Bicycle Utah: Creative Dining For Bicycle Touring

I love gardening, so this year to make it even more interesting. I have decided to grow some veggies for dehydrated food packs to take on biking/camping trips. If you are the kind of person who hates tomatoes it could be because you mostly eat store bought tomatoes. I find those tomatoes to be comparable to saw dust in flavor. I don't know what they do to make them that way it is a mystery to be solved for sure. However, a tomato picked ripe from the garden is bursting with flavorful deliciousness in the most satisfying way. A few years ago I had so many tomatoes in my garden I didn't know what to do with them. I invited neighbors to come get some and they did. They would take bundles of them for canning and in a few days the next overwhelming batch was ripe to pick again. So Cari, my wife and gardening partner, decided that we would dehydrate and store them. We already had a dehydrator. However, we had so many tomatoes that we purchased another dehydrator to try to keep up. Today I am still eating those dehydrated tomatoes from two years ago and they are still delicious. I often sneak down in the basement and munch away for a healthy and delicious snack.

It is time to take it to another level. If you have ever purchased dehydrated backpacking food for your bicycle tour you will know how expensive it can be. However you did it anyway because it is easy, light weight, and packs small. How would that be if you could make your own. You could control what you would make, Improve on the quality, and save some money for more excursions or maybe some of that needed gear on your wish list.

My wife Cari makes an amazing tomato/ham mac and cheese that I love. If I could just figure out a great dehydrated version I would be in bicycle camping heaven. The other recipe I believe I will shoot for is a dehydrated chili of some kind. The possibilities are endless.