Instructions

1. Weigh the dry components into the bag at home rather than into a bowl at camp. This is a meal assembled once and carried, and anything measured on a hillside gets measured badly.
2. Crush the cellophane noodles into shorter lengths before they go in. Full-length noodles need a deeper bowl than most people carry, and whatever sits above the water line stays hard.
3. Keep the cashews in their own twist of paper. They soften the instant they meet steam, and they are the only crunch in the bowl.
4. Tip everything but the cashews into a wide bowl and pour the boiling water over in one go. A slow trickle lets the dry milk and coconut cream powders clump before they have wetted through.
5. Stir hard, cover, and leave it ten minutes. The chicken and the vegetable pieces are the slowest things in there — a piece of carrot that squashes against the side of the bowl means the rest is ready.
6. Taste before you salt. Cumin, curry powder and garam masala are already carrying a great deal, and coconut cream powder flattens salt in a way that tempts you into adding too much.
7. Scatter the cashews over at the last moment, and eat it out of the same bowl.
8. Sealed dry, the mix holds six months in a cupboard. The dry milk is what limits it, and a kit that has gone past smells faintly of old cream before anything else changes.