Welcome to our blog about biking across the country - the blog's still under construction a little, but we figured it would be a good idea to start putting up some content anyways. And today's topic is: Food.
Making the decision to ride a bike across the country comes with some serious considerations to account for (especially when you don't have vast amounts of disposable income to throw at the trip). Where will we sleep? What do we pack? How are we going to have food??
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| Breakfast! A mix of oats, fruit, dried honey, etc. |
Well, thankfully Erin is a biking veteran, having completed the TransAmerica Trail in 2013. So, she knows the basics of planning this sort of venture pretty well. Since we're certainly not going to be purchasing our meals on a daily basis while out on the road, that means we're going to have to carry our food with us. And because weight is a major consideration when you're lugging everything you need to survive on the bike itself, we gotta cut as much as possible. Which leads us to......the process of dehydrating.
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| First load of dehydrating |
Dehydrators are totally new to me, but Erin's family has been using them for quite a long time. And they are such nifty little machines! We just load them up, set the temperature, and *whoosh*, all the water drys up. Actually, the process does take a little time, especially when you've got really water heavy foods like some fruits or veggies, but it sure does make the house smell good (but also really makes the house pretty hot...)
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| Dehydrated chili - not a kitchen disaster |
We're both vegetarian (Erin's also vegan), so everything we're drying is meatless, eggless, and
dairyless, which makes the whole process a little quicker. We got 80 lbs of food from www.bulkfoods.com (which came pre-dehydrated), which was crazy affordable. Erin wanted to make sure we had salads to eat for the next three months as well, though, so we did some google searching and found this list of awesome salads to mix up and dehydrate for the road.
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| So much cabbage salad |
We've also been pulling recipes from the Lipsmackin' Vegetarian Backpackin' cookbook, as well as throwing in a few original creations and random finds off the internet. But what this means for us in reality is that we mix up a bunch of dehydrated food, put it in ziplock bags, and then add (typically boiling) water when it's finally time to eat.
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| Dehydrated salad - looks delicious, right? |
But remember that whole weight consideration thing? We can't carry all that food with us the whole time! So we've scouted post offices that are on our route, packing up our food into boxes that we've got on a mailing schedule (thanks to the help of family back here on the east coast). So about every week or so, we'll be picking up our rations at different locations across the country. Cool, right?
So, that's what we'll be eating for the next couple months. We tried to ensure that our meals were protein dense to keep us moving throughout the day, as well as packed enough calories to maintain our energy levels. Erin even threw together some DELICIOUS homemade trail mix, which I am super excited to munch on. We also have 10 pounds of dehydrated hummus. I didn't take a picture of the bag before we opened it up, but believe me, it was huge.
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