Cooking

For those of you who have been wondering what and how we have been eating, we thought we'd dedicate a little section to this specific topic.

You might have pictured us toiling away in the saddle, slaving up mountains and burning calorie after calorie only to come home to oatmeal and ramen. Not so! The first part is accurate, but in truth, we have been living high on the hog, as far as food goes.

Our mobile kitchen seems to get more and more elaborate each trip. Ten years ago, it was just a pot, pan, and small camp stove. This year, we have replaced the small frying pan with a cast iron skillet (thin-walled, so it's not too too heavy, but ask Gretta, she's been carrying it the whole time) and we have added to the repertoire, nothing short of a pressure cooker!

We do only have one burner still, but you'd be surprised at some of the feasts we have cooked up given our limited supplies.

One of Nick and Dominic's favorite meals from their last bike trip was the breafast burrito, which they invariably managed to make almost unmanageably huge. On this trip, we first attempted to repeat this while in Corner Brook, but after realizing that tortillas are a prohibitively expensive commodity reserved only for the wealthy ($4 a package!), we had to alter our plan. The new ingredients were egg, potato, avocado, salsa, and...bread. Breakfast burritos a la Canuck (or, in Dominic's Spanglish, a la "Canadensien,") we call them.

We are mastering the pressure cooker too though, and our meals lately have frequently involved some type of grain (rice or barley), a legume (beans or split peas), and some veggies (potatoes, carrots, etc.).


We simply throw this in, heat until the pressure release starts hissing (about 10 minutes), turn the burner off, and let it simmer inside. If we're feeling particularly chilly during this waiting period, we'll whip up some hot chocolate to accompany our group reading of "The Boat Who Wouldn't Float," a hilarious tale about a man who sets sail in Newfoundland in a rickety old boat. When we open up the pressure cooker we pour a couple other things in that serve both for flavor boosting and temperature regulation (bringing the heat down from the 300-400 degree range to the more manageable range of 150-200, cream of mushroom soup has been working well for this) and voila! Ready to eat! Some cold cheese chunks as garnish step this meal up a notch from delicious to divine.


Against our best efforts, we have been snacking on things like cookies and candy bars, but occasionally we'll undertake something a little more healthy, like popcorn, of which Gretta is the master.


On our way back through Corner Brook, we stayed with Ryan again and cooked up a delicious vegan feast to share with him. Shepherd's pie, and the delicious chocolate cream pie we referred to in the posting on berries.


But by far the most glorious so far involved both the pressure cooker and the cast iron skillet: homemade cherry syrup (the cherries we picked ourselves, you'll recall), and pancakes! The one item lacking for this process was a good spatula. But no matter, we have a semi-flexible knife, and love the challenge of flipping pancakes in a cast iron skillet. Check out Gretta in this video.



Hungry now? We sure are!

In fact, as Dominic looks at the screen, he is currently contemplating pedalling back up the hill in the wrong direction before we leave town so that we can add some cheesy goodness to our dinner tonight. Oops there he goes!