Cooking equipment

Essential kit

• Tupperware box that seals: for blackberries, elderberries, butter and storing leftovers for breakfast without adding a host of eagerly supping slugs to your meal.
• Trangia multi disk strainer, protects the frying pan, strains off water without losing half the rice into the bushes and acts as a chopping board. (Not so good as a plate as blackberry juices tend to leak through the holes and stain your trousers)
• Small pot of pepper and mixed herbs and bayleaves mixed up. (You can pull out the bay leaves for individual use). One or two other 'pots of stuff' eg Juniperberries, cloves, cardomoms, mustard seeds mixed (you pick out the seeds you want from the pot). Mixed spice pot is very nice with blackberries. These, although not essential, help keep you fat, as you can eat a larger quantity of tasty foods than of bland ones.
• Opinal penknife: This costs less than a fiver, has a carbon steel blade that sharpens to a razor edge and glides through the woodiest turnip. The thin blade is much easier and safer to use than the famous Swiss Army knife which is generally wedge shaped (presumably for hacking through branches) and has no blade lock, so can just as easily turn on you and hack into a finger as cut a vegetable.
• Throw away your knife and fork set (which do not fit in the trangia) and adopt a spoon and penknife approach. I like a teaspoon, which has the dual advantage of low weight and of limiting the rate of food consumption to aviod indigestion.
• Waste 'water' container This is very useful in cold weather conditions where leaving the tent is unpleasant. It has as many uses as you care to imagine, but one of them is to store the hot water drained off pasta to be used as washing up water later. This is only useful for wildcamping, where all the water has to be carried. In lands where rooms are cheap and the village only has one loo, 200m away and guarded by dogs. This water container is also handy. Our friend in China did tell us that after dark in his village "WC is everywhere", but how can you be sure?

Water

Iodine tablets are a light weight backup to a water filter, or to a system of buy or boil. Alone they taste so bad that you,d really have to be desperate to use them, but a tip from our friends had us adding soluable vitamin C tablets after the alloted sterilisation time. This removes the taste. Thanks Ali and Ingrid! Iodine tabs seem to keep longer than chlorine ones which suffer if they get even a bit of moist air in the container.

Getting the most out of Trangia

Many say they love trangia, but that bit is no good in the cold or at altitude because the meths won't light. This problem can be solved using a SPOON. Dip the back of the spoon into the meths and light it like a splint. Dip just the tip of this lighted brand into the meths so you hear a fizzle, but not deep enough to put out the spoon. Repeating this will heat and vapourise the upper layer of meths and light your fire.

The other, somewhat justified argument is that meths is hard to find whilst petrol is world wide. I found it hard to get information on this for our trip (even Trangia's own site it not ideal). I aim to build a table to help others planning similar trips, so that maybe thay can avoid having to carry two stoves like us.

See the meths anywhere chart

Trangia pans on an open fire

We don't have many open fires, but in spring before the woods are too dry my Ukrainian friends tell me they are not a risk. It is important to start by digging a shallow pit and clearing away leaves from around the fire area. The trangia pans are not ideal for this use because they have no hanging point. Here are our solutions

Balance the pans on thick green sticks. Green sticks take longer to burn threw, but need to be cut, which impacts on the environment. Here's Vlad using forked sticks to support the logs.

We have now put steel wire around a pan to allow us to hang it over the fire. That way we can add more wood easiliy and not risk losing our meal as the logs burn threw and collapse. Our pans have been further modified by our Russian friends: Four holes drilled in the rims allows flexible handles of copper wire.

Cooking above 4000m

If I was going to tour Tibet for a long period, I would consider a small pressure cooker. Without this rice or plain noodles will not cook, but turn to sludge. You will be limited to paket noodles.

Ju's index