My Chicago Garden

What can go wrong, will go wrong. But you can still have fun!  Read all about it

So today we were at Outdoor World looking for something to blow $50 worth of gift cards on.  I remember seeing a harmonica and learning DVD in the store the last time I was there so I went hunting. I found it and snatched one up for $15.  I figured I could learn how to play it and take it with me backpacking this summer.  As soon as I got in the car I cracked open the plastic packing and started blowing on it.  My two children’s eyes brightened and they both clambered to play it.  Ever since then I haven’t gotten it back.  My kids have been fighting over it for the last 6 hours and my wife is in the kitchen right now trying to play O’Shenandoah, my favorite song.

I think tomorrow we are going to go hunting for a couple more.  I didn’t realize this was going to be such a big hit. My wife says she saw two different kind at REI for $15 too.  Mine is in the key of A….so I think we will try and find a key of C one.

I WANT MY HARMONICA BACK!

A bunch of things are going on at the same time….I’m still putting together the seeds I need for the garden this year. I think I have everything but cauliflower, I can pick those up somewhere local. There is a new layer of 8 inches of snow in the garden, with another 10 inches forecasted for today.

I made reservations for our backpacking trip to Yosemite in July and I’ll have a big enough tax return to hopefully pick up some new gear to lower the overall weight of the gear we need to carry.

I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on the very large project I’ve been working on for my day job, so hopefully I’ll get my life back in time to work on some things I really like doing.  I had the urge to research a homestead in Alaska (yes, I got that depressed..which is rare for me) but found out that it’s a bigger pain in the backside than I first thought. So much for that idea.  I’ll just have to tough it out.

My wife and I are getting excited about our backpacking trip to Yosemite and we started thinking about food options for 6 to 7 days in the high country.  We had seen the REI choices and frankly I’m not exactly thrilled.  I heard about "Freezer Bag Cooking" over on the practical backpacking forum and decided to go ahead and buy the book after reading Sarah’s website.  Melissa and I went through the book and marked the recipes we liked and then decided to try several that we had both picked. We then hit the local grocery store for ingredients.

After eating the meals below we decided to try similar meals from REI and see which one we like better. I suspect we’ll like the freezer bag meals better, but you never know.

Oh yeah…my 5 year old (Sierra) and 3 year old (Teagan) would not try any of the items (I put a sample of each of the items on our plates, minus the coffee) which is not surprising for my 5 year old. But my 3 year old will eat anything, so it was shocking to see her decline. It might be the fact that all three items were a weird shade of yellow.  They ended up requesting peanut butter and jelly. Normally we force them to at least try one bite, but given that this was waaay off the reservation, we made them PB&J’s. They better learn to like it or it’s either go hungry when mommy and daddy take them backpacking or I’m now schlepping tubs of peanut butter and jelly and a loaf of bread for a week. (they are not going on our summit attempt on Mt. Lyell…but they are going on the shakedown trips)

All items purchased at Target Super Store unless otherwise noted. $25 (most of the items are not completely used so cost is spread across multiple future meals) Note: we could not find "cheese powder" but after a bit of careful looking we found "four cheese potato seasoning" which seemed to do the trick.  We also could not find "dry milk powder" at Target but found it at a normal grocery store on the way home. It was in the "soy/alternative" milk aisle. We also could not find "mixed vegetables" so we opted for a corn only dish for the Veggie rice.

We picked the following recipes to try:

	Cheesy Chicken Veggie Rice Easy to make. I’ll probably try and find foil pouches instead of the cans.  At "house level" there was way too much water in the recipe. I want to see if this changes at higher elevation. Tyler:  Liked it…will take it with me on the trip Melissa: Liked it…will take it with me on the trip. Needs more salt.
	Taters, Ham & Cheese Actually pretty good given that it uses flaked potatoes.  My wife is a mashed potato connoisseur and it didn’t bother her that much. As made per the recipe in the book it could easily serve three unless it was your entire meal. Tyler: Liked it..will take it with me on the trip Melissa: Acceptable…will take it with me on the trip
	Couscous /w Mushrooms & Tomatoes Funny thing is my wife thought she would like this one and I would not. But in the end I liked it and she did not.  Not as easy to make as the Cheesy Chicken Rice, because you have to prepare the dried tomatoes and mushrooms ahead of time but a couple minutes chopping isn’t that big of a deal. Tyler: Liked it…will take it with me on the trip Melissa: Yuck…will not be taking
	Winter Coffee I’m sort of a coffee snob (eg: Starbucks sucks) so I knew this was going to be a bad idea but I tried it anyway. Tyler: No..no..no. Absolutely not. Had to throw out the cup I made. Horrible. Melissa:  Doesn’t drink coffee