Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021 - 6

FROM THE EDITOR

FOODIES IN THE FOREST

It's All About
the Lunch
By KURT RHEINHEIMER

ou can read all over the place these days
about the great reasons to hike-the exercise, the nature, the vistas, the time
with your honey or family.
And they're all as true as can be to us.
Gail and I will celebrate-just about the
time this magazine comes out-17 years
of hiking pretty much every dang weekend.
But the true secret behind such a sustained
oddity comes down, really, to one thing.
Lunch!
Which usually happens at the approximate
mid-point of our hikes-ideally on a mountain
peak after the climb has been accomplished and it is thus
the proverbial all down hill after lunch, though of course
Virginia's mountains don't quite work that way.
Lunch has evolved over the years-not quite from the
crusty old bread and a hunk of cheese that marked my
father's hiking years' food break-but at least from a perspective that was closer to eat-to-live than is our current
lunches' glorious hike-to-eat context.
Consider first just a few of the accoutrements that are
the first things in our packs these days: the light-blue Ice
Mule cooler that requires only a small amount of cubes to
keep foods well protected and beverages perfectly chilled;
the Toaks titanium knife-fork-spoon sets; the retro gingham napkins; the ultra-lightweight Helinox chairs; and
our most recent addition, the also-lightweight Helinox
table, which is as light and packable as the chairs.
And then there's the food! Which The Greatest Day
Hiker Of Them All has refined and perfected in full scale
with the furniture and tools, most of which she also researched, purchased and brought to our packs.
Her menus run from perfect sandwiches and salads to
what is my current favorite, which might be called haute
hors d'oeurves. From the ice bag she unpacks nearly a
dozen cute little containers made in New Zealand and offering everything you need in the way of vegetables, protein and crunch. She then recommends combinations of
cheeses, veggie chunks, chicken salad, olives, etc, toward

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the consummation of the perfect single-bite moutaintop
culinary experience.
The wine is of course perfectly chilled, and the Deer
Park Sparkling Lime water awaits on ice, its carbonation
fully intact inside the vacuum bottle, and its cuddled
cubes the same size as when they were dropped into the
bottle.
My usual, non-woodland consumption pattern of
chomp-chomp-chomp is slowed to near politeness in the
wonderful context of food in the forest. Somehow the
recommendation to slow down and enjoy your food fits
perfectly, at least in part because once you're done, you
gotta, you know, get up, fold stuff back up, re-stuff the
packs and hike some more.
But not before the ideal denouement to a trailside
lunch-the chocolate! Here The Greatest Day Hiker and
I diverge slightly: While I have graduated from bluebells-the exquisite blueberries covered in milk chocolate-to Hershey's Special (pretend) Dark Chocolate, she
takes dainty and far fewer bites of Lindt 70% Cocoa Dark
Chocolate, which is of course far more commensurate
with the lunch than mine, first two ingredients of which
are " sugar, chocolate. "
I'll walk it off on the way down, right?
Yes, go hiking! And not skimping on the lunch will up
your odds of heading out again soon.

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Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Blue Ridge Country March/April 2021