food

I was thinking about all the re-use and repurposing we are doing with the Garbage Experiment.  And, how thinking about these things results in real changes in your household consumption.  I believed that I had gotten pretty good at buying for reduced packaging when I ran into something.  I ran out of salad dressing and wrote it on the shopping list because that is what I have always done and it is convenient.  Really?  What will I do with the bottle?  And, in fact, I had 4 clean bottles awaiting some sort of repurposing. Oops.

It is not hard and does not take long to make your own dressing.  Why had I not already figured that out? I made two bottles of dressing and took one, with a salad, over to dinner at a friend's house.  Now, I am on the hunt for stellar recipes.  Sorry, Annie and Paul!

If you want to recycle more, or use less plastic, or live more sustainably, it is about making conscious decisions and small changes over time.  It is a learning curve.  To learn what we really need. To appreciate the value of something. To question the notion that everything is disposable.  So, I am learning as I go and making my own dang dressing!

Salsa is next!

For Cristy.

On our bike tour we needed calories and this was a great justification for eating whatever we wanted.  Beer.  Cinnamon rolls. Beer. Seafood.

We had decided that we would not even attempt to eat  our "largely vegan diet" on the road which was smart. There were times when even vegetarian options were few and far between and making do with the vegan options from a convenience store would not have sustained us. I am aware that French Fries can be vegan, but I don't think French Fries and Cokes is the diet recommended by cycling champions.  There were a few times that I scoured the menu for a popular item that was ordered a lot--meaning food turnover and freshness in the kitchen-- and hopefully avoiding stuff that had been moldering in the walk-in all week.  Just thinking it through to figure what would be least likely to cause food poisoning.  In those cases, all dietary restrictions rules are out the window.   Safety first, people, safety first.

We started out eating breakfast and lunch in restaurants.  But, it took too long, cost too much and was too heavy.  It made for stomach aches and leaden legs.  So, we started eating smaller meals and snacks all day and then going out to dinner once we stopped for the day and got settled.  We started carrying cereal with us and buying milk when we hit town since it seems that even the smallest, saddest motels have refrigerators in the room. We would stop for a second breakfast around 11am and get the gooiest, most decadent pastry we could find.  (We really miss being able to eat pastries.) We made sure to always have food with us for those afternoon carb rich snacks like bagels with peanut butter and honey,  Lara Bars, raisins and almonds.  We would hit town around 4pm, get settled and search out the best dinner option that included beer.  After a day on the road, a beer tastes pretty darn good.  And, you have totally earned it even accounting for your giant cinnamon roll.   

Some culinary highlights:  delicious steamed mussels at Toby's Bar in Coupeville, WA; a free potato pancake in Lincoln City, OR; pan fried geoduck in Caste Rock, WA; berry pie after the ferry ride into Oregon; berry pancakes across from the Trees of Mystery in CA;  and a berry milkshake in Fort Dick, CA.

Craft twist: you can illustrate any food story with felt/knitted foods.  Crazy!

Cristy and I were served huazontles rellenos by our host Areli at the Spanish language school we went to last year in Cuernavaca, Mexico.  They were excellent!  The huazontles looked familiar and not terribly exotic.  We would be able to get them at home.  Later Cristy did some googling and found that they were the flowering stems of lamb's quarters, also known as wild spinach, a common weed in North America.

Here Adriana Rosales shows you step by step how to make huazontles rellenos.  Her preparation turns out a bit different than Areli's, which looked more like this.  You broke apart the relleno, extracted a long stem and then used the stem as a handle to nibble off the cooked flowers.

Previously.