DIY Explorer Food

Nuts, nuts, berries, nuts!

This past May, my boyfriend Chris & I challenged ourselves to a Seven Continent Cooking Challenge: cooking one meal from each continent in one month. The real challenge wasn’t agreeing on recipes or finding the time to cook... the real challenge was figuring out what the heck to cook for Antarctica!

Since there are no known indigenous inhabitants on Antarctica, we would not be able to cook authentic Antarctican... whatever that may be. Seal and penguin came to mind but didn’t really appeal (and isn’t readily available). So instead we racked our brains to come up with suitable Antarctican delight. This lead me back to the story, The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, where he and a small team of two chronicled their adventures across Antarctica in the early 1900s. They weren’t attempting to reach the South Pole, as others were at the time, but instead they were gathering Emperor penguin eggs for scientific study. Apsley's story tells a harrowing tale of hauling heavy sledges across the frozen land, losing their only tent in a gale force wind (and then finding it!) and the everyday difficulties of doing just about everything in that bitter, windswept landscape. I distinctly remember the relative joy they experienced while huddled around their Primus cookstove, despite the meagerness of their meals. Their English diet consisted mainly of hot tea, pemmican and biscuits. I had never heard of pemmican before, and I soon discovered it’s a dense, high calorie food mixture, originating from the Native North Americans. Traditionally made from dried meat, rendered fat, berries and nuts, they were rolled into balls and dropped into boiling water to make a stew. Sound like a boullion cube? We thought so too. It can also be formed into ready-to-eat bars for more temperate conditions, kinda like beef jerky and great for backpacking! We decided pemmican was the best possible solution to our challenge: the original Antarctican survival food by early explorers...and the perfect snack for our upcoming summer adventures.

After researching recipes online, we decided going with a vegetarian pemmican (veggican?) recipe that leaves out the meat and celebrates the nuts, berries and grains instead - a little more to our liking. Sound like a homemade granola bar? You bet it does! It’s much like a Lara Bar, or maybe a dense, cranberry-nut bread is a better description. In short, they were easy to make and hard to resist. Roughly speaking, each bar weighs 1.4oz, containing about 210 calories each, for a caloric density of about 150, not bad! We altered a recipe found on Food.com, adding cinnamon and replacing the figs with dried berries (figs were unavailable). On my second attempt, I added macadamia nuts and coconut for a more tropical taste... not exactly Antarctican, but yummy all the same. Enjoy!

Vegetarian Pemmican Bars
Prep Time: 15min
Cook Time: 45 mins
Servings: 16

Dry Ingredients
1 tablespoon flax seed, ground
1/2 cup toasted wheat germ
1/2 cup wheat bran
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup nonfat dry milk powder

Nuts & Fruit Ingredients
1/4 cup cranberries
1/2 cup dried dates, pitted
1/2 cup whole almonds
1/2 cup cashews
1/2 cup walnut pieces
1/2 cup pecan pieces
Alternatives ingredients include shredded coconut, macadamia nuts, dark chocolate chips or whatever you love to snack on.

Wet Ingredients
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup water
1 tbsp butter for greasing 8” loaf pan

Directions:

1. Preheat oven at 375˚F.
2. In a large bowl, mix the dry ingredients together (wheat germ, ground flax seed, bran, flour and milk powder)
3. Chop the nut & fruit ingredients into small pieces and add to the bowl, stir well. 
4. Add honey & water and stir until all the ingredients are fully moistened. 
5. Press the final mixture into the greased 8" loaf pan and bake for 30 minutes. 
6. Cool in pan on wire rack. When fully cooled, remove loaf from pan and slice into bars. They can be transferred to a freezer container or bag and frozen for up to 3 months.