Travel Cooking... A quick stir fry because restaurants around here don't serve enough vegetables...

Travel cooking.  It's definitely a different experience, because your ingredient list is different than what you would normally have at home.

However, if you're me, you will probably carry an arsenal of "can't live without" items that make this task a little bit easier (though still creative).  I have a small bucket weighing down my backpack of teeny tiny containers of hot sauce, olive oil, salts and spices and herbs... (the actual contents varies depending on how low the circumstances require my pack weight to be).  At the moment, I have garlic salt, cayenne, a couple of spice blends, dried rosemary and thyme, several varieties of olive oil in very tiny containers (maybe 1 oz. at the most - I got them when I ordered to-go nutrition shots at Arden's Garden), two tabascos in the same containers, and a sriracha to-go key chain.

So, there's that.  If I had to narrow it down to three, it would be olive oil, garlic salt and cayenne pepper, but I've splurged because this is the longest trip I've ever taken and I want to ease into it with some comforts of home.

But I digress...

Today I am in Cartagena, Colombia, where you can't just go to a grocery store and get all the ingredients you want to cook with.  The full-sized supermarket I went into today had very little produce, because most of it is sold in outdoor produce stands.  What I ended up with, as a result, was some yogurt (eaten as an afternoon snack prior to cooking, because the hostel refrigerator is broken) and a mango.  Then, I walked by food stands until I saw some red bell peppers (with some swirly green spots where they hadn't fully changed) and bought two of those.

Tonight's dinner was a major win for me, as I stir fried the two bell peppers with small strips of ripe mango, sriracha, olive oil and garlic salt.  Really, this hodgepodge only occurred because the refrigerator in my hostel is broken and I knew none of the items would be in good shape if not used immediately, but WOW.  Stir fry your red bell peppers with very ripe mango and sriracha.  Seriously.  Do it.  And to think I almost left the sriracha at home....

Again, ingredients:

-2 red(dish) bell peppers, sliced into stir-fry sized strips
-Olive oil
-Slices of super ripe mango (just a few, because you are also eating the mango as you cook.  To not do so would be a travesty.
-Sriracha
-Garlic salt

Instructions:

-Throw peppers in pan with olive oil.  Add mango as you slice and eat it.  Garlic salt and sriracha to taste (in my case, a lot of both).
-Cook it to the desired texture.
-Take a picture, because it just looks so good.
-Eat.

I mean, just look at that sh*t.  Yum.

On the theme of cleaning out the pantry... I also make smoothies.

"Cleaning out the pantry" smoothie recipes

One day, when I was in college, a guy showed up at the door of my apartment from a party across the street and offered to trade one of my roommates a bottle of coconut rum he had taken from the party for a cigarette.  This was obviously a major score for us, except that we had nothing to mix the rum with.  After raiding the refrigerator and pantry, I discovered some canned fruit, which we threw into the blender with rum and ice, creating delicious alcoholic fruit smoothies!

Since that day, I have been throwing random, cast-aside pantry items into blenders and making them delicious, from soups to smoothies to dips.  This past week, I have discovered unused items like applesauce, cranberry sauce, crystallized orange, cocoa powder (sweetened) and peanut butter and turned them into delicious treats instead of throwing them away.

This week's major victories in the smoothie department are as follows:

Orange/cranberry/ginger smoothie

- 1 individual container of greek yogurt with some kind of fruit (or just a cup of yogurt)
- 1 individual container of applesauce (or 1/2 cup from a jar)
- 1/3 can of cranberry sauce
- 1 - 2 packets of crystallized orange (http://www.truelemon.com/true-orange-cooking)
- Minced or powdered ginger, to taste
- Any frozen fruit

Blend these things.  Add liquid of choice if needed (I use green tea by the spoon with this one, but not much is needed because most of the ingredients aren't solid.)

Banana/PB/Mocha smoothie

This one is ice-creamy and wonderful

- 1 chopped frozen banana
- Peanut butter (1-2 tbsp)
- Dutch cocoa powder (or whatever cocoa powder is in YOUR pantry), to taste.  I used 1 spoonful, but 2 would not be crazy.
- about 1/3 cup of coffee, or a little less for thicker, more ice creamy consistency

Blend it.  Love it.

"Cleaning the pantry" soup #2356 (or something comparable, as I make soup every time I clean my pantry)

Asparagus, tomato and goat cheese soup

I'm getting ready to go traveling for awhile, and one of the elements of my impending move into storage is the cleaning out of pantry ingredients.  Today I needed to get rid of a jar of white asparagus (asparagus in a jar makes better pureed soup than fresh, due to its texture), a can of tomatoes and one refrigerator impulse buy, sweet hot pepper goat cheese.

Boil the jar of asparagus and the can of diced tomatoes in a saucepan for a few minutes with about a cup of water and some garlic salt and ground red pepper to taste.  Then puree it all, put it back in the pan with the burner on medium-ish.  Crumble in 1/4 to 1/2 of the log of goat cheese (depending on how badly you need to get rid of the goat cheese) and stir.  After about 5-10 minutes, split it into two generous servings and eat it with other things you need to finish.  In my case, that was two pieces of rye toast with EVOO and garlic salt.

Then give me a big hug because that was so good.