Our Motto will always be: “Do not take what you do not like to eat.”
The Long Way to backpacking bliss……I learned how to not eat the hard way, which also seemed to involve carrying a rather large (and quaint) backpack, back in the day:
Like most backpackers, when I got into backpacking, I thought that eating freeze dried meals was the only way to go – they were light weight, they packed OK in the sense that one could grab a couple packages for a trip and be done, and were easy to make. Except for being very pricey, having little flavor and making one’s stomach not feel so good. I started dreading dinner time – for some reason all the dinners started tasting the same. And cost wise, freeze dried was too expensive as I went out more often and was taking my son along with me. So….I started cooking on the trail. And that was even worse! I hated having to carry multiple pans and then cleaning those pans, using so much fuel up to cook on windy nights. Spending an hour in the evening cooking and cleaning when I was tired was not fun. I also had become tied down to campsites that had an adequate water supply – so I could do dishes. One day, about long many years ago, I saw mention of freezer bag cooking and I wondered how that would work for me – and for the most part I have never looked back. It is the best of both ways of cooking – it is fast, it can taste very good, you can have so much variety and it is affordable. The food is very packable – and can be a way to lighten your pack weight. Best of all, it has made it so I can have what I want for dinner, and my sons can have what they like, and we eat at the same time. It simplified my outdoor life so that I can spend more time being out there. The amount of gear I carry for my kitchen is a shadow of what I used to carry. In fall 2004, a hiking partner and I got to talking and realized we needed to broaden our food & meals on the trail, and come up with more recipes…and make them as gourmet as we could. At the time, if you did FBC, it was usually standards like mashed potatoes and stuffing. So, we started coming up with new recipes for our weekly hikes-and trail testing every one of them in the wilds. The rules were a stove, a tea kettle or small pot, a freezer bag with the food and a spoon. The recipes came fast. We opened our eyes and saw how many products could be used. The Freezer Bag Cooking website evolved out of this in late 2004, and in late 2005 Kirk and I published the first version of our first cookbook, Freezer Bag Cooking: Trail Food Made Simple. As the years have passed by and we got further into it, http://www.trailcooking.com was born. We realized that while we preferred FBC, that we could do even more on the trail – be it FBC meals, FBC hybrid meals, The Fauxbaker for making baked treats and gourmet one pot meals that didn’t suck up fuel or require long cleanups. We invented the soft, ultra light freezer bag cozy and opened up our gear store online. We hope you enjoy our blog and visit our websites for more information. See our “In The News” section for articles, magazines and books we have been featured in.
Note about the blog: The blog was written from 2006 to present day. In early 2019 we rebuilt the website from ground up. This meant the old blog that ran from 2008 to 2019 went away. Our site was hacked badly and was not salvageable outside of the last year. We have slowly been rewriting trip reports and some gear reviews from the past, adding them as Sarah has time. However….at least we had a good run on it! Kirk and I with our two youngest sons in summer of 2016:
Contact Info/Questions? Thoughts? Ideas? Visit our contact page at TrailCooking.com for more information about who we are, what we like and why we do the stuff we do. We read every email sent to us, so please, do contact us with questions and or anything else.
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And the rest: This blog does not share personal information with third parties, nor do we store any information about your visit to this blog other than to analyze and optimize your content and reading experience through the use of cookies. You can turn off the use of cookies at anytime by changing your specific browser settings, on your end. We are not responsible for republished content from this blog, on other blogs, or websites without our permission. This privacy policy is subject to change without notice and was last updated on 4/01/2019. If you have any questions feel free to contact us.
Copyright Notice The sites http://www.freezerbagcooking.com / http://www.trailcooking.com and http://blog.trailcooking.com are copyrighted ©2004-2020. All rights reserved. Sharing information: The Internet has made it easy to share a wealth of information. A core reason why we have done the website and blog is to share what we have learned with others. We require that if you share what you have read here, that you give us credit for it. The content of the website, blog and books are copyrighted. You may share, to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions: 1) Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author. If you use any of the work you find on Freezer Bag Cooking™ or Trail Cooking, you must attribute the work to Freezer Bag Cooking™ or Trail Cooking and include a working direct link to the relevant post from the website and/or blog. If you use an original photograph or video belonging to Freezer Bag Cooking™ or Trail Cooking, in addition to adhering to the rules set out in this section you must also agree not to change the name of the image if you copy it to your own server and when you publish it you give attribution to us with a direct working link. 2) Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Please do not use any words or photographs from the website and blog in a circumstance where you make money from it in any way, except for use on your own websites or blogs that contain advertising and where direct attribution/credit is given for the works. This means you may not publish our work and claim it is yours. 3) No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder, Bay Street Communications, LLC.
Nutritional Information: All information on the website and in our books is our personal writing. We are not nutritionists nor are we professional chefs. In the past we have been asked about whether we would provide nutrition counts on recipes. For now we are not doing it as the software is not reliable in providing correct amounts. There are a number of free resources to determine calorie counts online if one wants to try it. Periodically when the stats are easy to run we do add them to a recipe – if Sarah has the time to add it. On subjects such as low sodium diets and food allergies, we are presenting what has worked for us personally. As always, if you have dietary and health concerns, talk to your doctor first.
Disclaimer: While no one we know has had any bad occurrences on the trail using freezer bags (ie. leakers, blowouts, etc) there is a small chance of it occurring. So make sure you pay attention, set the freezer bag in front of you as you pour the water, be careful when pouring the boiling water and don’t do it in your lap. Use common sense in cooking in the outdoors, just like you would at home. All sports run injury risks, and cooking has a multitude of chances of hurting yourself (hot stoves, water, knives, etc). We as authors, do not take any responsibility for the use of any materials or methods described on this website, or in our books, nor of any products mentioned in them.
Your Privacy & Financial Information: We believe firmly in privacy. If you contact us, through this website, we will only use your email address for contacting you back. We ourselves will not share nor sell your email address, mailing address or phone numbers. For more information on our store’s policies, see here. When you purchase items from our website, we do not see your financial information. All orders are processed through http://www.Paypal.com, and they handle the credit cards and billing. For Paypal’s Privacy Policy, see Paypals link here.
About gear reviews & links on our blog and website: When we write about products and gear in the blog, website and books these are our personal views on the items. If you notice a pattern in reviews, and see a company’s name pop up often, this is a company we love. These are our personal views. We post links to help our readers find hard-to-get products and to see clearly what we are talking about when discussing gear/food/etc.
On Reviews Of Products and Food: We do receive items from manufacturers and public relation firms to review. We try to keep an honest opinion about the items. If the item is so bad we cannot test sample it or it is unsafe we decline not review it publicly and/or simply turn down the chance to review it in the first place.
Links on Nav bar of the blog: The links to outdoor food companies on our navigation bar on the blog are websites with superior service and hard to find products. We do not take ad payments for listing them, though some have affiliate programs where if you purchase from them we receive a percentage of the sale. This helps cover the cost of running the websites and server fees.
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