Midweek Mission - Culinary Cop In

Welcome to the first of a regular new OM series, 'Midweek Missions' by Tim Moss. Tim's personal mission is to inspire you to inject a little unexpected outdoors adventure into your life.


And your first Midweek Mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring hill cuisine into your everyday life:

Flapjack for breakfast, de-hy for lunch

There is no way you'd eat that at home. Your mind says no but your body says yes. Mushy pasta that's cold the moment you turn the gas off. It looks like hell but tastes like heaven as its contents hits your stomach and your blood tingles with the anticipation of sugar. "I don't normally like these", you say sheepishly handing back to your mate an empty packet of what were once fig rolls as you stomp your way up the hill.

It's not what you'd usually eat but you wouldn't change it for the world. Expeditions are made and broken on the back of their menus and conversations on such trips so frequently return to the universal currency of the calorie.

Maybe it's the fact that you've got so much other great stuff happening and you're in dire need of energy that anything tastes good. Or maybe it's because you've lugged every gram of that food with you and gone to the effort of melting the snow and heating the water to rehydrate it. Whatever the cause, meals consumed outdoors are ones to be remembered.

But there's still no way I'd eat that at home.

But what if it was research? Testing out a new brand of de-hy beef bourguignon to check you could stomach it for a month in a tent? Seeing if it was actually possible to consume the entire contents of the ration packs you'd be living off on the next journey?

What if it was one year to the day since you stood on top of Mount Elbrus? At the foot of your first HVS? Soaking wet on a river bank having completed your first Eskimo Roll? And you'd celebrated with 110-grams of glutinous apricot flapjack and still had one left from the trip that you'd never eaten?

What if you just missed the hills so badly that you had to carry a thermos filled with extra sugary tea on your way to work so you could sip its sweet nectar from the lid cupped in both hands on the park bench out the front of the office so you could, just for one small moment, just this once, recall the sunset so spectacular you think you imagined it, still half asleep behind the unzipped door of your tent.

What if, instead of your Weetabix you had flapjack. Instead of a sandwich from Pret you had the squashed one from the bottom of your rucksack. Instead of answering "Yes", to the offer of a cuppa, you said "No, but you can stick some hot water in here" and handed them a foil packet with a black dotted fill line. Instead of the donuts Colin brought in for his birthday you nibbled incessantly on trail mix.

What if...

What if you just decided, "To hell with it!", and packed your lunch for the day as if it were a hill one.

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About the author:

Tim Moss runs adventure website The Next Challenge. He has climbed in Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Bolivia, and spent two years organising Arctic expeditions for the British Schools Exploring Society.


After travelling around the world using eighty different methods of transport and swimming across the Solent to visit a friend on the Isle of Wight, he set about pursuing a more adventurous lifestyle full-time from his urban base.

He is currently running the length of every Tube line in London and planning a South Pole expedition to tie in with the London 2012 Olympics.Read his regular blog and follow his adventures at www.thenextchallenge.org