Road notes

Biscuits at the Loveless Cafe, Nashville.

We've been on the road for a little more than a week now, and so far, we've managed to keep the cost of eating to a minimum without resorting to fast food. How? By selecting restaurants where we know we'll get something that we wouldn't get either in Charlottesville, where we live, or Northern California, where we're heading. And for all other meals, there's the food box and the cooler.

In the food box is tube filled with peanut butter, bags of Uncle Ben's precooked rice and Madras lentils from TastyBite, a variety of crackers, a dozen corn tortillas, a half-pound of cheddar (wrapped in a paper towel and stored in a plastic container, to ward off mold), freshly ground coffee, a few lemons and limes, pop-top cans of tuna and salmon, a slice of vacuum-packed country ham, cups of applesauce, mandarin oranges and fruit cocktail, small bottles of olive oil and Italian spice mix, a couple of instant Thai meals and a backpacking freeze-dried meal left over from a backpacking trip. In the cooler went a tube filled with a mixture of light cream cheese and feta, milk, a bag of fresh salad greens and a butter lettuce, an orange bell pepper, a package of grilled chicken strips and a few packs of frozen slow-cooked pork.

Out of this has come some fancy salads, soft tacos, plates of rice and lentils, and some very portable lunches that can be eaten on a cracker at a time while driving. A shout-out to REI for our camp stove that's smaller than our portable cookware, and the fillable food tubes. Only in Memphis did we not have an outdoor place to use the stove, but the room had a microwave, so that worked pretty well.

By far, our favorite meals out have been at the Loveless Cafe in Nashville, and Rendezvous ribs in Memphis.