Tour de (food type)

[shootingstar]

I will always remember the Canadian east coast on our self-loaded bike tour for 3 wks., as Tour de Fried Breakfasts. It drove me nuts..but to get energy I did have to eat a largish breakfast. when you are on the road, cycling, going through rural areas in some regions, just take whatever food is offered when restaurants/cafes are far apart.

So the sight of fried eggs, hash browns or fries, bacon/sausage..became almost too common. But thank god for weighted cycling to burn off those greasy breakfasts.

And no, we were already cycling each with camping gear, clothing weight, so to add much food in panniers was not a great thought.

My partner returns from his 4-wk. long European cycling and Eurorailing trip this weekend. I joked to him during his wk. long cycling trip in Germany, it was the Tour de White Asparagus. A very German food love, white asparagus. Since it's rare and expensive in North America, he tried an white asparagus dish in nearly every meal daily. He even sent me a digital photo of market food stalls with huge piles white asaragus. Ok, darling....

[Zen]

I will always remember the Canadian east coast on our self-loaded bike tour for 3 wks., as Tour de Fried Breakfasts.

... the Tour de White Asparagus. ... he tried an white asparagus dish in nearly every meal daily. He even sent me a digital photo of market food stalls with huge piles white asparagus.

If he were my bf, that would just be cruel. Sparagus is my favorite vegetable.
Luuuuvs me some sparagus.

[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.

[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.

[shootingstar]

More stories;

that Tour de Fried Breakfasts..also became Tour de Deep Fried Fish. (of course, we had our fresh lobster.several times, when we camped by the beach...we went during lobster season and bought straight from the fishermen. ...without planning/knowing this in advance.)

It dismayed us at that time, there we were surrounded by piles of fresh fish..but end result in alot of small town/city offerings...on menus was deep fried fish. To showcase fresh fish and fish diversity, I really prefer fish..pan fried, grilled or steamed. It wasn't until we got to one of the biggest Canadian cities on the east coast, Halifax that we had fish dishes done non-deep fried. Hopefully things have changed since um..over 12 years ago.

Story #2 -- In 2006, my partner and another buddy of his cycled from Vancouver to madison, Wisconsin to attend the ProWalk, ProBike conference. ABout 4,000 kms. It became the Tour de Sushi --in the U.S. midwest.

No guff. As soon as they got to motel, his cycling buddy was checking the phone book for local sushi places if any.

this friend is not Asian at all. Here at home in Vancouver he and his also non-Asian wife, provide paid home-stays to Japanese adult foreign students who come for several months to learn English. So they both do know alot about Japanese cuisine and quality. (Yes, he knows alot of sushi restaurants locally.)

thankfully my partner also loves sushi and sashimi

[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]

Too bad kat h..the Tour de Blintz is on in a few weeks. A local bike tour of Vancouver's Jewish delis & restaurants.

http://www.jewishmuseum.ca/info/curr...tour-de-blintz

http://thetyee.ca/Life/2007/08/16/Nosh/
A reporter did a piece. We were interviewed. I’m there towards the last few paragraphs…

Such bike rides are great to get people new to cycling or abit rusty.

I went, out of curiosity and wanted to become more knowledgeable ...also do really the miss the Jewish delis that Toronto has since the Jewish community is very large and strong there since there are several Jewish districts there.

[shootingstar]

And I have to admit that when we cycled in Hawaii, it was a deliberate Tour de Fresh Papaya and Mango hunt. We couldn't believe how cheap the papaya was and gorged ourselves happily. Same for mangos.

[Zen]

Tour de Fresh Papaya and Mango

Oh Star, why must you torture me?

[redrhodie]

After finishing today's, ride, I HAD to have sushi and seaweed salad. Nothing else would do! Don't know if I could do the tour de sushi, but it really was the perfect thing today! Thanks, shootingstar, for planting the idea.

Oooh, mango. I have a ripe one in the fruit bowl!

Zen, I'd do the tour de pie with you.

[OakLeaf]

Tour de donut: 5 minute time bonus for each donut you eat at the rest stops!

[tulip]

Tour de Vin et Fromage. My recent trip to France included almost-daily bike rides, which were topped by a fabulous baguette, different cheeses (Roblechon, Camembert, and Port Salut were favorites) and a couple of glasses of wine on the terrace, followed later by scrumptious dinners.

And I still lost 3 lbs!

[KathiCville]

Tulip....Your recent French wine-and-dine odyssey sounds heavenly! Do you have enough photos to give us a taste, so to speak, of your tour? Or were you too busy eating and pedaling to snap pics? I'd love to hear highlights of where you rode, stayed, ate, drank, and were merry.......Merci!