Tour de (food type)

[redrhodie]

I'd love to ride "le tour de pierogi"! In my mind's eye, it's a winter tour with piping hot pierogi offered at frequent rest stops.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierogi

My family calls them "vareniki" but they're the same thing. Potato filled dumplings. Yum! No bonking on this tour, but you might need a 4 hr nap and a kick in the backside to get back on the bike.

I really would like to do a long tour someday, but the food issue scares me. I'm a veggie, and I don't eat hydrogenated oil or high fructose corn syrup (aka junk). I imagine I'd be forced to give in on the latter 2 things, and often the only vegetarian option in a lot of diner type places is iceburg lettuce salad. Not exactly pierogi.

[Eden]

Our trip to Spain felt like tour de calamari and serrano ham.... every place we went could be counted on to have calamari on the menu and ham in almost everything. Poor vegetarians - they'd have to survive on the gazpacho as almost all the other veggie dishes were seasoned with, you guessed it, ham. (not that it wasn't tasty we even bought some most mornings and had ham sandwiches for lunch, with almonds, raisins and chocolate)

Loaded touring is great - we ate well that trip and I still came home 10 lbs lighter.

[Skierchickie]

Ooh - how about a Tour de Cheesecake? Yummmm. Definitely a loaded tour idea - gotta work that off. Think of the endless flavors and varieties! My friend/training buddy makes a wonderful chocolate/orange one. And a pumpkin one. Puts most restaurant cheesecake I've ever had to shame.

My Mom is 100% Polish. She makes the cheese pierogis. Cheese filled, boiled, then fry up some bread cubes in butter, slather sour cream on the hot "ears", sprinkle with the hot bread cubes, and pork out! Ooh - I've got to tell her I want pierogis for my birthday dinner this year. Only 5 months to go! I need to make a list of recipes I must get (and learn to make). Mom was horrified the one time she experienced one of those frozen "Mrs. T's", or whatever they are. I don't thinks she's familiar with the potato ones, to begin with.

Redrhodie: I think it would be possible. You could always carry dehydrated food. More bulk than weight. And oatmeal, dried fruit, etc. Just need an occasional grocery store for odds & ends. Not that I've done it (yet), but if you can backpack without a store or diner for many, many miles, you can carry the same stuff on your bike. I've spend a week backpacking, and I've spent a week canoing - it shouldn't be that much different, except probably easier than backpacking. The canoe portages are killers, too (I tend to pack too much stuff, and the people I was with - experienced family of campers - brought tons of heavy stuff - like a jar of peanut butter ). It definitely would be more fun to not carry food, but it is possible.

[kat_h]

Beer.

A few years ago the Reading Beer Festival put out a list of 18 local pubs about six weeks before the beer fest. If you bought a pint at one of the pubs they would put a sticker on your list, and if you collected all 18 you got free admission to the beer fest, a free pint glass, and several free pints. Six of the pubs were right in town centre, a few were on the other side of the river or near the university, and the rest were scattered around the outskirts of town and in the surrounding countryside.

The day that the list came out I sat in the Hobgoblin with Nick and Daniel. We spread a map out on the table and started plotting all of the pubs on it. There were two that Nick insisted would be impossible to reach unless we could find someone with a car. I didn't think they looked that hard but Nick insisted they were impossible. So the next morning I set off on my bike to the farthest one. I should mention that I had just bought the bike two days earlier and hadn't been on a bike in a couple of years prior to that. I found the pub and had a lovely pint of Bateman's Dark Mild. That evening the guys were over for dinner and we started discussing the list again. I pulled mine out casually and Daniel was the first to notice that I had a sticker that they didn't. That was a good moment.

We went on to visit every pub on that list over the next few weekends, many of them more than once. It was a great way to get out and explore some of the country footpaths and historic pubs. Strictly speaking it wasn't a tour, but a series of day trips. It was a great time though.

[shootingstar]

I really would like to do a long tour someday, but the food issue scares me. I'm a veggie, and I don't eat hydrogenated oil or high fructose corn syrup (aka junk). I imagine I'd be forced to give in on the latter 2 things, and often the only vegetarian option in a lot of diner type places is iceburg lettuce salad. Not exactly pierogi.

Well, we know a couple who loaded bike toured on their own the whole length of South America. Methinks it was over 2-3 months. In some of the countries, ie. Chile, Argentina, etc., for them it was Tour de Red Meat/Just Meat. It was a serious challenge to find restaurants with vegetarian dishes to give them enough energy.

Part of the fun and challenge of loaded bike touring, is dealing with the food issues and learning which areas literally have NO food to offer, no gas stations etc. for over 50-60 kms.

Zencentury: by the way, I love asparagus. I just bought green asparagus for next few days. I just do a light stir fry with garlic, ginger, onions, sometimes with red pepper and shitake mushrooms.