A Deliciously Chocolate Retelling

How many times has this happened to you?

You wake up, cursing and clutching the machete kept under the pillow (or maybe that’s just me), and go downstairs to have some breakfast when you find only this in your cabinets.  Except you don’t have cabinets, you’re a in tent in the middle of New Mexico backcountry.  What do you do, kitchen MacGuyver?

Thus the predicament I found myself in while hiking out in the Double H Ranch one morning.  At first it seems easy: boil some water, make the oatmeal and hot chocolate, or if you’re three years old and impatient like me, eat it right out of the pack.

Well you’re wrong!  Because boiling water means haranguing with white gas and cooking stoves and burning fingers and messing up bowls and spoons, and you just do not feel like deal with all that right now.  Luckily for you, there’s a man in one of the other troops hiking the ranch whose name is, in all seriousness, John Slaughter, and who looks like the lovechild of Bruce Willis and a slab of beef.  This is the kind of guy who thinks hiking is basically running windsprints with fifty pounds on his back and has foregone drinking water in favor of the blood of wild animals he hunts down and kills with just a tent stake.  When John Slaughter gives cooking lessons, you listen.

First, open both the oatmeal pack and the hot chocolate pack.  You’ll notice the oatmeal pack is made of flimsy tissue paper, while the hot chocolate pack is aluminum-foil lined and substantially heftier.  This is due to the hot chocolate reading too many Dan Brown novels and listening to conspiracy theorists on the Internet.  But for us, this is a good thing.  Pour the oatmeal into the hot chocolate pack.

Then, add some water.  It can be hot, or it can be cold.  Perhaps even lukewarm.  Temperature to taste.

Obviously you will most likely not have an electric kettle on hand, or be dressed in a shirt and tie.  Most likely, like the first time I did this, you will be miles and miles from anything recognizable as civilization, wearing the same sweat-stained t-shirt you’ve been wearing for the last three days and an inch of brown dust, crouching in a sliver of shade and cursing the sun coming over the hills because that means the desert’s going to start boiling in an hour.  Try to ignore this fact and mix your concoction together.

And that’s it.  Chocoatmeal.  It ain’t pretty, but then again, at this point in the trek you’re not really turning any heads either.  Eat up, hitch up the backpack, and hit the trail.  Or wherever you’re going.