On 5/7/2016 8:45 PM, Joy Beeson wrote:

This is mostly from memory -- now that my range is so short, I nearly
always plan on eating at a fast-food joint, and the food I carry has
to stay good through several expeditions that don't meet with an
emergency.

Aside: you should always carry some bike fuel that you don't plan to
eat. You won't need it often, but when you do, you will be *very*
glad that you brought it.

Once, on a supported tour, I was too tired to fight the crowd at
suppertime . . . and by the time I noticed that the crowd was people
going back for seconds, they had run out of food. But I had two
high-calorie muffins in my luggage, and did just fine.

That incident is probably why, whenever I fantasize about feeding a
randonneur tour -- those guys are a cook's daydream -- whatever the
menu, my plans include giving unopened boxes of spaghetti and cans of
spaghetti sauce to Our Father's House.

The main menu would never be pasta -- I once read an interview with a
Boston-Montreal-Boston rider who said that he got so fed up with pasta
that he would have killed for a baked potato. So my menu features an
oven filled with one huge potato per person (plus ten percent for
error), a sack or two of raw small potatoes and two microwaves (three
if I can borrow Kiddie Kollege's microwave) for seconds, and several
crock pots of toppings.

Jambalaya would be good, but doesn't allow for individual taste --
suppose you put garlic in it and someone is allergic to garlic? Two
kinds of rice and the aforementioned crockpots of toppings.

Of course, any peasant food would be good bike fuel. But I don't
think I'd be good at serving tortillas even though one can buy them
ready made. Fish and poi? No way to get the ingredients even if I
knew what to do with them.

Could go back to my own peasant roots and serve good ol' Hoosier
tamale pie, but that's the same problem as jambalaya, and I don't
think anyone under seventy would recognize plain polenta as food.
Shucks, there are people older than I am who won't touch it.

Perhaps spanish hamburger and an assortment of starches?

And that's enough to make a post; this being the only post in the
buffer, I'll save my original topic for another post.

If I can remember what I meant to say.

Peasant food? I nominate pierogi! Preferably with a variety of
fillings, not just the classic potato.

If you can come up with a way to make them hot and ready to eat while
cycling, I'll nominate you for canonization. (And two popes ago, you'd
have been a shoo-in!)


--
- Frank Krygowski