Food

Multiple people have asked us about food, and it was a question mark for us before this trip. How would we balance enjoying local food with saving money by cooking our own meals? As the lead grocery shopper, I (Jason) have taken over the writing of this blog from Meggs. There are three main topics related to food on this trip: buying groceries, preparing food, and dining out. 

First up, dining out (meaning not at our current lodging). We do this most commonly for lunch, and rarely for more than one meal per week, plus snacks and treats. The ease of dining out has varied throughout the trip based on season (touristy and lots of options, or off-season and many places closed), 

• Benefits: no cooking, no cleanup, trying new foods, each person can order what they want
• Challenges: cost (almost always higher), finding menus in English (or sometimes menus at all), hard to judge portion sizes so sometimes we get too much or not enough, using Google Translate for the menus doesn't always work

"family margerita" pizza at Popej Pizza in Herceg Novi (they had vintage Popeye cartoons playing in the dining room) 

appetizer of "homemade cheese" near Kolasin

we love watching people make crepes in any country (Tirana, Albania)

We don't eat out very many meals. Meggs does the primary food planning and does a great job of balancing what we all want to eat with what we hope to find at the store. Then I take the list and go to the store (sometimes stores) to find food, usually accompanied by at least one other family member. I like grocery shopping at home so it's not a crazy chore here, although it is strangely tiring when you can't read any packaging. This is particularly tough when the store is in the middle of a concrete building with no wifi so my Google Translate doesn't work. ☺I think the most different languages I've seen on one package is 14! 

Sometimes it's like a fun date and we explore what might work and other times we just want to eat something vaguely familiar. In some countries we've had the pleasure of shopping local markets for fresh produce -- in France and Greece this was particularly great because each stall had price lists so I could compare!

We love cereal, usually with milk but also with yogurt. Milk is fairly cheap and usually comes in tetrapak containers, never larger than 2L except in Ireland where we briefly found a 3L container. We've discovered Nestle Fitness Fruits, eaten multiple store brands of corn flakes, and loved Crunchy Nut in Ireland. During the early part of the trip we could regularly find our favorite cereal from home, Kellogg's Special K with Red Berries, but we haven't seen it in months. We've also enjoyed various kinds of muesli.

full milk cartons make excellent weights for strength training

Yogurt. At home we eat lots. The dairy products available in Denmark were amazingly varied, and also in Greece. Some varieties are very thin and drinkable, others are thick and nearly cheeselike. Recently I nearly purchased a tub from the yogurt section in Montenegro that turned out to be pig fat when the label was translated!  

yogurt tub

tub of not yogurt = pig fat

Produce: Most places, produce is weighed, placed in a plastic bag and you are told or shown the price (sometimes on a calculator if there's a language difference). In most stores produce is weighed and priced in the produce section, not at the checkout as in North America. Sometimes we can figure out the machines that print price stickers and sometimes not. Many stores have a person whose entire job seems to be to weigh produce for customers. We carry a supply of bags and whenever possible we put produce in reusable bags. We also try to reuse plastic bags (sometimes turning them inside out to cover previous stickers). While this has resulted in lots of strange looks and confused clerks, after seeing the volume of plastic bags floating around in countries where garbage collection is not common I am determined to not contribute to the problem! 

sticker directly on bananas and reused produce bag (old sticker inside)

Deli: In the Balkans we often need to ask for chicken breasts, pork chops and other meat items since these are rarely prepackaged. Since the only words I know are 'hello' and 'thank you' I have to point to the meat I want and hold up the number of fingers (three for three chicken breasts). Or I have to write down 400 to indicate I want 400 grams of edamer cheese (called edam at home, and similar to mozzarella/gouda). I try to indicate a block of cheese so we can shred it at home, but sometimes it ends up getting sliced for me.

Non-meat options: canned beans have been limited recently and are sometimes very expensive. I can't remember the last time I saw tofu in the store so I've kind of given up on that. While trying to reduce my meat consumption I've been eating lots of peanut butter and nuts. Many people from North America are surprised to hear that peanut butter can be very challenging to find. It is common to find only one option. In much of France and Greece it was Skippy, which unfortunately is super sugary. In most countries I am glad if I find any at all! Nutella and various hazelnut spreads are ubiquitous in all stores.

hmm...wonder what these snacks taste like?

Usually we walk the groceries home in backpacks and grocery bags, but in Ireland I used to take empty cardboard boxes from the store and strap them to the back of my bike to ride home from the store. In France I had to call for backup when I bought more groceries than I could carry home.

Finally, time for food preparation! We have been staying mostly in AirBnB or similar apartment rentals with our own kitchen. Hmmm...how many burners are on the stove? 1, 2, 4? How do you turn this stove on? What do you mean there's only one pot in the kitchen? Interesting, this kitchen has a meat tenderizer but no potato peeler... Sometimes we cook using unconventional methods because that's what is available. For example, there are not often toasters in our kitchens, so we have been making toast in the frying pan. Very few places have had microwaves, so we have been re-heating leftovers in a pan or a pot most days. Some kitchens come equipped with various oils, spices, etc. and others have nothing. Fortunately we've brought four camping bowls for the times when the only dish options are huge or tiny. In the Balkans, it has been common for us to blow a fuse when cooking on the stove while still trying to have the heat on...nearly every place we've stayed in.

home is wherever we eat food together

One challenge has been the lack of containers for leftovers. Part of this is the culture of purchasing and cooking only the food needed each day. In some countries we literally never see people buying more than a few items at a time and wonder if they shop multiple times per day. We get weird looks at the grocery store when we buy more than 5-6 things at once. We have been able to use leftover yogurt containers or glass jam jars to store leftovers.

A jam jar = leftover storage

Recently we have been staying in places for 3-4 days so we buy what we think we will need for that timeframe, cook our food, and then pack up and move along to the next place. This means we are sometimes carrying rice and pasta or a block of cheese or some butter with us in our backpacks, but trying to chug milk before we leave a place because we cannot carry it with us on the bus... Soon we will stay in one place for 7 nights so we might splurge and buy some spices or oil or ... who knows what kind of crazy thing we might find!