Me and my coconut curry triumph (Umph! Umph! Umph!)

I must say that I rock a little bit.  I do this rocking thing.  I am like a Lazyboy recliner.

Yesterday evening I sat down with my giant box of ingredients from www.packitgourmet.com and commenced putting together entrees.  I wasn't working from any recipes.  I was making it up as I went along.  And I guessed that this would result in some horribly inedible food.  But I didn't know how else to go about it other than trying it to see.

Today, I grabbed one of the entrees and took it to the office.  I made it for lunch.  (I was fully prepared to eat backup snacks if it turned out to be horrible.)  I guesstimated the amount of boiling water to pour into it.  I MacGuyvered up a bag handle out of a binder clip so I wouldn't burn myself.  And I used my office blanket (don't judge, sometimes people gotta nap) to insulate the bag while it rehydrated.  It took about twice as long as I expected to cook the grains, half an hour rather than fifteen minutes.  But once that was done, I had a delicious lunch.  And a really filling one as well.

I made several different entrees. I still have to taste test the others, and they may still be horrible.  But I know that I have one good one.  The good one, I'm sure you are dying to know, was a coconut curry.  It had quinoa, freeze dried chicken, dehydrated carrots, freeze dried green beans, coconut milk powder, and curry powder in it.  It was fabulous.  I'm going to make up five or six servings worth of it to take on various hiking trips this summer.

It's really nice to have just-add-water food that a) tastes really good, b) is non-dairy, and c) is reasonably high protein.  If I made it for lunch rather than dinner on the trail I think it would give me quite a bit of hiking energy. I base this on the fact that I was significantly less hungry than usual this afternoon at work.

I do have a small dilemma in that I packaged the entrees in vacuum bags so they would last a long time, but I really want to cook them in ziplocs to keep heat in and reduce spillage.  It galls me to carry both.  I may have to live with the gall.  (But only a little bit at a time, as I have no gall bladder in which to store it up.  Hee!)

Tomorrow I suppose I'll try another one.  Maybe I'll bring a ziploc with me so my office blanket only smells like curry, not curry and also garlic.

In non-food-dehydrating news (Although who wouldn't be utterly fascinated by my hiking food? I mean come on.) I started working on a book outline yesterday.  The whole idea feels a little ridiculous to me.  I'm a computer nerd.  I am not a writer.  And yet, here I am doing it anyway.  Maybe if I actually write a book, somebody will read it.  Possibly I will just send a really long text file to eArThworm and she can read it.  One person reading it would probably be good enough, if they liked it.  Just say you like it, you don't have to be truthful.  I am happy with the lie.