November 29, 2020

Our first dehydrated camp meal

We are going on a 1 night overnight hike next weekend 🙂 This is our first overnight hike for over a year (cos of COVID)…so mostly this first little overnighter is to get us back into the swing of thru hikes, and test out the gear that has been sitting on a shelf for a while 🙂

But this post is all about the food 🙂 We have been busy reading dehydrating books and searching dehydrating tips to see what we can try out for our first attempt at actually dehydrating a camp meal 🙂

So we thought we would start simple.  We will cook our regular kind of hike meal, angel hair pasta and a tin of tuna 🙂 But this time we will add some veg.    We bought a mandolin so that we could slice our veg evenly, we got a Baccarat one that was worth $100 for $20 in the sales 🙂

We chose capsicum and zucchini to go into our pasta dish.  Here is the zucchini being sliced, marinated in chilli, lemon oil and paprika, and dried. We thought it would add a little flavour to our pasta dish 🙂  488g worth of zucchini reduced to 42g 🙂

Here are our capsicums.  We bought a bag of organic ones just about to go out of date so got a bargain 🙂 Bag contained 175g of capsicums.  After dehydrating…. 10g 🙂 These will get cooked with our pasta together with the zucchini.

For a snack when we arrive at camp, we thought we would have some sweet potato chips 🙂 These haven’t quite turned out like a bag of Kettle Chips unfortunately 🙂  But they taste OK and are a nutritious snack at less weight than 4 sweet potatoes 🙂 And they haven’t been deep fried 🙂

Then we need those energy treats that we always take on a hike with us…usually in the form of snakes, because they are a light hit of sugar to give us a boost…but unfortunately contain zero nutrition.  So we thought we would try our own roll up kinda treat to give us the same boost.  We blended half a pineapple and 3 pears to spread out in our dehydrator and make our own healthy roll ups.  These actually turned out YUM.

We have to be careful as you could easily eat the whole lot 2 trays of roll up to yourself in one hit…and there is no way you could eat half a pineapple and 3 pears as easy 🙂 It makes you wonder about the amount of sugar we can easily consume when we eat these processed snakes or roll ups…they contain spoons and spoons of sugar and hardly any nutrition (even the so called fruit roll ups are mostly just sugar with fruit flavouring).  So as long as we understand that we should limit our intake of our new home made roll ups on a hike, we are getting a natural sugar boost packed with lots of vitamins and fibre 🙂  We used half the pineapple and 3 pears, so what would weigh 1068g in our packs for this heathy treat, now will only weigh 56g 🙂

The next stage…vacuum packing our dehydrated food 🙂 Dehydrated food should last months, but vacuuming it will help it to last longer, and reduces volume 🙂 We managed to pick up a vacuum sealer that was $210 but $89 in the sales 🙂 So here is our veg and fruit for one night’s hike, all vacuum sealed:

A whopping 2.472kg of healthy food reduced to 189g

We have learned that we can easily carry multiple days of nutritious fruit and veg on our hikes at this weight. But it will take an enormous amount of planning and time to dehydrate and seal for a hike that will take a few months.  We will need a bigger dehydrator and silicon mats for our fruit roll ups, as it takes ages to cut paper to the shape of a round dehydrator, and peeling the paper off was not easy 🙂 But for our first attempt not a bad job 🙂 Proof will be in the eating next weekend 🙂

November 27, 2020

Walking and helping nature out a little bit

Lucas has bought himself a rubbish picker so that he can help nature out a little bit while we go on our walks.

At one of our local wetlands yesterday he filled 2 bags of rubbish, cans, bottles, chip/lolly wrappers, anti-bacterial wipes, fishing wire, pliers, an atomiser spray pump, maccas and 7/11 smoothie cups, cigarette butts, bottle tops….and we only walked for 1km (and 1km back).

He collected 10 bottles and cans that can be recycled at cash for containers, so a bonus dollar to add to his next trip there 🙂

When walking as much as we do, cleaning up the rubbish is something we may as well do, helping us be in the moment with purpose, and helping our natural environment too 🙂

 

November 19, 2020

Mandarin Chef Down Under -New Video

Lucas is in his element when he is eating 🙂 He often just gets up from what we are doing saying ‘I’m hungry…’ and off he goes to whip up snacks.

He started a YouTube channel ‘Mandarin Chef Down Under’ quite a while ago, making bilingual videos of some of the dishes he likes to make.  He was enjoying making them, when the iMovie app that he used on the phone to edit the videos just stopped working properly and nothing we did seemed to fix it.  Yesterday he goes to make his regular morning pancake fix and I mentioned that it was a shame iMovie stopped working…so he checked it and it’s all of a sudden working again.  So he gets set up to film again.  Bugger whatever it was he was just doing with his Mum, he’s making a video now 🙂

I think that is the beauty of learning from home.  We can stop what we are doing if something more interesting comes up.  And I have no problem when he goes off ‘track’ to do something that means more to him, as long as he’s using his hands and mind, in the moment with something, then he’s learning.  Here is his ‘Banana Pancake video’.  In his previous videos, he has also added commentary in both English and Mandarin….suggested by Mum because I wanted that added layer of him practicing ‘speaking’ Mandarin 😃 , even though he had always argued that ‘cool’ You Tube cooking videos these days don’t have voice overs…just music and subtitles.  I won my argument with the fact that Jamie Oliver seems to say a lot and he does pretty well 🙂 But this time, he has chosen to just add subtitles.  Much quicker for him…still having to translate into Mandarin…so Mum still  happy it is still helping him keep up his Mandarin 🙂

Wonder if making a video of rehydrating a curry on a hike will look just as good 😜

 

November 19, 2020

Starting to explore the Bibbulmun Maps

We received our maps for the Bibbulmun Track 🙂

We are starting to explore the first section of the trail, Kalamunda to North Bannister.  Here the kids are calculating the distances between camp sites in this section.  This initial exploration will start to give us an idea of time needed to complete the track, how much food we will need to carry for each section, and how much money we will need to pay for it all 🙂 So this is the start to understanding how we are going to plan, and budget for this adventure. I am trying to step back, and let them work it out…that’s why we start planning so early…so there is time to learn 🙂

Calculating the distances between campsites of section 1 of the Bibbulmun Track

After writing a list of all the camp names and the distances in section 1 of the track, they started a spreadsheet.  We ultimately need this spreadsheet to have every bit of planning and link to a budget spreadsheet, which they are also going to create – so it is a big task 🙂  But we agreed that just ‘starting’ was the best way to a daunting task.  As we build the information, the layout, design, colours, adding of sheets, pie charts…can all be a work in progress.  Today they learned how to add a formula that calculates the running total of the kms 🙂

The first section is a total of 135km, with 12 days of hiking before getting to a town 😱 This means carrying 12 days worth of food 😱 Some hikers ‘double hut’ to shorten the length between towns.  We like to be in the moment, and of course have a little time to just ‘be’ in the afternoons.  We are not ‘double hut’ kind of peeps 🙂 But…the thought of carrying 12 days worth of food was enough to make the kids use their map skills to study the track a bit closer 🙂 Could we ‘double hut’ on some of the days?

We have been reading a few books from the library about navigation, as we plan to learn how to use a compass on our overnight hikes that we will do over the next few months testing our dehydrated food and gear (and I mean use a compass properly, not just have one with us that we don’t know how to use 😄) This DK book ‘Survival for Beginners‘ was really good to help the kids get a visual of the contour lines.

We know from previous hikes, that sometimes a 9km hike can take longer than a 20km hike.  Distance alone is not enough to determine which days are possible to ‘double hut’.  So the kids then got to studying the section 1 map a little more, studying the contours, and the terrain profiles.

We probably won’t know till we are on the trail what we will do, we will need to be prepared for 12 days in the bush 🙂 But the thought of 12 days without access to food was enough for the kids to study the map a little closer than they would 🙂

 

November 17, 2020

The cost to run a dehydrator…useful maths

This Ted Talk video came into my feed again yesterday, ‘Why math instruction is unnecessary’. which was timely as I needed a reminder that not making my kids do hours of maths drills will not ruin their lives…in fact quite the opposite…just doing the bare minimum useful maths will mean that they won’t suffer from ‘maths anxiety’ which is what makes kids avoid maths forever after school!

He explains that deductive and inductive reasoning is what our kids should be practicing.  I do have waves of doubt sometimes that my kids don’t go through thick text books of maths 🙂 But I felt pretty happy yesterday re-watching this video just after my kids had been solving a problem in their ‘Life of Fred’ book, asking them to find out how many diagonals a 200 sided polygon had.  Now I doubt they will ever need to remember or ever use this fact…but in the typical Life of Fred way it was asking this question to encourage them to logically work out a way to find the answer.  Here are the pages from their working out books:

The previous questions had asked how many diagonals a rectangle, a pentagon, and a hexagon had, which they worked out by drawing the shape and the diagonals.  2,5 and 9.  Lucas then drew a heptagon and an octagon, and identified a pattern.  He couldn’t work out how to fast track that pattern to a 200 sided shape, but he started to make a table and follow the pattern to record the number of diagonals for each shape as it increased in sides. When he got to 25 he noticed that he could safely increase his shapes in the table by 10 sides and calculate the diagonals, finally fast tracking to the conclusion that 200 x 98.5 would give him the answer he needed.

Aurora thought for a while, worked out that what she needed to find out was a value in an arithmetic series…she made a connection to a previous Fred book that had stepped the reader through a formula that students don’t normally learn till second year advanced algebra…but it was just useful for Fred at that time and fairly easy to follow…so why not?  She found the Fred book she wanted, slowly worked out the figures she needed to pop into the formula, and after a few attempts finally figured it out, 19700 diagonals 🙂

They both arrived at the same correct answer, took them both a while, but they nutted it out in their own different but logical way.

But what does this have to do with dehydrators?  Well the discussions in the house while we have had the dehydrator running all night experimenting for our long trail adventure, is whether it is economically worth it.  The treasurer of the house (Dad) having panic attacks at how much our electricity bill is going to be next time 🙂  So I asked the kids to find out how much it costs to run a dehydrator.

They found a website that gave them a formula to calculate how much it costs to use a dehydrator.

(Wattage of appliance × Hours needed) / 1000 = Kilowatt-hour (kWh) consumption

Cost = kWh x cost per kWh

They then had to find the values to put into the formula.  They had to find the wattage of our dehydrating appliance, and how much it costs us per kWh on our electric bill.  Lucas found the formula, it took them both a while to find where the cost per kWh was on our electricity bill, but they found it eventually, and Aurora neatly laid the information out, calculating how much a typical 12 hour dehydrating stint would cost.  Here are their calcs, working out that our machine would cost around 35cents to run for 12 hours.  She also did a little additional calc working out it will cost us around $21 if we were to run the machine nightly for 2 months to pre-make lots of snacks and meals.

Calculations of how much it costs to run our dehydrator

What we learned:

  • Definitely more cost effective by far than buying commercial dehydrated camp food, even if we were to run it every night for months making all our dinners for 3 months
  • We can confidently continue to experiment knowing our treasurer won’t have a heart attack 🙂
  • We can calculate anything if we can find the formula
  • If we look into buying a bigger dehydrator further down the track, to take the wattage of the appliance into consideration when comparing the ones on the market, pop it into our formula and calculate the cost to run, also taking into consideration if it is bigger then it has to be run less times 🙂
November 16, 2020

The science and safety of dehydrating food

When we hiked Wilson’s Prom (Vic) and Hinchinbrook Island (Qld), we had to be self sufficient carrying everything we needed for the 5 days on the trail.  We survived on nuts and sultanas, tuna and crackers, and noodles.  Our longer hikes in Langtang Nepal (Mandarin version of video)  and Tiger Leaping Gorge (China), we were spoiled with tea houses along the way to fill up with hearty food.

We want to do a really really long, self-sufficient trail next 🙂 On any of our expeditions, we have researched into the best, lightest and affordable equipment to ensure a safe and enjoyable hike.  It really doesn’t matter how fancy your gear is though, it’s our bodies that are moving us through the hike! We need to look after them. Which means that we are going to have to think about our nutrition…noodles and angel hair pasta with no veg for 3 months isn’t looking after that most valuable piece of equipment.

We have been watching lots of vlogs of hikers doing these long trails, and we are learning that many hikers pre make and dehydrate all their meals, box them, and mail them to towns along the route of the trail, ready for their next self-sufficient stint 🙂 It saves the $13 per meal per person you need to spend for a similar dehydrated meal in the camp shops…which would be over $3000 over 2 months JUST for DINNER alone. Plus you have preservative and additive free meals 🙂  Some just take fruit and veg dehydrated separately, and just add them to their regular noodle meals.  Some dehydrate whole dinners, whipping out their powder in a zip lock at the end of the day and rehydrating a coq au vin for dinner 🙂

We were given a used dehydrator over a year ago, and it has been sitting in the box under the stairs.  So we thought we would get it out, and start to explore the world of dehydrating foods 🙂

It takes months to experiment and master dehydrating and rehydrating full meals. So we are learning all about the science and safety of food dehydrating, starting with the easiest: fruit 🙂

Lucas in the moment slicing his favourite fruit for our first attempt in dehydrating 🙂

Over next few months we are going to experiment and learn everything we need to know about making our own dehydrated meals for a long trail 🙂 We have reserved some dehydrating books from the library 🙂  We have watched YouTube videos 🙂 We have learned up to now:

  • Food spoils because the mould and bacteria that spoil it like the moisture and in it  🙂
  • Dehydrating it will get rid of the moisture and so make it last much longer
  • Drying food is a preserving method that has been done naturally by many cultures for centuries (we saw lots of families drying their fish or chillies on the streets in China)
  • Dehydrating it also kills enzymes, which you really want to not kill…and although dehydrating machines probably aren’t as good as the sun, dehydrating longer at lower temps kills less enzymes apparently, and we can control this with our machines.
  • After our first few attempts of fruit, we found that it’s really hard to tell whether the food has dehydrated enough, and therefore if it is going to be safe to keep for months…

We are going to continue for a few months, experiment and read and learn about the science a little more, and hopefully become confident dehydrators 🙂 We may have to invest in a bigger machine though if we go ahead and try and make all our meals for a 3 month hike.

We have already discussed a future challenge once the kids have experimented with lots of foods.  They will need to make a  dehydrated meal to take on an overnight hike with us.  It will need to be nutritionally balanced, tasty, safely prepared, packaged like the ones in the camp shop, selling us with enticing images and scientific information, labelled on the back with nutrition content and reheating instructions etc.  We thought it would be a great challenge integrating science, technology, health, maths, English, marketing, design, visual arts and apparently business…as after chatting about the challenge together, they seemed pretty keen and their first question was ‘Will we get paid the $13 for it?’ 🙂

I am sure updates on our dehydrating journey will follow 🙂

 

November 16, 2020

Time for a new blog

We have been learning through life and adventures at home together as a family for over 5 years now!  Many of our previous adventures and learnings were included in one of our old blogs Mandarin Motion.   I started that blog so long ago when I was a Mandarin Teacher, it evolved into our family home learning blog as we integrated Mandarin into most of the things we did. But what and how we learn now has changed as we have grown and developed.

It’s time for a bit of a reset… a fresh blog! We thought we should have a blog that encompasses how we have evolved and that encompasses our whole learning….so this is it:  Being In Our Element

Langtang Valley, Nepal

We have amazing future adventures in our heads, but of course the world has changed and adventures like hiking Manaslu and Mont Blanc, or Kungsleden and Kilamanjaro will have to wait.

We were thinking Te Ararora in New Zealand might be an option for our next adventure, surely a travel bubble between our two countries down under will open soon? But we are accepting that Australia is our classroom at the moment, and it’s not a bad classroom really 🙂  But even interstate travel is going to be a yoyo of uncertainty for a little while to come.  We were thinking the Bibbulmun Trail in Western Australia could be our next adventure, WA just opening up its borders.  But even as I write this, only a few hours after opening, SA has had a Covid cluster and WA have now closed their border to them before it had even opened. So on the one hand, even though our states are opening one minute and encouraging other Ozzies to come and spend their money there, on the other hand requesting leave and booking airfares at the moment would be insane.

This uncertainty has reminded us how important it is for our wellbeing to be in the moment.  We have started this new blog Being In Our Element as a reminder that often life throws in these uncontrollable elements that make our future goals uncertain. Every day is an elemental layer of our life’s journey.  We have our big goals and dreams, but to be is our present goal, and if we can do that ‘being’ in our element, then bonus 🙂

Our adventures have always been exciting ways to integrate Maths, English, Chinese, Science, Geography, Health, Humanities, Technology and the Arts learning outcomes.  We will be continuing to prepare for some kind of long distance trail, hopefully in 2021.  This blog will be to document our journey for our own record of learning and memories…but of course any family is welcome to follow if you are planning on doing an adventure and learning through it 🙂

Whatever may be…we will continue to be in our element 🙂