Food for Weekend Trips
Worrying about weight and bulk is largely unnecessary if your trip will last only two days. Since you'll probably eat breakfast before you start and dinner after you get out, you need to plan only four meals. Over that space of time, almost anything goes: ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch, hamburgers with all the trimmings for dinner, donuts and fresh fruit for breakfast. If you pull the frozen hamburger out of your freezer just before heading for the trail head and wrap it, well-bagged, in an extra sweater, it'll be nicely thawed (but not spoiled) by dinnertime. In fact, on a weekend trip, there's really no need to cook at all if you don't feel like it. Dinner can be just a continuation of lunch, perhaps with a different filling between the slices of bread. With a little experience, the eyeball method of assessing quantities will work just fine for a two-day trip. Sure, you'll probably have a pound or two of food left over, but on a trip that short, who cares? Although you can be a bit lackadaisical about quantities, do make an effort to cook only what you can eat. Leftover food should be packed out, not strewn around or buried, where it will corrupt the eating habits of jays and squirrels. Worse yet, burying scraps will also encourage bears to raid your camp.

Although it would be easy to turn our weekend trips into gourmet extravaganzas, Cora and I still prefer to keep our food-packing simple. We eat breakfast the first day at home. For lunch, we usually bring cold-cut sandwiches, corn chips and a few granola bars for snacks. Dinner is a quick-cooking pasta or rice dish fortified with shredded cheese or a can of tuna, chicken or turkey. Most grocery stores sell packaged pasta and rice dishes that contain their own dried "sauce," or you can take plain pasta or quick-cooking rice and add a package of dried soup mix. We fill in the chinks with a bagel. For dessert, we drink hot chocolate and sometimes split a candy bar (okay, I admit it, it's a big candy bar). Breakfast the second day (our first one in the field) is always cold cereal with powdered milk. Lunch is a near-repeat of the first day, and we're home or on the road for dinner.

Backpackers who walk to eat, rather than eat to walk, can find legions of backcountry cookbooks to help them plan more exciting fare. I recommend Camp Cooking from The Lyons Press.

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