It seems almost mandatory to include pictures of your exotic meals in our journals.

So post either your own pics or link to someone elses journal.

My first pic is from Frankie in his current Thailand journal. That Thai food looks great!

Mike

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws...

Hi Mike,

I know that not everybody likes food pix, but hey, I do, so here's one of my favorites:

Yum!

Cheers,

Keith

I'm not sure I've ever had an exotic meal while cycle-touring. It's hard to find that kind of thing in rural America or Australia or New Zealand. But that hasn't stopped me from trying to get creative with the limited choices that small-town grocery stores and gas stations provide.

There's the peanut-butter-and-Tim-Tams-cookies wrap from Australia:

And the double honey bun sandwich from the States:

I would take either of those choices over this mysterious plate of slop from a tiny cafe in Western Virginia:

Jeff

I saw a Tim Tam cheesecake in a coffee shop on a recent Sunday ride. Just looking at it would put 25mm (1inch) on anybody's waistline!

Mike 

This is my favorite breakfast in SE Asia. I look forward to it for weeks after countless meals of rice and noodles (which I love, but still). The Bamboo Restaurant in Chiang Khong, Thailand has superb multi-grain bread, baked daily, and amazing locally grown and roasted coffee. They also serve Mexican food but that's where we draw the line on western food in Asia.

This is reason enough to go back to Australia.

This isn't exactly what you were looking for, probably, but it's one of my most memorable "meals". In 2013 I was riding halfway across the country, from Iowa to San Francisco. I was doing long, long days, and my appetite was voracious. 

I rode 100 miles the day I crossed into California from Nevada, and only when I arrived at dusk at a campsite in the middle of nowhere did I realize that the only food I had was a package of two crushed pop-tarts, forgotten until now in the bottom of a pannier. A guy at the campground gave me a bottle of strange-tasting "vitamin water", and that was it - the saddest dinner of all my bike tours.

A few days later I arrived in San Francisco to find I'd lost 30 pounds in one month.

Jeff

How far did you have to go the next to find breakfast?

Mike

Not too far - maybe ten or fifteen miles. But it was a fairly strenuous climb the entire way until I reached a lodge, where I had an enormous breakfast. 

Mike, I agree the Thai know how to plate a meal with beauty and resonance. In all my touring I only remember photographing one restaurant meal. Not to say there were not memorable eats just no photos. But back to that one photographed meal. It was after a week and a half riding across Montana floating a processed cheese stuffed vegetable omelets, in a flood of Tabasco sauce to cover the blandness, and lunching on truck-stop deli egg salad sandwiches on white bread made nearly palatable with two packets of yellow mustard and one of pepper that I rode though a small off ramp town in the midst of a well attended local rodeo at lunch time. All I found were two taverns advertising “family dining”. Be warned that those signs are there strictly to get their hard liquor license and you don’t want to put the “cook” to the test of producing anything on the menu.

More than a bit peckish I rode towards the I-90 on-ramp. There was the freeway fuel stop with its attached McDonalds where a bus load of high school kids were disgorging from the bus and running to McD’s door. (I haven’t eaten at McDonalds in over half a century so there was no loss.) Across the street was a closed up casino and a nearly empty parking lot. But just has I was approaching the on-ramp and reaching for some handlebar bag chocolate I saw on the side of the casino “Thai and American Food - OPEN.”

On a properly proportioned rectangular white china plate came broiled salmon with a coconut/pepper sauce and fresh asparagus spears with a flower accent, served separately a bowl of fresh fruit and one of black sticky rice. A pot of delightful Thai tea and a glass of mango juice. I had to take a picture. Alas somehow when I downloaded my journals from the other website the picture seems to have been lost but the memories vividly and fragrantly remain.

So here’s a post of the humble meal I long for on every ride. That would be "road kill (vegetable) stew" or as I prefer to call it pilgrims road manna. Many of my tours have been in the late summer and fall, harvest season. The farm trucks are overloaded with produce falling off with regularity. Fruits are dropping from the trees. If the branches are hanging in the public commons, I pick what I can use. I invoke a somewhat edited passage from Laveticus 23:22 “And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest, nor shalt thou stoop to lift up the spillage from ye donkey’s baskets on ye track to market: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the traveler.”.