Gee Whiz!! Did that can include the pickles, onions, fresh tomatoes, mustard and ketchup, too??? Or does the camper have to pack those in his knapsack?????

This stuff is freeze-dried, so I guess you just pour in a cup of hot water and - bingo! The same company is also offering red wine powder with 8,2 % alcohol, 3,95 EUR per glass. I mean, it's so much easier than having to carry around all them bottles.

The wine deal sounds reasonable, and I've carried enough wine bottles up the San Francisco hill I live on to appreciate the value of omitting the liquid and the glass. But what kind of a hamburger bun will you get by pouring hot water on it???

Thx, Peter!

Hi Chuck,

I guess the kind of hamburgers we used to mean in the 1970s when we said: If the salad's not wilted, it's not a burger ...

Actually, the best hamburgers ever I ate at some nondescript restaurant in Merida, Venezuela, operated by a Chinese, packed earth floor, swarming with cockroaches, but an immaculately clean kitchen, where two Chinese boys (or maybe a boy and a girl) were fighting a constant, valiant and probably non-winning fight against the cockroaches.

Which reminds me of a meatloaf my mother once found in the oven with one of those huge cockroaches (big as your hand) sitting right on top of it. She removed it, served the meatloaf to the unsuspecting family and told them later ... aaargh!

Might explain my altogether mixed feelings about minced meat, freeze-dried or not ... if you didn't mince it yourself, you never know.

;-)

You might have seen the recent New Yorker cartoon with the mother serving the casserole to the father and child, saying "If anyone asks, I didn't hear about the beef recall."