I take them on back packing trips and add a pack of Starkist tuna to the shrimp ones with a little hot sauce. Once on a 30 mile trip at Big Bend National Park I was too worn out to cook on the last night so i just got them wet and sprinkled the packet on them and at it like a big cracker... would not recommend to anyone.
LOL - a (begrudgingly) favorite backpacking food of mine is what we call the "Sh!t brick..." it's a block of Ramen noodles, broken in half along the "noodle fold-over" and covered with peanut butter. Bear in mind that it's not a favorite because of how it tastes, but because it's small, light, calorie-dense, and takes up next to no room in the pack. The name is also a bit ironic, bacause after a couple of days of eating these as your trail lunch, you'll be doing anything you can TO evaucate the ol' colon!! :-D
As for my favorite recipes, there's a recipe for Ramen coleslaw out there that a friend used to make...man, I need to find it, because it sure was good! If I'm just making Ramen soup, though, I like to use one packet each of the Beef and the Oriental flavor and make sort of a "poor man's Pho" by adding in some shredded roast beef (usually leftover round or flank steak, but I've even used Oscar Meyer Cutting Board Deli Roast Beef in a pinch and it worked well!), chopped green onions, a dash of sriracha, a squeeze of lime, garlic powder, and a sprig of Thai basil. To this you can also add cilantro, bean sprouts, hoisin sauce, ground beef, or anything else you might like.
Then there's my favorite "College Ramen"
- Come home after an especially hard exam or a night of too many beers
- Turn on TV
- Open Ramen. Dump noodles into whatever bowl is clean (bonus points if the bowl was "borrowed" from the cafeteria of your freshman dorm)
- Dump flavor packet onto dry noodles
- Add water to coffee maker, HotShot, electric kettle, or whatever other heating recepticle you may have handy
- Watch TV and wait out the painstaking 2-5 minutes while your water heats up.
- Pour hot water over noodles/broth powder.
- Wait out additional 3-5 minutes while noodles soften. Watch more TV
- Retrieve bowl o' noodles. Stir to mix broth. Plop down in front of TV and enjoy noodles with a(nother) cold, cheap beer. :thumb: