High Sierra Topix

I was searching for dehydrated hummus when I walked into the organic food isle today - wow!

I not only found the hummus, I found about a half dozen potential meals for our summer trip:

refried black beans
refried beans
sloppy joe mix
hummus
vegetarian taco filling
tofu scrambler
falafel
tabouli salad
all sorts of couscous

cheap, lots of good ingredients, and a departure from the usual soup or rice dishes we used to eat.

http://fantasticfoods.elsstore.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

actually cheaper in our local market than online. I'll be testing some of these in the coming days and report back. None of these need any real cooking.

I also found some organic pesto seasoning pouch - now I just need to locate some pine nuts and we have another meal the kids will love. We already pack olive oil as a calorie staple.

They didn't have tomato powder, which I am looking for to make my own chili, but then I found this place online that has just about anything you'd ever want in dehydrated form - down to butter flakes or artificially chicken flavored vegetable protein bits :-)

http://beprepared.com/quickshoplist.asp ... 0in%20Cans" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

My local Safeway (the Rivermark Safeway in Santa Clara) has an aisle of bulk dried organic food. Bins of stuff like dried bean soup flakes, couscous, basmati rice, and so forth. Memorial Day trip, I ate more black bean soup, couscous, and rice than I liked courtesy of this aisle (I was supposed to have cheese with me, but forgot it in the fridge at home -- darn!).

Trader Joe's is also famous for having a lot of bulk dried stuff, but I don't have a TJ near me, so don't know if that's true.

I understand there are people who actually buy something called "backpacking food", but I'm not quite sure who they are. They certainly aren't people trying to fit sufficient food for several days to a week into a bear canister .

I load up at my local TJ here in town. Great place. Their flat bananas are to die for and a welcome snack on the trail. Their freeze dried strawberries are also worth it.


ladd

we have a Trader Joe's in town - gotta go check what they carry here. Usually I only go for the fancy brews they carry - no idea about their freeze-dried selection

I know old post, but falafel was mentioned:

https://www.backpacker.com/skills/fancy ... ry-falafel

I'll try it at home before my next trip. I love falafels.

There is a Win-Co close to me, and they have a large section of fd and dried food in bins. My only concern is that the store seems a littl seedy, so I wonder about the freshness and cleanliness of the food. Their refried beans were great.

Another odd find- my local ACE hardware has a "survival food" isle with #10 tins of FD meat. ACE hardware stores are independently owned- the owner of my local store is a survivalist. I have used the chicken, and it is not too bad. Have a tin of egg omlet that I have not yet cracked into.

Trader Joes now has black bean pasta- tried that this summer and it is good. Get dried sweet dates from Sprouts. Get FD fruit (snack packs) from Walmart. Get TVP from Safeway.

If you go to several stores and look around, you will be surprised at what you can find!

Wandering Daisy wrote:There is a Win-Co close to me, and they have a large section of fd and dried food in bins. My only concern is that the store seems a littl seedy, so I wonder about the freshness and cleanliness of the food. Their refried beans were great.

If it's just the store and not the underlying product itself, you could look into having them put in a special order for a bag of whatever it is you're interested in. The big issue, however, is how large the bags are from their supplier. I recently did this with oats, but it's not that hard to go through a 25lb bag of oats when you have it nearly every morning. That said, specialty goods might be sold from the supplier in smaller bags simply because they're bought in smaller quantities by consumers.