Diets.

Following the success of our little insight into our routines, and after many inquiries from back home about the food over here, here is a quide to what we generally eat in our new lives.


Breakfast: -

While on the road we normally carry a resealable freezer bag ful of oats, milk powder and sugar. A big scoop of this is magically transformed into hot porridge when you just add some boiling water. It´s not the tastiest thing in the world but it´s quick, easy and keeps us going for a few hours.

If we find ourselves in a town (or anywhere near a shop) then we can really go for it and have cereal for breakfast. Normally with yoghurt because UHT milk is not great when your so used to the delicious pasteurised milk. Oh what we´d do for a nice big glass of cold pasteurised milk. Mmmm.


Onces: -

That´s elevens´s in Enlgish. Something seemingly introduced by the German population, a good mid-morning snack of cake is great when cycling. We haven´t had many of these yet but now we´re in the Lakes District, it´s cake shops all the way!
Sometimes we collect our own food from the millions of trees providing lovely fruits.



Lunch: -

In Latin America the siesta can (and mostly will) last from 12-4pm. Lazy, but a great idea. We initially thought they just slept for 4 hours but it turns out that lunch is the most important meal of the day for the locals. And we thought it was only cyclists that could eat for 4 hours at a time!

Anyway, for us cyclists, lunch is biscuits, nuts, crackers (with peanut butter or Dulce de Leche - caramelised milk mmmmmm) and occassionally bread with sweaty cheese and warm mayonaise if we decide to carry it.


Afternoon snacks: -

Because we need to eat lots, we keep on snacking. 250g Chocolate bars are gone within seconds of the wrapper coming off. We can easily go through one of these each, each day.



On good days we find the empanada shops. These beautiful little havens are pretty common and they sell meat, cheese, ham and cheese, tuna, and sometimes others rolled up into a lovely parcel of pastry. Much better than Greggs, these shops are Ian´s most favouritest places. Yummy.


Dinner: -

While on the road, choices are quite limited for the evening meal. Most supermarkets provide us with packets of pasta with a few different flavour sauces like cheese, brocolli, meat or "have a guess". They´re not that great but pasta is good for us and is easy to prepare.
When we fancy a change we sometimes boil some rice up. Add to this a tin of fish and some tomato juice and you have an almost tasty alternative.



Evening meals get interesting when we´re in towns or when we´re not cycling. With easy access to supermarkets we can find all kinds of treats. This is where we splash out and buy ourselves giant portions of steaks, sausages, morcilla (blood sausuages are very tasty here), chicken etc. etc. All relatively cheap and supremely tasty. It´ll be difficult going back to British meat after this.
Vegetables are not as abundant as back home, we often find peppers and potatoes which are okay, the avocadoes are amazing, but generally the rest are not great.



With all the time in the evening, it´s becoming quite common for Ian to build fires on which we cook the evening meals. Many campsites provide firepits where Ian will be found piling wood as high as possible before emptying a litre of petrol onto it. Ray Mears made TV shows about making fires where he showed us all the blisters he got on his hands when rubbing wood together. He obviously doesn´t need to eat quickly.



For most meals we find ourselves being watched. Dogs appear from nowhere and sit by your side while scratching their fleas. Sometimes they look dreadful and are spared a few morsels. We´ve even seen some with fake limps or closing their eyes to pretend to be blind. They normally get rewarded just for entertaining us.
Other animals join us sometimes but we are more and more aware of the fact that some animals are actually watching us, hoping to eat us, especially when the roads are busy or it´s too far to the next town...




Drinks: -

On the road we will normally just carry water. We restock the bottles often at small streams and rivers. It´s clean and cold.
Any shop passed is normally relieved of a few bottles of Coke.
Other options are Tang, a powder (like sherbert) which when mixed with water gives you a litre of E-numbers in any colour or flavour imaginable.
Or, the local soft drink - Pap. It´s exactly that.



When it comes to evening drinks, Ian likes to try Quilmes a lot to make sure it´s still cold.
It never gets chance to warm up.


So there you go, our diets. We´re very well fed and watered indeed. So far.