Because teenaged boys are weird.

This is totally not ASL related. Just in case you're looking for the connection while you're reading....

Lige (13) does Boy Scouts with our Branch troop, which meets combined with his old troop, because there aren't any deaf boys in the troop right now, so it makes a lot of sense to have the two small-ish troops meet together. The last few weeks I've been teaching the Cooking merit badge.

For Christmas, my mom gave me a freeze dryer. Yes, seriously, my very own home freeze dryer. It's shockingly fun. Besides the copious amounts of snack food we make, one of the best things about it is freeze drying meals, then just adding water when you want to eat it! I mean, buying freeze dried meals for backpacking is pricey. But we can make our own now! Woot, woot!!

So the boys need to go hiking and backpacking and cook 2 meals (plus a snack) on the trail. I thought it would be awesome to cook one of the meals in advance, then freeze dry it for the boys, so they can have something amazing to eat. I researched good trail foods - you want something hearty, since they'll be burning calories. And it has to be easy to cook, because they're teenagers. And it needs to be easy to reconstitute.

I got to Scouts and put my list of ideas up on the board. "Anything else you guys want to put on the list?" A voice in the back, in good brainstorming fashion, says, "Maybe chicken noodle soup?" And then nobody else adds anything else. Then I ask if there's anything on the list that anyone just hated and would starve if we took it. One by one, everything on the list was crossed of, until only chicken noodle soup was left.

I get a chuckle out of the idea that we're making chicken noodle soup for a hearty backpacking meal. But hey, they have to cook 2 meals and a snack, and they're only hiking like 10 miles, so I'm sure nobody will starve.