Cooking On The Road
Travel cooking has become its own adventure for me over the years. Long term travel changes the way you consume, engage with, and appreciate food in a country that isn’t yours. It makes sense on a weekend getaway to go all out and check off the big restaurants, cram in one reservation after another. But when you travel with any kind of frequency this quickly becomes expensive and unsustainable. More importantly, exclusively dining out unintentionally skews our palates. Most lauded restaurants are designed to present a palatable experience for the tourist. This isn’t a judgment on the food, it’s just the natural path of hospitality.
Not all travel is about luxury dining. There is so much pleasure to be found from experiencing cuisine from the ingredient level. Growing fluency with local ingredients inevitably changes my own practice, it grows my food vocabulary and reminds me constantly that there is no finish line when it comes to understanding food. Cuisine is not a static medium, it’s constantly reflecting back our own moving culture.
For me, it’s all about the markets. Visiting the local market wherever I am is pretty much the first thing I do. Eating out is a wonderful privilege but working with everyday ingredients feels like an act of appreciation. Taking the time to approach cuisine from the level of craft and not consumption is also an act of respect. I don’t want to shortcut this experience.
When I’m at new markets I’m uncharacteristically bold. I’m not afraid to ask what something is, how I should prepare it, and how it’s commonly used. Generally people love talking about food and vendors are proud to share the quality of their wares. It’s wonderful and humbling that I get to encounter new types of produce all of the time. Discovering a new fruit feels like finding a whole new planet to me. Imagine if you were a painter and you discovered a whole new color? Newness is exciting but it’s also eye-opening to realize that a mango in Mexico tastes differently than a mango in California or that a strawberry in Korea feels like an entirely different fruit than a strawberry in Mexico. It’s so simple and so true that food is a product of its environment. To taste the fruit of any place is to taste its cultivation practices, its priorities, and its’ history. There is so much story in those differences.
I think something gets lost when we only see the finished plate without understanding the raw material. Without understanding the ingredients we can’t understand the labor behind the meal and if we can’t understand the labor behind the meal then we can’t appreciate the hands or the tradition or historical context that brought that dish into being. Consumerism becomes a kind of erasure in this process.
Most places I travel are rich in traditional cuisine and native ingredients and it’s an embarrassing bounty of riches every time I find myself somewhere new. But on the road, occasionally I find myself in between destinations or far from access to fresh food. I’ve learned to be thrifty and resourceful. A few years ago while traveling east in the Yucatán I ended up needing to find a last minute place to stay overnight en route from Izamal to Vallodolid. I had been detoured for a number of reasons and having traveled all day, neglected to grab food. The nearest thing I could find was a gas station about 4 miles away. I walked along a mostly empty highway, trying to beat the sun with quick steps because I did not want to be on this road in the dark. I found the gas station and seriously confused the attendant with my poor Spanish and overall Asian-ness. I bought dry spaghetti, canned tuna, tomato puree, and SPAM (not ashamed at all). I can do a lot with gas station ingredients. In fact, I kind of love this constraint. I want to say that I started making this pasta on that trip but I feel like my mom definitely made a version of this or I’ve had some kind of canned meat and starch in any number of variations. No one invented this – it just always existed. I’ve been making a version of this gas station pasta ever since.
I’m sharing this recipe because it’s infinitely adaptable and can be made with the most basic of ingredients. It’s helped me through a few food-panic moments. All you need is dry pasta, a canned meat, and 1 other ingredient to make it a little special. You don’t even need olive oil because you use the oil from the fish tin. It comes together in 20 minutes and shouldn’t cost you more than $5 in ingredients.
For this version I used yellow tomatillos that I bought at Mercado Medellín but this could easily be tomatoes, wilted greens, an herb, a cheese, or any ingredient that you have handy. I pan seared the tomatillos until they started to break down and self-sauce. I love the acidity of a tomatillo – it brightens everything up without changing the flavor the way a lemon or lime would. I added some good crema for a little richness and some local peas and cilantro for color but all of this is optional. The pasta would be good with tuna and tomatillos alone.
Here’s the “recipe”:
4 oz dry pasta
1 can tuna packed in olive oil
5 oz yellow tomatillos
2 garlic cloves
1 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
Optional :
¼ cup shelled peas
2 Tbsp crema
Strain your canned tuna and reserve the oil
In a sauce pan add your reserved oil and heat pan at medium
Add yellow tomatillos to your pan and don’t move until they start to brown
Flip the tomatillos once they start to sizzle and brown, add 3 tablespoons of water and lid
Lower heat to medium-low and wait until the tomatillos start to burst and juice
Once the juices start to leak, help it along by crushing your tomatillos
When completely soft remove from heat and let cool
Once cool, crush your tomatillos until they are completely sauced. You can pass through a sieve if you want it to be extra fine. If you have a blender or food processor, all the better.
Par-boil pasta 2-3 minutes short of whatever your package recommends
Reserve 2 cups pasta water and drain the rest
On medium heat finish off pasta with 3 tablespoons of pasta water at a time, adding more as the water evaporates. If using the peas, add them at this time
When the pasta is about 1 minute away from done add the tuna and tomatillo sauce. If using crema, add at this stage
Cook until sauce is absorbed into the pasta and garnish with parsley or cilantro if you have available
Other Tips For Cooking On The Road:
You can make a feast if you have access to these few ingredients. These are my essential pantry items when I travel :
Primary
Dry starch (i.e. rice or pasta)
Eggs
Salt & sugar
Acid (vinegar or lime/lemon)
Fat (olive oil, butter, or veg oil)
Secondary
Soy Sauce - the most versatile condiment
Canned Fish
Canned Tomatoes
With these basics you can incorporate market finds to make any number of dishes
When finding accommodations with a kitchen make sure they have a propane stove! I don’t mess with induction and feel like an absolute idiot trying to figure out if the unit is on or off. Cooking needs fire, period.
Bring your own knives – I have yet to encounter a rental situation that came with good kitchen tools. I always travel with my knife roll and some basic tools : chef’s knife, serrated knife, a mandolin, a whisk, silicone spatula, and can opener. For some reason there is no Airbnb with a decent can opener. They always have them but they are always junk. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cut myself trying to open a can with a janky opener and a butter knife to leverage the lid off. I don’t recommend.
Good knives are important and pretty irreplaceable but get creative with the kitchen equipment you have. I have definitely MacGyver-ed aluminum steam trays and makeshift double broilers. It’s all part of the fun.
FORAGE