Anyone who knows Jeremy and I knows that before we started on our RTW adventure, cooking was one of our shared passions. And I don’t mean that we just whipped up dinner a few times a week, although we did that as well, I mean that we embarked on some serious culinary projects.Spending all Saturday and Sunday canning a bushel of tomatoes and a bushel of peaches? Just a typical weekend in the Jones house. Carefully coaxing milk to turn into yogurt, or diligently feeding a sourdough starter for days on end? Not unheard of. Baking in particular was one of my favorite things. Sometimes I would go into baking withdrawal and not realize it until Jeremy sensed my angst and gingerly asked me if I wanted to bake something.
Needless to say, traveling around the world presents quite a few challenges for the chefs inside us. Sure, we love seeking out authentic, local food in restaurants in each country we visit, but you can only eat out so much before you start going crazy. We pine for the feel of a spatula in our hands and the smell of sautéing garlic wafting into our noses.
What’s a nomadic chef to do?
Well, the obvious answer is to cook, but sometimes it’s not quite that simple. Most hostels, even though they have kitchens, lack everything but the very basic utensils. More often than not the knives are ridiculously dull, and good luck finding a cutting board. And forget about baking. We have yet to stay at a hostel or apartment that has had any sort of cookie sheet or baking pan.
Shopping in a grocery store where you can’t read the labels also presents some interesting challenges. Maybe you’re only buying fruits and vegetables and things with pictures on the label, but every once in a while there will be no pictures and you’ll just have to guess, leaving you with yeast instead of butter.
Yes, this happened to me.
My first reaction was not “crap!” but instead, “you can buy fresh yeast in a sketchy corner mini market here?!” Even if you look up translations for certain things you need, some ingredients you’re used to at home simply aren’t available in other countries (like baking powder in Europe). Or, instead of going down the baking aisle expecting to find “all-purpose flour,” you find 20 different kinds of flour, each with a mysterious number on the bag.
Let’s say you can MacGyver your way through with the utensils on hand, and you manage to buy all the right ingredients from the store, and you end up with some adequate made-in-the-microwave brownies. What do you do with that giant bag of flour you just bought?
Well, I’m not ashamed to admit this: I am always carrying a giant shopping bag full of food while traveling. In fact, I carried a bag of flour we bought in Budapest all the way across Austria, through Slovenia, and down to Split, Croatia. Yes, we used it all, and yes, I did a little happy dance when we finished the bag. Even if the ingredients are inexpensive, there’s something about throwing away perfectly good food that makes me cringe. Plus, you never know when you’re going to get a hankering for a microwave brownie.
In the spirit of sharing things that we learn on the road, here’s a recipe for pancakes and syrup that doesn’t require much more than a hot plate or stovetop and a skillet. We rarely have measuring utensils, so to measure the flour and yogurt I typically use a coffee mug.
Regular pancake recipes usually call for baking powder as the leavening agent, but as we never found any in Europe, we made do with a baking soda substitution. Now, you can’t substitute them one for one; you have to use about 1/3 less baking soda, and you have to combine the baking soda with something like buttermilk or yogurt before mixing it with the rest of the ingredients.
We found this recipe satisfied our craving for real American pancakes. No offense against crepes, but sometimes you just need the comfort of a fluffy pancake. Now, as for syrup, this is also something that we had a difficult time finding in European grocery stores. This recipe for syrup is something I made up on the fly, but it was so good that I just have to share it. It’s also easily adaptable to whatever ingredients you have on hand.
Pancakes on the Road, with Homemade Fruit Syrup
Pancakes (makes about 4 big pancakes, enough for 2 hungry world travelers)
1 measure flour (about one cup, use a coffee mug to measure)
2 T sugar (use a large spoon to measure)
1 tsp salt (use a small spoon for measuring, or just guess!)
1 tsp baking soda
1 measure yogurt or buttermilk (use the same measure you used for the flour)
1 egg, beaten
2 T melted butter, optional (or about one pat of butter)
Mix the flour, sugar, and salt together in a bowl. In a mug or other small bowl, mix the baking soda and yogurt or buttermilk together. (We’ve found that the very thin, pourable yogurt in Europe gives a good batter consistency; if you’re using thicker yogurt you might need to use ½ measure yogurt and ½ measure regular milk.) Add the beaten egg, the baking soda/yogurt mixture, and the melted butter to the dry ingredients. Mix until just combined.
Heat a skillet with some oil or butter in it over medium high heat. Scoop the batter onto the skillet, using about ¼ of the batter for each pancake. (Most likely you’ll have to cook two pancakes at a time.) Cook the pancakes until light brown on the bottom, then flip with whatever large utensil you can find and cook again until light brown. Jeremy once accomplished pancake flipping with a very large spoon.
Syrup
1 measure jam (about one cup)
1 pat of butter
Several spoonfuls of honey, or to taste
A splash or two of liquor (c’mon, I know you have some)
Put everything in a small pot and heat over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until butter is melted and ingredients are blended. You could also heat this up in a microwave if you have one. We added honey because it was so cheap everywhere in Europe and we pretty much always had some on hand, but you could leave it out if you don’t have any. For the liquor, use whatever you have- rum, schnapps, and brandies are all good. Our favorite was when we added some of the cherry brandy we picked up in Zadar, Croatia.
When it is all ready, eat, and enjoy one of the comfort foods from home!
So, do you like to cook on the road? How do you deal with unfamiliar kitchens, foreign grocery stores, and leftover food?
