Freezer Bag Cooking Provides Inexpensive Easy-to-Prepare Meals for Backpacking or Emergencies [Video]

Freeze-dried foods from such brands as Mountain House and Backpacker's Pantry are staples for multi-day backpacking trips, and many preppers also store them for emergencies since they store for years and only need hot water to prepare. By utilizing dehydrated and freeze-dried foods from the grocery store you can make your own meals that are tasty and easy to prepare for a fraction of the cost of commercial backpacking food.

Trailcooking.com is the main resource for this method and features recipes, tips on dehydrating your own foods, and even plans to make an insulated cozy for freezer bags to reduce cook times. Most of the ingredients can be sourced at your local grocery store, but a few (such as single serving packs of olive oil) may have to be ordered online. Update - a helpful reader just informed me you can snag a few single-serve packets of olive oil at the Subway fast food chain.

Once you've assembled the ingredients for your recipe all you need do is put everything together in a freezer bag, label it, and when you're ready to eat you'll just need to add almost-boiling water, stir, and close the bag and wait typically 5-15 minutes for your meal to rehydrate and cook. You'll definitely want actual freezer bags as sandwich bags are not rated for high temperatures.

From my research it seems that Ziplock brand freezer bags do not contain BPA and are rated to be safely heated to microwave temperatures. As long as you're not immersing the bag in boiling water there should not be any health risk with regard to the bags. Freezer bag cooking seems to be a great compromise between tasty meals, ease of preparation, and cost.

Freezer Bag Cooking 101

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Chrono Slider Provides a Super Fast Way to Create AppleScript-able Alarms on Your Mac [Mac Downloads]

Chrono Slider is essentially an alarm clock with what, at first, seems like one of the most bizarre interfaces you'll ever come across. Once you get to know it, however, it turns out to be a really fast way of adding alarms and reminders that can even control aspects of your computer when they go off.

As you can see in the screenshot above, activating Chrono Slider breaks your screen into various segments. Click up at the top will cancel out. Clicking in the middle will set an alarm that goes off after a specific amount of time passes from the current time. The farther you mouse is to the left, the shorter that period will be. Moving to the right will elongate it, letting you set a range anywhere from one second to 24 hours. Heading down to the bottom of the screen will let you set an alarm for a specific time of day. Once you've clicked and chosen your time, you'll slide from left to right to select a preset alarm label. It'll be white if you're just going to see a message displayed, and it'll be blue if it runs an AppleScript (e.g. pauses or plays iTunes, or puts the computer to sleep). You're not limited to the preset options, of course. You can go into Chrono Slider's preferences to edit them. Once you've found the one you want, just click and the alarm is set.

This may seem like an in-depth process because of this long description, but once you know how it works you can set an alarm in a matter of seconds. Chrono Slider is actually a really clever app and definitely worth a look.

Chrono Slider ($2) | Mac App Store via One Thing Well

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