conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The Well-Fed Backpacker about Offers, Haute with the genre: Cookbooks, Food & Wine, Cooking Education & Reference.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A vastly expanded edition. Offers a long list of food sources, new material on drying techniques and many more winter meals to provide heat and sustenance on an icy hike. Haute hiking menus for spring, summer, fall, and winter.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Well-Fed Backpacker
  When you plan to work some wild foods into a trip's meals, consider tucking a few of these supplies into your pack:
  Once a year or so when I know certain "tea" plants will be abundant on a hike, I'll pack plastic bags to hold a large quantity of each herb gathered—usually yarrow, mint, sage. Then one of the first projects on my return home is to dry these pungent plants and package them singly or in combinations. They make unique and treasured Christmas gifts, carrying with them the aura of summer pleasures in grand places.
  Home-dried edibles are a natural for the backcountry, meeting all the tests of a good trail food: lightweight, compact, sturdy, tasty, easy to fix, nonperishable, nutritious, inexpensive. Compared with commercial dried foods, your own are even lighter, less perishable and tastier!
  Versatility also counts for a lot (like the bandana with a dozen uses), and these foods can fill many niches in your wilderness menus. By drying your own, you can tailor the shapes, sizes, blends and seasonings to turn out a variety of offerings you'd never be able to buy: herbed mushrooms, a batch of jerky with several different flavors, tomato or strawberry slices, plum sauce, thin peach slices that rehydrate in a minute in oatmeal.
  Creative, fun and easy to learn, home food drying on even a small scale without a food dryer can produce an endless range of items to work into your meal plans.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'Here are some tasty leather combinations to get you started'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Here are some tasty leather combinations to get you started. As you experiment with fruits, spices and other additions, make notes of blends you especially like so that you can reproduce them.
  When your dried foods are headed for the wild places, what do you do with them as they come out of the dryer? Correct storage is essential to preservation; foods that have been dried right can be lost in storage if just a few basic rules are ignored.
  Any method of storage you choose needs to keep out air, moisture, bugs and light. Several things work well: for home storage, glass jars (dark ones are best) with a good seal; sealable plastic bags with the extra air squeezed out; plastic containers with tight-sealing lids.
  Resealable plastic bags are handiest and most compact for hikers. Some people feel they are somewhat permeable by moisture and can transmit a "plastic" taste to foods stored for more than a few weeks. The bags made for use with home bag-sealing machines are much better for long-term storage of foods you'll open just once and use. If foods are stored in containers that don't exclude light, the bags or jars can be put into paper bags or into cans with tight lids for home storage.
  Bugs and mice find these tasty foods appealing, so if you store plastic bags in cupboards, gather them first into another, rigid container.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Many people who prefer to avoid the expense of freeze-dried foods in milder weather will include them in at least some snow meal plans, perhaps with the added zip of a favorite spice blend. If you don't want to use main dishes, use a freeze-dried meat or vegetable ingredient in combination with grocery store ingredients. This tactic can speed preparation time and average out total costs to a more reasonable level.
  Many high-energy, no-cook snack foods can be prepared ahead at home and used as pick-me-ups while traveling, as part of a no-cook breakfast, as desserts with lunch or dinner and as bedtime snacks.
  The range of food possibilities for snow camping is infinite! Once you begin exploring what's available, and how to combine, package and prepare foods for use in the winter wilderness, you'll find ideas coming so thick and fast that you'll be snow camping more than ever.
  June Fleming, who lives in Portland, Oregon, has taught classes in backpacking and snow camping for ten years and has led hundreds of trips in the Cascade Mountain range and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. Her Backcountry Kitchen segments were seen as part of the 1984 public television series, "The Great Outdoors" produced by WGBH Boston.