A great light weight high carb meal. This meal is one of my favorites. As meal I only eat in the bush, the craving of this meal, has been the reason I’ve gone for a hike.

Base: 120g, 425 cal, cooking time 5-10mins

20g – Instant mash potato

80g – Pasta

10g – Parmesan cheese

Stock – stock cube/ a teaspoon of stock powder

 

Prep:

I put all my ingredients portioned out into one zip lock bag, whether it’s a solo trip or a group meal. See below for group quantities. Depending on my stock/cheese I sometimes leave this wrapped to retain freshness. This is not essential.

If storing for a long time I would recommend using fusilli pasta over penne. The mash can go a little hard in the center of the penne. It’ll still cook out, but it’ll take longer.

When it comes to cooking, just chuck it all in roughly 400ml of water and cook/stir until the pasta is done. The amount of water can vary depending on how runny you want the mash/sauce. I usually start with less water and add more. Be careful, if you’re using boiling to treat your water, that it has all been boiled for long enough. Note if you are trying to limit the amount of water used in your meal, I would keep the instant mash in a separate bag and only add once the pasta is fully cooked. Otherwise it can burn and stops the water boiling the pasta.

Quantities above serve a female with a large appetite. Feel free to adjust as required. This meal is great because it can easily just be scaled up to feed multiple people. If you are feeding many out of one pot, I would recommend to add 110% per additional person, meals are never split perfectly and the extra bit of wiggle room is nice for team dynamic.

 

Alt Ingredients:

A few adjustments I have for either nutrition, flavour or cooking time:

Oil – Just for calorie increase add as much or as little as you need/ want to carry. It also stops the food sticking as an added bonus. Carry separately using either a plastic or metal very water tight container.

Milk Powder – Increase your protein. Add some milk powder to your meal. If you’re worried about weight, but want more protein, reduce the amount of pasta/mash and increase the milk powder.

Instant Soup – This can replace the stock used. Edit qualities of mash to suit as well. This works particularly well for tasty group meals. If you’re eating this for days on end it’s an easy way to add variety to your meals.

Instant Noodles – Replace pasta with noodles. This reduces cook time.

Couscous – Decreases cook time. You could replace pasta with couscous, but I normally use it combined with pasta when cooking a  large group meal and I don’t want to cook 500g of pasta. Bonus is if you buy flavoured couscous you don’t need to add additional stock.