One of the things we looked at in some detail early on in our polar training was our food. Making sure that you get enough calories in, and a good selection of fats, carbs and protein to boot, is a major challenge when you’re trying to cut weight down as much as possible. You need to find food that’s hugely calorie dense, as you’re aiming to eat up to 6000 calories every day! Add to that wanting something you can face eating a for weeks at a time, and it becomes pretty tricky.
Most of our meals at the moment come from the big freeze dried food companies, with Expedition Foods winning most of our business. Breakfast, however, is a bit simpler than the other meals, and by making our own we’re saving a lot of money, without having to compromise on taste, calorie content or our ethics (I’m vegetarian).
After a little trial and error, this was the recipe I came up with:
| Ingredient | Type | Quantity | kcal per 100g | kcal per serving |
| Porridge | Ready Brek | 75g | 374 | 280.5 |
| Milk Powder | Organic whole milk | 30g | 504 | 151.2 |
| Dried fruit | Raisins | 25g | 299 | 74.75 |
| Nuts | Whole almonds | 25g | 576 | 144 |
| Sugar | Brown | 5g | 380 | 19 |
| Nut butter | Pip & Nut | 30g | 625 | 187.5 |
| Total | 190g | 856.95 |
I mix this all up in a ziplock plastic bag, which I can then just add the hot water to in the mornings, and eat from without needing to do any washing up in the snow. We can then wash the bags out when we get back to civilisation to save our waste a little bit.
The Ready Brek is just plain oats, with some added vitamins and minerals, but its powdery texture means that it softens up nicely just by adding hot water and leaving to stand for a minute, no need to cook it!
The raisins plump up nicely in the hot water, and make it taste a bit more interesting. I’m going to try substituting in some dried fruits from here, they’re mostly very similar in their calorific content so I just need to see what 25g of each of them will do in this quantity of porridge, but I think having some strawberry, banana and blueberry options will keep things a bit interesting as the week drags on!
We’ve been struggling to eat this much food in the mornings so far, but I’m hoping after the first couple of days of our Hardangervidda trip our bodies will work out what we’re doing to them and it’ll get easier!
Mountain leader in training, Skipper, sometimes Viking and total coffee addict. Runner, hiker, Girlguiding leader, animal lover. British/Irish, aspirant Norwegian.