Packing food for 7 days tramping+emergency food.

Oats + milk powder + sultanas will keep in ready-to-go ziplock bags. Instant Pudding or Milo/drinking chocolate + milk powder is easy too, tho it's really just adding flavour to milk. One Square Meal bars or Nice n Natural type nut bars are okay, tho rather sweet. Avoid chocolate coated in warmer weather. Gummy lollies are an easy treat or pick-me-up. Melt nicely into hot porridge too. Seen Europeans come thru with peanut butter, flat bread & olive oil. Know a guy tried a week on Gingernut biscuits. Thought the ginger might have kept it interesting enough, but his advise was "Don't". Same with the guys sucking on tubes of condensced milk. Subway, or the like, will be good for a couple of days. Pita pocket bread & a rip-top tin of chicken in mayo turns heads if produced on Day 5. Your BCC dehy might taste better if you shake it upside a few times - mixes the contents & shakes lose the finer particles that have settled into the bottom crevices of the bag. Better to add more water & be a little soupy than under-rehydrated. For the same reason, prefer mash potato based dehy over rice. Known a possum to raid a tent and attack a pack at night because that person was big on carrying fresh fruit on multi-dayers. Fruit leather or dehy might be better ?. Squeeze tubes of baby food fruit puree aren't worth it. Be aware, hut mice will chew through a couple of layers to get at something nice. ps. (late edit) Tea bags go a long way and help with cleaning up what ever's left in the victuals mug.

Milk powder or Milo is actually a good idea...I never thought of that. I'm not a big fun of nuts or dried fruit to be honest with you...but I know how important they are in terms of energy and calories and small space occupied in your pack. My "must" have to be: Flat brad Tuna(I found that in Sydney they sell tuna in plastic bag and doesn't take too much space on your backpack). Coffee powder Usually pack with me honey as well...but with seven days worth of food seems a bit harder. Some of my friends take dry salami and parmisan cheese...good protein source.

Milk powder or Milo is actually a good idea...I never thought of that. I'm not a big fun of nuts or dried fruit to be honest with you...but I know how important they are in terms of energy and calories and small space occupied in your pack. My "must" have to be: Flat brad Tuna(I found that in Sydney they sell tuna in plastic bag and doesn't take too much space on your backpack). Coffee powder Usually pack with me honey as well...but with seven days worth of food seems a bit harder. Some of my friends take dry salami and parmisan cheese...good protein source.

I'm curious about dehy dinner alternatives as well. Long ago I came to terms with the taste of BC meals, but for my next tramp the cost of 14 x 2 serve dinners is what is causing a rethink. Reading some of the older threads, rice or couscous with some dehy veg, salami or dehy mince, spices+a good lug of light olive oil seems to get a few mentions as an alternative to BC dinners.. For what it is worth, my normal summer +10day meal plan is Breakfast - 1 x OSM or Bumper Bar Lunch - Crunchy peanut butter on Vita-wheat + Jerky Dinner - 2 serve Backcountry dehy + some dark chocolate Snacks - Dried fruit, nuts, biscuits (ginger nuts are one of my favourites), trail mix, nutrigrain or similar I'm fortunate in that I am one of those people who is fine to eat the same thing day after day. This comes in at around 650g (dry weight) - 3000cal/day (roughly 15% protein, 47% carbs and 38% fat). The above leaves me feeling neither hungry or tired on the trail, but I do loose a few kgs by the end of the walk. Cheers, Moh.

I've recently bought radix food which I find way better than the other alternatives, but it's still dehy. I usually just knock up my own meals with a home dehydrator spice mix and couscous. Last tramp I took an absolute wilderness dehy meal and it was so bad I gave it to the dog. But I had a salami, cheese and crackers in my pack and this was an awesome dinner and something I may do from now. It was great propped up in the biv in my sleeping back making crackers while listening to the radio and sipping billy tea through the cold winter evening.

We dehydrate a lot of things. Bolognaise sauce. Casseroles etc. We even dehydrate pasta (sometimes homemade) and rice after cooking them. They are prepared outback in minutes after that (saves fuel). We don't combine the with the sauce until eating. Oven bags are good to cook or prepare in to save the billy for other things. Real cheese, i can carry in NZ for days but the backcountry cheese is still Ok with our favourite meal. That is, refried beans, salsa, our own dehydrated brisket or backcountry beef, in a parcel made by a tortilla or mountain bread, and toasted. We usually dehydrate the refried beans and the salsa. Avocado is good to add. I make rollups from stewed fruit by the hundreds for school kids. The same stewed fruit mixture combines with a biscuit crumble and custard to make a deconstructed dessert. Mostly Apple Rhubarb crumble with custard. I take those rollups and rehydrate them for a dessert outback. The rollups make a good snack too, as does the yoghurt rollups which started the whole thing. Yoghurt rollups are a good way to still get some dairy product many days into a walk. I've only ever seen dried yoghurt sold commercially once. It was by a company in Tinderry near Canberra back in 2003. I found it to retail it. It went for 2.95 for three pieces. Expensive. I can only bring it down to .38c each when using Yoplait 1kg tubs. I'm currently doing chicken and beef jerky. It is rubbed with spices or marinaded first. Vacuum sealed, like the bacon it is keeping for more than long enough at room temp. We are, in three weeks or so, starting another Scenic Rim traverse in Southeast Queensland. Taking 13 days this time. We're going with caches again.

Cooked meals: I'll go with some combination of rice/pasta/couscous as a base, make use of BCC dehy mince and cheese and surprise dried veggies, add some flavour with garlic flakes, maggi soup packet or Japanese curry block or similar. Carry a big plastic bottle of olive oil and put a lug or two in everything to up the calories. Empty fizzy drink bottles come in a variety of sizes and are all robust enough to hold olive or other cooking oil. Chuck milk powder in everything as well, it's cheap and light protein and energy. I might take some mung beans and flour and yeast, can make flat bread and dahl, especially if in a hut in bad weather. Soak mung beans in water overnight and put them in a plastic bag in the morning, chuck them in with the rice the following evening and they'll be ready when the rice is. Leave them another day and they'll have sprouted enough you can eat them raw. On my own, I'll do breakfast and daytime food almost exclusively from one of the Pams light cereals with lots of milk powder and a lug of cooking oil in it. With the kids along there will be more crackers and biscuits. Try and avoid lots of small plastic and foil packets, the packaging takes up a surprising proportion of the weight and your rubbish bag ends up bulkier than your food bag towards the end. I figure 750g per day per adult total weight, that seems to have enough calories if I keep the fat content high with olive oil and whole milk powder. I did 10 days on Stewart Island with three kids (6, 9, 10), I started with 21 kg food, had just under a kg left at the end.

Thanks to all for all the suggestions... My problem also is try to fitting 8 days worth of food inside a 50 lt backpack...I might need it to update then...because would be very hard fitting all of this inside...or someone of you did it already?

If you need more than 50L volume to do the trip, get a bigger pack. Less stuff, lower volume stuff are also strategies but there's nothing wrong with slightly underfilling, say, a 70L Osprey Aether. So long as the total weight is manageable for you.