survival food or camping food?

[Mortblanc]

Over here "trail mix" is always dry.

We have one form called "Gorp" which is usually home made and is my favorite. Generally it is equal parts M&M chocolate, raisins and peanuts, sometimes with a handful of shelled sunflower seeds thrown in. It can also include small bits of beef jerky, candied citrus or chunk chocolate.

It keeps well in a zip lock bag on the trail and makes good snack food in camp or anywhere else as long as you are not in intense heat.

I must admit that I can not be anywhere around the stuff since it creates symptoms of an impulsive eating disorder and I can not stop until the container is empty.

Over the years I have come to equate some of my "survival foods" as standard and favorite camp fare. Besides the gorp there is my home made beef jerky, hard tack made with honey, salt cured ham and bacon, parched corn and all the things one can do in camp with corn meal.

One of my favorite quick trail meals is to fry up a couple of slices of bacon, then split and core an apple and fry it in the bacon grease. While that is cooking up I mix up a "jonny cake" and fry it in the remaining grease after the apple is done. Sometimes I slice the corncake and eat the bacon as a sandwich, and sometimes I have the apples on top of the corncake with the bacon on the side. Just as often I eat one thing while the other is still cooking wipe out my frypan at the end and I am on my way.

We also use some tricks from out past, such as "no cake" which is not a cake but parched corn crushed and mixed with brown sugar. It can be eaten raw or mixed with water as an energy drink, or made into a dough and fried as bread. It also makes a good addition to thicken soups and stews if the pickings are sparse.

All in all I do not really have a separate division of foods called "survival foods" which are different from my regular camp food, or that I consider "second rate pickings" just because they might be used in an extreme situation.

Well, perhaps the canned chili or beef stew I keep in the vehicle kits. But that is eaten only under extreme duress while trapped in the vehicle under a snow bank after rolling down a cliff face!