Rick Curtis - Collins Complete Hiking and Camping Manual - The essential guide to comfortable walking, cooking and sleeping

Serves 6

DHAAL-BHAT (SHERPA RICE)

Dhaal-bhat, or curried rice and lentils, is a staple for the people of the Himalayas. I grew to love this simple dish while trekking in Nepal.

1/ 2cup lentils

1/ 2cup barley

Salt

3 cups instant rice

1 onion, chopped

2 green bell peppers, chopped

2 apples, chopped

Curry powder

Ground cinnamon

Soak the lentils and barley for about 2 hours by putting them in a water bottle (you can do this earlier in the afternoon and they will be rehydrated by the time you get to camp). Add salt to a large pot of boiling water. Stir in rice, barley, and lentils. Reduce to a simmer, then add onion, green peppers, apples, and spices. Cover tightly and simmer for 30 minutes.

Serves 6

CURRIED CHICKEN WITH RICE

3 cups instant rice

Salt

1 onion, diced

1 teaspoon minced garlic

1 tablespoon margarine

30 ounces canned/foil pack chicken

2 apples, chopped

1/ 2cup raisins

1 to 2 tablespoons curry powder

Boil 2 1/ 2cups water, add rice, and boil for 1 minute with 1 tablespoon salt. Simmer, covered, until done. Drain excess water, if necessary. In a fry pan, sauté onion and garlic in 1 tablespoon margarine until tender. Add the chicken, apples, raisins, and curry and heat for a few minutes. Add chicken mixture to rice and serve.

Serves 6

OUTDOOR BAKING

Baking in the outdoors is an art that requires patience. In order to bake, you need to be able to provide heat on both the top and the bottom of your pan. There are a number of cooking pans and devices that enable you to do this. Another technique is to create a Dutch oven using a pot with a lid. You can do this on a fire (if building a fire is appropriate) or on a backpack stove: place coals from the fire, or build a twig fire, on top of the pot lid. (Lids designed with a rim to contain the fire make this much easier.) Hold your hand about 6 inches above the pot-lid coals. Your hand should feel hot but not burn. Once baking begins, gently remove the lid periodically using pot grips and check your progress, and then quickly replace the lid. You will have to continue to feed the coals to maintain heat.

FOOD EQUIVALENTS

Here are some common menu items with information on how weight or volume converts to the number of servings:

MEASUREMENT EQUIVALENTS

CHAPTER 4

Hygiene and Water Purification

KEEPING CLEAN ON THE TRAIL

Handwashing

Personal Bathing

WASHING CLOTHES

WASHING DISHES, POTS, AND UTENSILS

WOMEN’S HYGIENE ISSUES

Tampons vs. Pads

Disposing of Tampons, Pads, and Towelettes

WATER PURIFICATION

Boiling

Chemical Purification

Mixed-Oxidant Solutions

Ultraviolet Light

Filtration

COLLECTING AND STORING WATER IN COLD WEATHER

Preventing Your Water from Freezing

Maintaining proper hygiene is a challenge in the wilderness. After hiking down a muddy trail all day you are just covered with gunk. Add sweat, sunscreen, and bug repellant and you can be a mess. While part of the joy of backpacking is returning to a more basic existence, giving up the luxuries of hot and cold running water, toilets, showers, and the like, sometimes we surrender too much to the dirt that surrounds us and that can lead to actual health problems. Dirty and open blisters or cuts and scrapes are a ripe environment for infection. Bacterial infections can spread through poor cleaning of cookware and poor personal hygiene before handling food. Get into the habit of using good cleaning practices for a safer and more enjoyable trip. It’s not just your cleanliness; someone else’s lack of good hygiene could cause you to become sick. (See below.)

KEEPING CLEAN ON THE TRAIL

One of the most common health problems when backpacking is gastrointestinal illnesses like diarrhea, which are spread by fecal-to-oral transmission. Fecal-borne pathogens get into your system through one of several routes:

Direct contact with faeces (even using toilet paper leaves germs on your hands)

Indirect contact with hands that have contacted faeces (shaking hands, for example)

Contact with insects that have contacted faeces

Contact with contaminated drinking water

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