A little while ago I had a great phone conversation with a lady from Texas named Sarah. It isn’t often that I meet another person as passionate about trail food as I am. She was gearing up to launch Packit Gourmet in partnership with her Mom. The site has now been launched and it is a beautifully designed online store that showcases meals for the backcountry as well as gear and special ingredients.

The premade meals look and sound yummy. Keep in mind that I am probably a tough critic as I have high standards when it comes to food. The site has some very useful items for the trail cook including the line of True Lemon products which I highly recommend. There are also powders to make worchestershire sauce, soy sauce, au jus, honey, molasses and vinegar.

A click on the “Media” link at the bottom of the site’s front page takes you to some interesting links for cooking in the backcountry.

Soon the company will also be shipping to Canada which is very nice to see. I can’t wait to place my first order.

This week I have decided to take what our family refers to as a “stay-cation”.  Of course, I would rather be on a wilderness trip somewhere but we’ve bought a 130 year old Victorian house and we need to do some work on it. Perhaps I should say my husband needs to do some work on it—there is no way I am getting up on scaffolding. Anyway while I am trying to stay out of his way I’ll be in the kitchen testing new recipes for my various projects including wildernesscooking.com. My presence on the blog may be somewhat sporadic.

In the meantime I will leave you with this…

Over the weekend I tried my hand at making red pepper jelly. We like to have it with cream cheese and crackers on some of our shorter backcountry trips. It’s really good on a bagel with cream cheese too. I was pleasantly surprised at how much better it tasted compared to the store-bought varieties I’d been trying. It’s surprisingly easy to make and worth the small effort.

Today’s post isn’t cooking related but it is still trail related. When I checked my email this morning there was an invitation and password for a site called Trekalong.com.

What is Trekalong.com?

Well that is a good question. It is a new site from Keen Communications (Clerisy Press, Menasha Ridge Press, and Wilderness Press). In time the site will become filled with the writings of outdoorsy author types such as Michelle Waitzman, Harold Davis and many others including myself.

Anyway I am happy to be included as part of Trekalong.com and hope to have some fun posting over there. Of course I will continue the Wilderness Cooking blog and try not to cross post too much.