports, and the like. The perspective will be that of the less-than-hardcore hiker. I love getting out into the backcountry and spending time on the trail. I don't love pushing myself beyond human endurance and racking up miles. I'd far rather take my time and enjoy the views and even take some naps.