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!).

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.