I’m here for the seven tomato pies, not the miles.
Everyone has an opinion on pizza. Especially in New Jersey.
Continue reading “The best Trenton tomato pie? This bicycle ride tries to find it”Soozel Sweets is barely into Lawrence Township when coming from West Windsor and the Princeton Junction train station.
When NJ.com wrote about Soozel Sweets in Lawrence Township, I put it on my list of bike destinations. Ginger, cardamon .. yum.
Continue reading “It was worth getting drenched on a bike ride to this new Persian bakery in New Jersey”We stopped at Papa’s and Classico.
A pizza with a thin layer of brown mustard. A veggie pizza with cauliflower, peas, potatoes, paneer cheese and Indian spices. Another with mushrooms, honey and truffle oil.
New Jersey has lots of great independent pizza places, but we were on a quest for “weird” pizza (in the nicest way), a riff on my rides for “weird” beer. No sausage, pepperoni or green peppers this time.
Continue reading “Mustard? Cumin? 3 ‘weird’ pizzas on a 23-mile bike ride in New Jersey”This bakery makes a must-eat foodie list. So we biked there. Here’s what we ate.
I’ve been entertaining myself with some of these “best” foodie lists on NJ.com, and the Baklava Lady in Englishtown popped up on the list of the 50 New Jersey dishes you need to eat in 2023 — specifically the chocolate hazelnut baklava.
Continue reading “A bike ride to one of those 50 must-eat New Jersey dishes for 2023”Fried? Seafood? Both? Here’s some of what I ate in Mississippi.
Getting out on your bike is just another excuse to try new foods — like that chicken on a stick I wrote about a few days ago.
In Mississippi, my food themes definitely involved fried or seafood, sometimes in the same dish. Somehow there were no signs for ice cream or homemade pie to tempt me along the Tanglefoot and Longleaf trails — and it’s so much easier to resist those at the end of dinner rather than in the middle of the afternoon.
I did discover comeback sauce — said to be called that because you keep coming back for more. It’s essentially a spicy mayo with a reddish tint because of ketchup and hot sauce and seems to be everywhere. There are no shortage of recipe variations, like this one, or this one with fewer ingredients.
Here’s more of what I ate:
Fried pickles and boiled shrimp in Ridgeland
Fried (not baked) brie with delicious tomato jam in Vicksburg
Fried crawfish balls with comeback sauce in Vicksburg
Chargrilled oysters and other seafoods in Hattiesburg
Stuffed shrimp with a corn-tasso-and-more side in Hattiesburg
Mississippi-style shrimp and grits in Long Beach:
Beignets in Biloxi:
And what I didn’t eat? Waffle House. We counted seven in one day, I’d say mostly over 15 miles along the beach.
My North Carolina food discoveries: a (fried) collard sandwich, a fried croissant and that pig picking cake.
This East Coast Greenway trip was surprisingly light on barbecue. Based on a sample size of one barbecue restaurant, the eastern Carolina style of vinegar sauce may not be my thing anyway. I did discover collard sandwiches, which apparently is what fieldhands brought for lunch. I’m hoping it’s usually better than what I tried.
The collards just felt really overcooked and a soupy mess. One of the riders from the Triangle area says you should want to eat that collard liquid, so if you didn’t, the collards probably came from a can. They were sandwiched between two pieces of cornbread — deep-fried, crispy cornbread. I could have seen pan-fried to help keep it together, but this…
On the side were two strips of fatback, basically pg fat. I think they were fried too.
So vegetables, yes. Healthy? Doubtful.
This is what the barbecue plate looked like — lot of meat (half a pound?), hush puppies (think cornmeal mixed with a few other ingredients and deep fried — yes, more fried food) and my two sides, in this case collard greens and baked beans. Chris had the candied yams and, no surprise, they were incredibly sweet.
And then there’s that pig picking cake that I have wanted to try ever since that bakery stop on the first day. I found it at Burney’s Sweets and More, whose reputation goes beyond Elizabethtown. I’m not sure it had mandarin oranges, but crushed pineapple was definitely in that frosting (not a buttercream frosting, so I am going with another rider’s guess — what he calls grease frosting.) The recipes I have found call for a box of yellow cake mix. I don’t know if this was a mix or made from scratch, but it was certainly yellow.
Interestingly, not all of the Carolinians on the ride had heard of it.
Was it great? No. (Of course, it lacked that key ingredient of deep dark chocolate.) Did we demolish it? Yes.
Here’s something else I found at Burney’s: I think it’s their fried croissant. I’m telling myself it was healthier than the doughnuts offered in that bare-bones Knights Inn breakfast. At least there was chocolate. And I only had one.
I don’t know when I last ate so much fried food. Should I be surprised that 30.1% of North Carolinians are obese, ranking the state 22nd in the nation?
Spotted along the East Coast Greenway: Chess pie and pig picking cake.
I know — bike rides are really all about the food (or for some, the beer).
And when we topped that hill into Clayton and reached Main Street, it was too early for lunch. But is it ever too early for something sweet?
I peered into the pie case at Nancy Jo’s Homemade and settled on a lemon chess pie. Chess pie is a southern classic; I discovered it in Occoquan two years ago. Amazingly, I couldn’t take more than a few bites. Into the rear bike bag it went, to be eaten further along the route and polished off once we got to the hotel.
But this is what really caught my attention. It’s not something we have in New Jersey:
Why the crazy name? The key ingredients seem to be a cake mix, canned mandarin oranges and canned pineapple. There’s no pig in it. But it does seem to be served at barbecues, and people there pick at the pig, I guess like we pick at the turkey leftovers after Thanksgiving.
There wasn’t exactly a stampede of riders with me into the bakery, so I couldn’t suggest that we share this half a cake. But you can bet I will be looking for a single-serving size further along the East Coast Greenway. Or riders to share something bigger.
I’m guessing I haven’t seen the last of boiled peanuts either.
The Maine food tour on a bike continues.
Of course this exists in Maine!
I found it at our hotel in Augusta — chunks of lobster, squares of roasted seaweed (nori), spicy chili aoli, topped with scallions and toasted sesame seeds. And of course oozing with cheese — asiago and mozzarella. I’d cut down on the cheese and let the lobster shine through.
Bonus: half-price pizzas during happy hour. And then they let me bring it to the restaurant.
Can I confess that I’d be back for the weekday lunch pizza buffet? I’d try the crabmeat pizza, the pear, walnut and gorgonzola one…
I bet someone has found a way to combine the two, but for me, it was blueberry pie for breakfast and lobster pie for dinner.
Not together!
Though I bet someone in Maine has come up with a way to combine them.
Pie is an important part of bike riding, as you can see here and here.
I finally did get my own slice at Helen’s Restaurant in Machias — that was called breakfast. Like the one I had drooled over on Sunday afternoon, it was a thick helping of blueberries that spilled onto the plate. None of that gumminess in cheap grocery-store pies.
On the other hand, that slice cost a touch more than Clive’s proper breakfast of corned beef hash and two eggs. Worth it!
The day ended with lobster in Ellsworth. Instead of lobster roll, I went for lobster pie. So rich! Lots of lobster chunks drenched in a cream sauce, with a layer of fine bread crumbs as the “crust”. It plus the sides left no room for dessert. Not that the ice cream shop stayed open until 9 p.m.!
Some of the others went for a full lobster, and Chris, who calls himself a newcomer to Maine since he’s only been living here at least part-time since 1976, gave the tutorial in how to twist and crack it open.
A happy rider:
And if you didn’t want that, there was lobster stew, lobster dip…
The Union River Lobster Pot is one of those seasonal restaurants that fills up early. So we had a bit of a wait. But here, the “bar” is chairs on the lawn, with a view of the river. And yes, you can get beer.
Found some blueberries. Still looking for blueberry pie.
We have been told to stop for blueberries. Hey, bike rides are all about the food.
So when we spotted this blueberry field about three-quarters into our first day of our East Coast Greenway ride, we did. We focused on harvesting them by the handful. It felt a little like “Blueberries for Sal,” but without the bear.
The actual berries are smaller than the ones at home, and they’re grown on low bushes, not the high bushes at home. Our SAG driver said they serve another purpose — to act as fire breaks.
We saw someone harvesting blueberries as we drove to Calais yesterday. To me, it looked like he was using something similar to a tennis-ball hopper — push down and the balls (or berries) go in from the bottom, pushing up the balls (or berries) already there. Or was it some kind of scooper? He certainly didn’t seem hunched over, doing back-breaking work. Still, if it was hours in a field…
We’re still on the hunt for blueberry pie. Three of our riders have scored some, but it took a bit of sneakiness. The restaurant next to the motel in Machias had closed after lunch by the time they got in (and we can’t have been that far behind at 2:30 p.m.). But they waited outside the door until an employee wanted to head out, then bolted in and successfully pleaded for pie to go. They got the last three pieces of blueberry pie. And they just oozed blueberries. Look at that:
I admit I drooled. Enough, I think, that one of them felt guilt-tripped into offering me a bite. And then I said no. Crazy! Apparently they felt badly enough that they offered a bit to the next person who came by. And Alan our mechanic said yes!
We’ll be at that restaurant for breakfast. Maybe I’ll get lucky? (Because I certainly won’t be eating eggs!)
Exploring by bicycle 