Week #10: Food, food and more food...

Well another week down and physical preparation remained fairly steady. I'm pretty much satisfied with my level of fitness and am simply aiming to maintain it through the next few weeks of continued office work.

Gear-wise, I'm still yet to get the last few pieces but the various options have been narrowed down to one or two. I'll be ordering them shortly, which really just leaves food (and a million other things, but I'm choosing to pretend that I just need to think about food for now).

One of the trays of freshly dried wallaby bolognese.

One of the meals on the rota is spaghetti bolognese. There's not much in the way of pasta on the menu, as it's by far the bulkiest and probably the slowest of the carbs we're going to be having. Instant pasta would take care of the cooking time, but is no less bulky and certainly less tasty. But to provide some variety along the way, there is one spaghetti meal. Since it's my favourite meat, I decided to make a wallaby sauce. The problem is that I've never used wallaby in a dehydrated sauce before and was concerned it would be so lean that it wouldn't rehydrate. It wouldn't do at all to finish one of the many inevitable days of bad weather looking forward to a filling meal, and then find that instead of bolognese sauce we're actually having soup filled with rubber pellets. So I made a small batch to start with, just 12 servings and one spare.

To test how well it can rehydrate with limited fuel consumption (ie. no extended simmering), I rehydrated the spare serve for a lunch by just pouring boiling water onto it. It absorbed about 2.5:1 water by volume and came out notably rubber free. It was a relief, else I'd have wasted a reasonable-sized pot of tasty bolognese on an experiment.

Tried out some dried snacks as well. Although the spiced sweet potato crisps were delicious, they're also far too bulky to be able to take anywhere the quantity required (one handful wasn't nearly enough) so alas they had to be consumed now instead. Fortunately I found a few volunteers to help me work my way through them.