Lipsmackin' Backpackin', Lightweight Trail-tested Recipes for Backcountry Trips, by Tim and Christine Conners. Three Forks Books, Falcon Publishing, Inc., 2000. ISBN 1560448814

Reviewed by Nancy K. Zimmerman

If you are a dehydrator, this cookbook might be for you. I say might because I am not a dehydrator and thus could not test any of those recipes. Of the recipes I was able to test, three out of five were good enough that I intend to use them on the trail. One of the others tasted awful and the last did not have the right timing and amounts.

Even though I have hiked for several years under the trail name "Gourmet Gang," I am only willing to whip myself into a cooking mode at the end of the day when I know what lies ahead, so I spent my review energies on the 59 dinner recipes. A few statistics will tell you why I would not buy this book for myself (even if I had a dehydrator). Forty recipes require this device, and at-home preparation looks formidable. Only seven had less than 1,000 mg of sodium. Six had more than 3,000 mg. For one serving. Does your stove "simmer" anything? Thirteen recipes required simmering or some other maneuver my stove refused to do. On the positive side, 32 of the recipes were vegetarian (sometimes with a little brand-name substitution) and more could easily be converted to vegetarian. Some required no cooking, and many called for only a quick boil, so if fuel consumption is important to you, this cookbook is very specific about minimizing cooking time. An excellent feature is a section that has nothing but on-the-trail instructions for each dish. Each instruction is approximately 1.5 x 7 inches and can be cut out and put into a bag with the ingredients. There are a few no-clean-up recipes that truly are, too.

Alternate review by Walt Daniels, Webmaster

Like Nancy, we have not tried many of the recipes, but we have tried 6 of them extensively as we submitted them to the book. However, the recipes were changed, usually using commercial ingredients where we make our own low-salt versions. Some of ours were adapted from high salt recipes and changed to low-salt versions, e.g. we make our own biscuit mix without salt. The recipe for Tamale Pie, page 70, throws in both a commercial (high salt) taco seasoning mix and our combination of spices (no salt). It should be pointed out the authors are long distance hikers and that is a sweaty business, where a little extra salt is easily handled.