What’s a food chapter doing in the Resources Book? Why is it here at all for that matter. Well, I like food and I like eating well when touring.  A few chocolate bars are fine for a one-off day tour, or those overpriced energy goo drinks. Not so good for regular or multi day touring, when good rewarding food intake is important. This is not so easy for the westerner in Japan. You cant just buy a robust crusty baguette and fill it with peanut butter to eat it later, all nicely squashed but still satisfying. You can't easily buy mixed nuts, you can't buy a high-fat salami and block of cheese at the petrol station on the way to the mountain (a la France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy). You can't really even buy granola bars. The myriad of convenience stores sell mostly inedible trash and the one readily available energy item gets tired and tasteless pretty fast: onigiri. Don’t misunderstand me, I love Japanese food and I love rice and onigiri, which have good energy for weight, are compact and relatively cheap. Take a few of them and you will be well fed for the day… and desperate for some oil and flavour to sate your stomach and boost your spirits.

Most worthwhile backcountry tours require a full day of strenuous effort and usually take in two meals from the backpack, or perhaps just a lunch and a snack. If you are unguided and therefore taking the appropriate equipment on your own back, you wont have much room for a bulky or heavy lunch. So it has to be small. It also has to be energy rich to get you through the day without physical deterioration – which leads to mental deterioration and bad decisions under stress. What’s more, in cold weather you need to eat fat which in turn warms your body as it is digested. You might not feel cold, but your body is blasting energy to keep you warm the moment you stop moving, especially if you are drinking your near freezing water supply which zaps your valuable energy store the moment it hits your stomach. Chocolate bars don’t cut it, certainly not day after day of touring.

There are solutions.

Namban Onigiri

For those not familiar with Japanese, namban means something like ‘Southern Barbarian’, and that’s basically the manner in which many foreigners have done things ever since the Portugues first arrived: in Southern Barbarian style. Just look at an Australian or American BBQ/chunk of flesh burning!  Its barbaric. Compared to yakiniku, yakitori or teppanyaki, I can see the namban tittle is well deserved at times.  But when I invented this easy hiking adaptation of onigiri I instantly appreciated my namban soul.

Forget the seaweed wrapper. For packaging you need a small tough plastic bag or much better, a recyclable small Tupperware container the size of an avalanche beacon. You also need a small alu camp fork to eat it with.

Ingredients: all of which are sold in supermarkets. The sunflower seeds are sold as snacks, so look in that section. Sesame seeds are extremely common in Japan.

• Lots and lots of chopped up bacon (Japanese bacon is imitation stuff, so buy a lot as it shrivels when you fry it)
• Chopped onion
• Chopped garlic
• Sunflower seeds
• Sesame seeds
• Shichimi (ubiquitous Japanese red mixed spice)

Fry the garlic, bacon and onion and all the seeds, then add a cup of cooked rice, stir it around so all the hot bacon fat and flavour covers the rice, then season with the red spicy stuff, stirring that around as well. Squash a lot of it into your little lunch box and chuck the dense energy-flavour bomb into your back pack.

By the time you are on the mountain, your namban onigiri will be cold and the rice will be a bit dry and caked together. But you stomach will love the input of energy from the bacon fat and rice. I make a few at a time and each day just grab another small container as I prepare for the next day’s tour. There is no need to keep them in the fridge, in fact that will just speed up the drying process that cooked rice suffers from.

Just don’t tell any Japanese, I think they will be disgusted at what this Southern Barbarian did to rice (although I know a Japanese girl who really likes it).

Pikelets with Jam or azuki bean paste

Bakery products in Japan are low quality and contain close to zero nutritional benefit. So why not make your own junk food rather than buy it from Seven-Eleven.

Whats a pikelet? From wikipedia: “In Australia, New Zealand, and the English Midlands and parts of the north, a small, thick colonial-style pancake, known in parts of Britain as a drop-scone or Scotch pancake”. It's basically a small, thick and simple pancake.

It takes 30 minutes to make perhaps 30 pikelets. I wont tell you the method, if you don’t know already then just Google it, and pick the one with the least ingredients and fuss. There is no need to overcomplicate the humble pikelet. Cooking them is so easy that it is impossible to stuff it up. The ingredients are easy to get at any Japanese supermarket, but you cant get self raising flour, so, add baking powder to normal flour (half a teaspoon per 200ml cup is ok). Then you need a really small amount of oil, some sugar, some eggs and milk. I use powder milk and water. That’s it, no need for bicarbonate of soda as some recipes suggest. Nearly all Japanese rental kitchens have an amazingly effective non-stick table top electric griddle. Make heaps of pickets. Then make a few thee-pikelet sandwiches of jam, or much better, sweet red azuki bean paste, and lots of fatty energy rich butter. A bunch of these little pikelet-burgers taste great in the mountains and give you better and cheaper snack fuel than the ‘bakery’ junk on offer at the shops. I like adding raisins to the mix before frying them. Most supermarkets even sell bags of pikelet mix for 99 yen, but you still need milk and egg. The best thing about them is that they don’t really go stale even after several days and they don’t mind being squashed or half frozen in a crowded pack. And they always taste good with butter. Seriously, take 4 pikelet-burgers on tour and you will thank me at lunch time as your partners eat energy-empty convenience store junk.

Home made granola bars – cooked in a Japanese grill.

Chewy mixed nut and grain bars are hard to buy in Japan but luckily usually pretty easy to make at home, and way cheaper than the over-packaged factory alternatives from the shop no matter what country you are in. But, most Japanese homes and rental apartments don’t have ovens. Typically a Japanese kitchen only has a small horizontal gas or electric toaster/griller. I am yet to work out how to make granola bars in it, but it can be done I am sure.