Wendy and Simon's Interim: All your foodish questions answered.

Hey Good Lookin', now is when we tell you what's cookin'.

We like to cook, especially since my New Age of Unemployment when there is enough time to savor at least a few of the joys of life. We don't care to revert to a diet of rehydrated meals and Power Bars just because we're traveling, so we've been eating well.

We cook with an MSR Dragonfly backpacking stove that allows us to control the flame intensity (just like at home) and which can burn almost any fuel around, from kerosene to gasoline to alcohol to diesel to jet A to White Gas and Coleman fuel which we use. We carry it around in a refillable red Sigg bottle. The stove has a foil ring that blocks the wind and reflects heat back into the pot, and Adam turned us on to the magic of the JetBoil stove, which wears a neoprene insulating wetsuit and has a corrugated ring along its bottom which disallows any flame or heat to escape up the sides. So this thing cooks efficiently and quickly. It's great.

We carry an array of spices, including chipotle, anise seed, orange peel, oregano, sea salt, black pepper, cayenne, cumin, paprika, garlic salt, curry, and some others I'm sure I'm forgetting. We also carry olive and sesame oils, soy sauce and rooster sauce. The latter four are in plastic bottles that we refresh here and there when they are threatening to dry up.

We like to eat fresh, and we don't want to carry more food than we have to, so we end up buying groceries of some sort nearly every day. On legs that we anticipate long distances between towns, we stock up more than usual.

Our most common meal is some sort of risotto. Credit goes to Adam for the idea. We'll saute the dry rice in onions and/or garlic and then add moisture as the rice sucks it up, and other ingredients as appropriate. Heavy on the fresh vegetables, some melted cheese when available, and always some sort of protein, whether it's tuna from a tin, tofu from a tub, beans from a barrel, or fish from a fridge.

Here's what we do for a fridge when we have fish or chicken: We buy frozen pieces the day we're going to cook them, and wrap them in a sarong or my hat with anything else that's already cold. We then stash that in the small duffel on top of my rear rack which I got from Cubic many years ago and which we use to store much of our food. That keeps things plenty fresh for dinner, especially if we've packed two freshly-filled water bottles in there as well.

If we're having fresh fish like that, I'll usually cook a simpler rice, and then layer the fish and veggies right on top of it to steam the meal. If it's chicken, we can cook the rice in a separate pot and do a stir fry in the main pot.

Don't get me wrong-- we don't cook all the time. It is a wonderful treat to have someone else make the food, especially if you are weary, so we aren't strangers to restaurants. We especially enjoy a hearty breakfast with coffee.

We don't bother setting up the stove in the morning; for an in-camp breakfast we can have hard boiled eggs (cooked beforehand in a batch--they keep well), yogurt, baked goods, whatever we have on hand. Definitely eggs if there is some climbing to do and no town beforehand for a big proper breakfast.

For lunch we used to always make wraps with tortillas, avocado, pepper, maybe mushroom or hummus, radishes, etc. But recently we got ourselves some mustard and sprouts and have been carrying around loaves of bread to make great sandwiches. Some potato or corn chips always go well with that sort of thing. And of course it all gets chased down with some Mega Smarties or Sweet Tarts or Neccos or Bottlecaps.

And then there are the snacks. Trail mix, bell peppers, nuts, Clif bars, cookies, whatever is around and easy to dig up without getting off the bike. Down the hatches they all go.

As for utensils, we each have a lightweight metal spork. Also credit goes to Adam for the idea. Richard gave me my spork for Christmas a while back but it was stuck in San Diego until I either drove north (and remembered to bring it) or I checked luggage, since you could totally take down a 737 with creative use of that spork. So Adam's enthusiastic applauding his own spork reminded me to put some effort in liberating mine from that drawer at my mom's house where things collect that belong to me.

In addition to the two aforementioned pots (one JetBoil and one plain), we have two metal cups for drinking or eating out of. We each have a folding knife and there you have the kitchen.

Oh, the cutting board makes a handy stiff back for the pannier I made from an old army surplus bag. We keep all the cooking gear in that pannier and we call it "the kitchen".