Swanny's Gorp

[Swanny]

So there I was, packing up to head back home from moose camp and trying to consolidate all that stuff into a smaller package. That "stuff" was miscellaneous provisions carried in small individual bags, stuffed into somewhat larger meal bags (B'fast, Supper, Beverages, &c) stuffed into a bigger grub bag.

Well, after 10 days in the big woods, those little individual bags didn't hold a whole lot, so I decided to mix whatever I had with me that could be eaten out of the bag for trail snacks and lunch. So, what I ended up with was a sort of gorp, made up of a wider than common variety of foods available on some frontier at various times of the 18th or early 19th C.

A bunch of parched corn, some tiny chunks of Spanish chocolate, some roasted nuts, some dried blueberries, some dried cranberries, and so forth. It worked.

Some other ideas to toss into your own gorp might include roasted punkin' seeds (I LOVES those), sunflower seeds (documented among the Mandan ca 1810), cut up bits of dried fruit (apple was popular throughout the New England colonies) and whatever else happens to come to mind.

Sometimes it's better than other times, depending on when or with what it was 'refreshed', but that's all part of the fun.

Anyhow, that's how it came about and I still mix my own gorp on a regular basis.

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“A good dog is so much a nobler beast than an indifferent man that one sometimes gladly exchanges the society of one for that of the other.” (William Francis Butler) Stardancer Historical Freight Dogs at http://www.tworiversak.com/mushing.htm