“Your bike is discovery; your bike is freedom. It doesn’t matter where you are, when you’re on the saddle, you’re taken away.”
I’ve already talked about common foods we make for dinner, and more recently, I did a post about our new favorite soup, but what about during the day? What we eat really depends on what we can find and what is cheap or in season. For instance, we typically eat buckweat or oatmeal for breakfast, but since we have yet to find either of those things here in Turkey, we have transitioned to eating bread and yogurt, eggs, or cheese when we wake up. During the day we also eat a lot of bread since that’s typically something easily found (fresh) in most countries. We rarely stop to cook an actual lunch so more often than not we end up snacking on fruit, bread, and some sort of sweet thing throughout the day. Though it’s not exactly healthy, in every country we have found a twenty-five cent treat (cookies here, ice cream in Georgia, chocolate in India) that is easily found and incorporated into our “lunch,” along with an unlawful amount of bananas in the States, mangos when they were in season in India, copious amounts of watermelon, tomatoes, and peaches throughout the summer in Georgia, and most recently here in Turkey, a whole lot of mandarins and apples since we have been able to find them everywhere.
We also occasionally stop to eat out, though not in every country (such as when I was in the States) because often it’s too expensive. In India and Nepal we were able to eat out whenever as it was possible to get a meal of rice and dal for a dollar, and in Georgia we often bought Katachapuri (bread filled with cheese, beans, meat, or potatoes) as it was also about a dollar a piece. Here in Turkey restaurants are more expensive, often 5-8 dollars for a meal, though we have found local places which serve small kebabs for a dollar, or soup and bread for two. When it’s convenient, we do try and stop at these places for a meal since it gives us some sort of variety in our diet, allows us to eat local food, and gives us a chance to plug in our electronics!
We always carry a few things in our bags: sugar, popcorn, oil, salt (and a few other spices depending on what’s available) and emergency rice (about two meals worth). Then, depending on how many villages we will be going through within the next few days, we sometimes have to stock up on food, though when we can, we like to just buy our ingredients for dinner and breakfast that very afternoon.
Though sometimes we are exhausted and just want to cook an easy meal and go to bed, I usually really like cooking dinner. As Kevin puts up the tent, I start cooking and once he is finished, we both prepare the meal together while listening to a podcast on our iPads. It’s one of our favorite parts of the day, cooking as we sit back and watch the sunset.
Dishes though, dishes are a whole different story. In Georgia, when it was 40C even in the evening we were nearly always by a river so jumping in the water one more time to do dishes really wasn’t that big of a deal. Now that it’s below zero and we never get to camp by rivers anymore (much more sparse here in Turkey), dishes are quite the chore. It’s completely pitch dark by the time we finish our meal now, so after washing our dishes with a limited amount of water, our hands are frozen as we climb into our sleeping bag.
Our most creative method for dishes is when it is raining since we collect the rain water from our hobo shelter and use it to wash!
You really can carry eggs with you as long as you wrap them in a jacket for protection!
Bread from different countries.
Cookin’, cookin’, cookin’!
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