One of the great things about cycling in western Europe is that there is a bar and/or restaurant at the top of virtually every major pass. After climbing 4000, 5000, or 6000 feet up some mountain having a refueling station close at hand is great. Here at home, if I climb Mt. Hamilton the only caloric items available are what is in the candy machine at the back of the visitor center. That is rather lame, in my opinion. We need some mountaintop restaurants here in the states. In 2004, as The Wife (then friend) and I got to the top of Passo dello Stelvio in a light snow storm it helped the psyche and the bodies to go into the restaurant at the top and fill up on Pasta Carbonara chased with a helping of Strudel before descending down the other side. Much better in many ways than a Snickers Bar from a machine.

I am a bit of a food agnostic. I will eat most anything if necessary. I’ve consumed cuy (Guinea Pig) in the Andes and macaw soup, crocodile, agouti and several other wild animals in the Amazon basin. And I am sure I do not want to know the identity of a number of things I ate in Southeast Asia. When push comes to shove, however, I have a preference for the cuisines of the mediterranean region. Don’t make me choose a country, just give me all the tastes of that part of the world. Besides being my favorite region, the cuisine works well with our attempts to become localvores as much as possible, eating what is grown and produced here rather than having For my last birthday The Wife gifted me the book ‘mediterranean Fresh’ by Joyce Goldstein which pays homage, for the most part, to salads of the region. We have started making our way through the book, but slowed down until some of the key ingredients become available from local sources.

Part of my food obsession is watching cooking and food shows on PBS, which are usually a great source of inspiration for things to cook. This fall I had high hopes when PBS debuted the series ‘Spain… on the road Again’. But other than the eye candy of Gwyneth Paltrow and Claudia Bassols there was not much to recommend the show; too little time spent on the food, scenery, and culture, and too much time on Mark Bittman and Mario Batali (in either florescent green or fluorescent orange crocs, depending on the episode). But, I am totally hooked on “José Made in Spain” with José Andrés. Not much of a looker, but that is fine as the show is all about food and it is evident that he is very passionate about the subject matter. We usually catch it just was we return home from 3-4 hours of riding on Saturday, in a caloric deficit and all too willing to be seduced by the rich, flavorful looking food he is either eating or preparing. Last Saturday it was roasted rack of lamb with sauteed potatoes and garlic. Every episode is a call to buy a plane ticket to Madrid or Bacelona from which to launch a culinary adventure. Until I am on the plane I will be attempting to recreate as many of these dishes as possible. Of course a good bottle of Tempranillo will help me get in the proper mood.

The Quest

During our brief trip to Hawaii I was reunited with one of my weaknesses.  Yes, I admit it; I have this thing for cinnamon rolls.  Island Lava Java in Kona does a fitting version.  Since we returnied I have been on the quest to find a local version that stands muster.  Unfortunately, so far all the candidates forget that cinnamon is the operative word.  Some I have tried in the past couple of months have hardly any cinnamon, and try to cover the omission by layering on too much tasteless ‘frosting’.  Others use commercial grade cinnamon that has barely any taste no matter how much they use.   Come on bakers of the world; a good quality Vietnamese, Chinese Cassia, or Korintje is so much better than that flavorless commercial grade Schillings or McCormick’s and not that much more expensive.  I wonder where I can find a ‘cinnamon roll’ worthy of the name without jumping on a plane for Kona, and without breaking out the yeast, flour, etc. on my own.

The Trip

The Wife promised her parents that we would escort them on their first bike tour, a short run from southern San Luis Obispo county to the Santa Barbara area.    That was our major event of the holiday season, a two day, 97 mile journey.   I’ll let her fill in the details, but the genesis of the route selection was my former desire to do the one day version of the trip, returning northward on the Amtrack Surf-Liner.   I now would like to do that one day trip as my endurance and power gets back to normal.  Time to start thinking of when I might be able to pull it off.  I’ll be back in the area on two weeks, accompanying The Wife as she participates in Bella training camp, but I suppose I will have enough to do then working as pack mule.

The Odometers

I finished with 2008 with a bit under 4K miles, total, on the odometers of the various bikes.   The least since I started keeping track in 2001, and only sligthly more than 2002 when I had my last recovery hiatus.   I feel like such a slackard, looking at the chart showing 9K miles two years ago next to less than half that this year.  I will be trying to get back to something more respectable this year, especially since I believe I need to spend some time in the saddle to build back the endurance I have lost since my accident in June.

I Resolve

Actually, I do not resolve.  I am not one for New Years resolutions.   To paraphrase from ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’:  resolutions?  resolutions?   I don’t need no stinking resolutions.

So don’t look for me to fall off the resolution wagon.  If you don’t make them, you can’t break them.  Stay tuned to see what does transpire.

A couple of years back The Wife returned from a trip reading the book ‘Fast Food Nation’.  She read me large sections, and we both came away a bit concerned about our food supply and made some changes into what and how we ate.    Soon after that the movie ‘Super Size Me’ by Morgan Spurlock came out, reinforcing some of the biases we developed from ‘Fast Food Nation’, though in part I am a bit immune from the McDonalds phenomenon.  I have not eaten at a McDonalds since circa 1969, a while before the concept of ’super size’ was developed.

Last year on our trip to Canada we stayed at an Inn in Kelowna, B.C., run by an expatriate from L.A. who is an advocate of the 100-mile diet.  He had run an orchard for years, but had changed to running a sheep and goat farm after rehabilitating a 1909 arts and crafts house as an inn/artist’s workshop.   Our breakfast conversations revolved around the ethics and politics of eating locally produced foods items, all while we dined on fresh goat milk yogurt and a variety of items produced either on the property or nearby.

At the present time I am reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan.  The first part of the book, the first of the four meals, is what Pollan terms the ‘industrial diet’.  Specifically he talks about the current diet in the U.S., a diet based primarily in some form on soybeans and number 2 feed corn.   He traces the feed corn from a farm in Iowa through feedlots, cereal processors, and the industrial production of items like HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), pointing out that the current farm policy that favors this type of food production is the legacy of the policies of Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture.  The villians in this section are our government along with the manufacturer’s reaping the benefits, mostly Cargill and ADM. Reading that section is enough to scare one away from most of the stuff items found at the local supermarket.  The last of the four meals, the part I am reading now, follows the diet that Pollan himself admits is not sustainable in our current environment,  the hunter-gatherer way of life.  Most interesting, to me, was the third meal, a meal based upon foods grown locally on managed grasslands. Grazers were rotated through sections of land in prescribed progression without chemical inputs. Here the case is made that we should be looking at local, low impact on the land, non-industrial food production with its inherent seasonality and favoring quality over quantity.

Yesterday, at the Toronto film festival, a movie titled ‘Food, Inc.’ premiered. From the press pieces it sounds like a movie documentary version of Pollan’s industrial diet, and features Pollan, Joel Salatin (the grassland farmer followed by Pollan), and the author of ‘Fast Food Nation’, Eric Schlossberg. The movie has not been picked up by a distributor yet, so I will not be seeing it soon. But the more I see and read about our food supply the more tempted I am to rip out all landscaping and to start growing as much of my own food as I can.

I decided to test out riding with the damaged thumb on Saturday but I was not quite ready to tackle the thumb lever of the Campy shifters. So I grabbed the TT bike, with the bar end shifters, and headed to the west. I found it easy to operate the right shifter with a combination of two fingers and the hand. After a nice warmup in the flatlands I made my way into the Los Altos Hills and started some VO2Max intervals, and I was feeling good. I put in a bit over two hours with no problems whatsoever.

Sunday ridin’

If one day of riding is good, two is better. The Wife was heading out to lead a team workout and asked if I wanted to carpool northward to ride in that area. Sure, but what bike? I had torn down the TT bike to clean and prep for Madera this coming weekend and did not have time to get it together. So I threw the Colnago in the Toaster and headed out to Woodside. While The Wife and her teammates did their review of what was ahead I did some loops of the parking lot and found I could use the finger next to the thumb to shift the thumb lever, just not smoothly or quickly. I did a warmup then cruised north on Cañada road for a fast tempo ride. There was heavy drizzle and stiff headwinds, but I did not care. The legs felt great and I rode hard, minimizing gear changes. I got in a big gear and powered up, doing 22-25MPH even on the uphill sections, all the while keeping the cadence above 95 rpms. I was shooting past groups of riders, the only one’s who were matching me were two guys in DBC kits. If I had felt that good, and had that much drive, last Sunday then I think I would have been in the front group all day. Maybe the extra rest did me good, or maybe the somewhat hard workout on Saturday. Need to sort that out, but it was fun and I was feeling it.

Glue and tape

One of my teammates had a tubular tire roll of the rear rim while he was cruising for an almost certain 2nd place at the Rondee von Brisbeen crit a week ago. The race official noted there was very little glue on either the tire or the rim. The teammate says that the tire was mounted by a local bike shop owner, one whom some folks claim tell them that they use too much glue when mounting tubulars. I do not know about that, but that shop owner has told me that I should be able to swap tubulars faster than I can repair a flat clincher. Never been able to, mostly due to the time it takes me to peel the old tire off the rim; maybe if I used less glue I could peel them off faster.

The incident has led to a lot of on-line chatter about gluing techniques, etc. Basically it is a religious war as to whether to glue or tape, if glue which one, etc. With Madera a week away, and The Wife wanting to ride the TT with the high zoot carbon trispokes, with tubulars, I decided to peel and remount the tires just to make sure they were on well. I glued on the front, using the Continental glue. For the rear I tried Tufo tape. When picking up the tape I did a quick check: regular or extreme? Extreme is for ‘extreme’ conditions of low or high temperatures, with the ‘extreme high’ meaning above 74 degrees F! Where is the world is it that 74 degrees F is an extreme high? Antarctica? I know Tufo is a Czech company, but the Czech Republic is not that moderate in their temperature range. Upshot is I went for the ‘Extreme’ stuff. While I was at it, I got a new tubular spare and needed to stretch that. All I can say is that gluing tires and stretching new tires onto rims really calls for having two good thumbs. I got it all done, but it was not easy.

New track wheels

While looking at the website of the manufacturer of the carbon trispokes for gluing recommendations I found that they sell a road to track kit for the wheels. For a couple of bills I can get the parts so I can swap them back and forth between road/TT duty and use at the track. Sweet! A lot more friendly on the budget than a new set of wheels.

Nutrition used to be easy on days where I planned long and/or hard rides. I would start with a big bowl of oatmeal with some fresh fruit (peaches are the favorite). I would fill my pockets with Clif Bars, and off I would go, hoping to get back to civilization by the time the energy from the bars was tapped. Then it happened. For years I had symptoms of a problem; one major symptom was physical, but there was a blood makeup issue, too. After lots of tests, I made the connection myself: the physical symptom reared its head on days I ate my oatmeal and bars! I cut oats out of my diet and rapidly the physical symptom and the blood makeup symptoms faded. I am allergic to oats!

Since I came to my realization I have been on the search for something I can eat in place of the ubiquitous oat-based bars. I tried PowerBars, and beyond the terrible taste and the fact they do not look like anything I would voluntarily put in my mouth there is the problem of the bloat they seem to cause. LaraBars are OK, but most of the flavors are uninspired and they tend to be slow to get sugar into the bloodstream. A number of newer bars are too heavily biased towards protein or to have a high fat content. I found a new brand, Greens Plus Bars, at Trader Joes a couple of weeks back. The ingredient list sounded like they had gone through the forest extracting from every plant in sight, and the bar tasted a bit like a good compost pile smells. Gels are, well, gels. So far my best choice seems to be to bake some banana bread or pumpkin bread and take slices of that with me. I did contact the Clif Bar folks a couple of years ago, and they were sympathetic but did not see a market for replacing oats with another grain for the few odd-balls like me who are oat sensitive. The quest continues.

Thinking of the smells of autumn has made me a bit homesick for the southwestern high country where I used to live. At times like this I miss waking up in the morning, walking out into frosty air, the surrounding hills golden with aspens still clinging to their leaves, the sweet odor of juniper smoke mixing with smell of the pepper harvest being roasted in propane fired roasters. That would be a fine day to start off with a plate of eggs smothered in freshly roasted green chili’s and sopped up with some fresh corn tortillas, all fueling a long ride along the rim, and a return to a lunch of steaming hot posole washed down with cold beer. Geez, I need to get back for a visit one of these years.

Guess in the remainder of the time I will work on some landscaping, take a long, slow bike ride with my sweetie, and try out my new ravioli mold (hopefully easier than handcutting all the little buggers), probably with some form of butternut squash ravioli, or maybe some with mushrooms (I love mushrooms), or artichokes.  Lots of possibilities!  Probably should put the lights on The Wife’s winter commuter bike, too.

Love having so little time pressure on the weekend for a change.