Food Glorious Food

Please Sarah, can I have some more?

Sarah likes to mock me; it brings her joy. She’s not worked out that I then put her in the hurt locker for the next 10km down the road but at some point she’ll join the dots.

One of her favourite taunts is the time we had (once again) forgotten that the world closes down in Germany on a Sunday, with pretty much all shops closing. Our engines don’t run on diesel – they run on pastries, forgotten cheese at the bottom of a pannier and bags of peanuts. In battery conservation mode we limped into a kayak-club ‘campsite’ on the Rhine, with some kind but bewildered club members letting us pitch up on their grass. All we had was a bag of rice and some soy sauce – so I bust out my rubbish German and ask if the man has a ‘bisschen brot bitte’ meaning a little bread. He glumly shook his head. Sarah laughs (she speaks German pretty well, but lets me embarrass myself). I don’t care about my dignity as my tummy hurts.

And then one of the kayak club ladies turns up with a tray bake of cinnamon swirls and buns telling us to take as much as we want. Sarah took three cinnamon swirls, cheeks full and still mocks the ‘bisschen brot bitte’.

I think we need to start seeing other people.

Anyway, therapy over. Back to food. Oh it’s important. A good friend bought me a book before I left called A Time of Gifts. And we do have the gift of time on this trip – mostly on the bike, mostly thinking. And most of those thoughts are about food. When shall we stop, what shall we eat, what do I want for dinner, etc… So I thought best to talk a little about how we’re keeping fuelled!

As this is predominantly a camping cycle tour, we’re carrying a kitchen with us. We’ve got a Trangia set of saucepans (we spent a long time choosing this set – it needed two decent size pans for carbs and sauce, and a frying pan for the all important fried eggs). Other essential items are a wooden spatula and my trusty Swiss Army knife (still going strong after 20 years – thanks big bro!) Our kit is important – don’t have much, but it needs to be reliable.

We’ve also each got a collapsible bowl, a set of titanium cutlery each, plus a titanium mug. I like titanium things. We got about a month into the trip before realising that these type of collapsible bowls are quite a common (but thankfully rebadged) choice for dog owners to keep their hounds hydrated.

We spent a silly amount of time choosing a stove. For a while we actually carried two; a tiny little Alpkit screw-on stove which was a last minute addition for ‘when we could find gas’. It turns out gas with the right nozzle is everywhere across Europe, and likely will be in Asia and Oceania – so it’s what we’ve used every day. We also bought a fancy MSR Whisperlite Universal ‘multi fuel’ stove which can run off diesel, petrol, kerosene, paraffin… anything. We thought that would make us resilient against anything, but the reality was that we just aren’t going to the kind of places where we’ll be burning fuel bought out of oil drums from a dodgy roadside fuel station!

And what goes in the saucepans? Well – here’s a recipe:

Bring a litre of water to the boil
Pour a complete 500g bag of carbs in (no joke: 500g of rice? Bosh. Whole pack of spaghetti? Bosh.)
Rootle around in the bag of mystery for what to make it good. Maybe it’s a well planned can of chopped tomatoes. Or maybe it’s half a crumbly/fluffy veg stock cube which unwrapped itself at some point.
Pour it into two dog bowls.
Wait, wait…
Chow down, trying not to make eye contact with the other person otherwise you’ll realise how disgustingly quickly you’re both eating.

We’ve cooked with a little more extravagance quite often. A Thai green curry was great. Banana, apple and Nutella porridge has been a highlight. French Onion Soup powder mixed through rice (500g) is quite good also. We’ve become quite the connoisseur of vacuum packed gnocchi and tortellini.

One of the challenges of this trip has been getting food – as we have to carry everything, often uphill, we don’t carry much more than 24 hours of food ever. This means a daily search for, and trips to, the supermarket. It’s quite fun seeing what’s for sale from country to country. It’s far less fun going into a new supermarket each day and working out the layout. And then planning a meal, and finding what’s not available. Then starting all again. And then getting told off in Albania at the till for not weighing your melons. (Ooh err).

And of course we eat out a few times each week at restaurants! I’ve introduced Sarah to the joy of kebabs (she’d never had one before). We’re eating a lot of peanuts each day, have a biscuit addiction and can easily polish off a family sized bar of chocolate. But… BUT! Let me tell you about bakeries.

Bakeries.

Baked goods. Is there anything finer?

Rolling off the ferry in the Netherlands the Dutch treats started. And then gave way to German/Austrian bakeries (Pretzels! Apple strudel! Doughnuts!)

And France. They can bake. Oh boy.

But then you enter Eastern Europe and the byrek begins. A kind of flaked pastry thing – either tart style, or twisted sausage roll. Who knows what they’re filled with. (Point at them. Hold up your fingers for the numbers, accept the look of disgust from the bakery person, walk out and scoffle it). And the byrek has continued all the way from Slovenia through Croatia and across the Balkans and into Turkey. Each a little different, each great. The Lidl bakery section has also continually impressed across Europe.

What can we learn from this? I don’t know. But I do know the word for ‘bakery’ in 5 languages now, and can read it in Cyrillic script also.

And the final piece of the jigsaw is coffee. Coffee is good. I have a lovely coffee machine back in the UK and being without it had worried me – but fortunately I’m also a fan of the AeroPress (thanks Chris and Ney!) which has been packed and used lovingly each day. In fact, the day doesn’t really start (after a poor night’s sleep listening to the neighbourhood dogs) until we’ve both had a coffee hit.

Right. All this chat about food has made me hungry. Time to head out and see what’s available for one of our first nights in Turkey!

But one last photo to end with… Carrying your kitchen and pantry with you is a bit of a pain. But the big upside is you can nearly always find somewhere to cook with a view: