Tags: vegetarian travel, healthy eating on the road, vegetarian food in Asia, vegetarian food in China, Rancho La Puerta, Tecate, Baja California, farm stays, farm stays in the US, farm stays on Kauai
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The Traveling Vegetarian: Tour Companies Step Up to the Plate
By Jenna Blumenfeld of Ovenzest.blogspot.com
Planning to travel with a tour company and concerned there will be nothing for you to eat?
Not to worry. Increasingly, tour companies are more than accommodating to their vegetarian guests, preparing fabulous meat-less meals. Many will ask you in advance to fill out a form specifying your food requirements. If not, be sure you let them know before you go. And don’t just assume some countries or companies are going to be heavy on meat offerings. Here are two that are quite surprising.
Wendy Wu Tours
Despite the fact that vegetarians are uncommon in countries such as China and Vietnam, Wendy Wu, owner of Wendy Wu Tours which specialize in Asian c ountries, explains how her company welcomes vegetarians on her trips. “We do a very good job of finding meals for vegetarians, including stir fries, eggs and rice. We always cook special meals for vegetarians.”
Ms. Wu adds that all of the Buddhist temples forbid eating meat within their walls, and therefore offer excellent vegetarian meals that contain meat substitutes such as tofu. “At the temple, you can have a proper vegetarian meal.” Indeed, even with the challenge of finding meat-less meals in a continent where only the most devout Buddhists choose to be vegetarian, Wendy Wu tours steps up to the plate.
Outward Bound
We often think of hotdogs, hamburgers and big slabs of rib-eye when we think of camping or grilling, but the expedition-tour organization Outward Bound focuses on nutrition when planning meals for its participants (whether teens and college kids or adults) . Trips with Outward Bound are often strenuous and occasionally lengthy. Simply for preservation purposes, meat is frequently out of the picture. Rather, group members cook meals consisting of grains, pasta, nuts, beans, cereals, and other light, dehydrated foods.” What is more, the folks at Outward Bound can accommodate those with stricter diets, such as vegan or lactose intolerance, with advance notification.
Put simply, as long as you make your needs known (best in advance), reliable companies--whether they be luxurious or down-to-earth--will do everything in their power to provide for you. So sit back, relax and eat!
Photo credit: Stacks of Chinese dumplings provided by Wendy Wu Tours.
Rancho La Puerta: We Hike to Eat
By Cara Greenberg of casaCARA: Old Houses for Fun & Profit
Rancho La Puerta is different things to different people.
For some, the main draw of this Baja destination is the early-morning trail hiking, from the gentle (Woodlands, Quail) to the challenging (Professor, Pilgrim) and the brutal (seven miles up Mt. Kuchumaa). Others come to work out all day in classes you won’t find at your local Y (Cardio Drumming, Wave Running, Aerobics with Soul), and/or embrace the challenge of seeing how many spa treatments they can squeeze into a week. Not to mention bird walks, make-your-own-jewelry workshops, and a zillion other options, from crystal bowl sound healing to the ever-popular popcorn bingo.
But for everyone, without exception, Rancho La Puerta is about good eating. It can’t not be, after all that exercise – you’re ravenous, and they don’t let you go hungry. The portions are calorie-controlled, but seconds and thirds are cheerfully provided. This is not a weight-loss place, although the correct answer, I’m told, to that annoying question when you get home (“How much weight did you lose?”) is “Seven pounds.”
Ha. My jeans seem no looser than they did four days ago. But who cares? The food here is too good. From the lavish-but-healthy buffet breakfast by the villa pools to outdoor lunches around the fountain on the tiled terrace to sit-down four-course dinners in the magnificent high-ceilinged di ning hall, it’s mostly vegetarian, elegantly presented, totally delicious, and authentically Baja — never heavy rice-and-beans, but nouvelle Mexican, masterminded by Cordon Bleu-trained chef Gonzalo Mendoza.
Sixty percent of the produce comes from Rancho’s own organic farm, Tres Estrellas. The 4-mile hike there and back is such a highlight they run it three times a week to accommodate demand. Upon arrival, there’s a legendary breakfast spread at La Cocina que Canta (The Kitchen that Sings), Rancho La Puerta’s cooking school and culinary center. There’s a professional kitchen for cooking classes and an expansive dining room with French doors overlooking the farm, where rows of luminous lettuces prove that vegetables, too, can be ornamental. Many of the flowers, including calendula, violas, and nasturtium, are grown as edibles and used to pretty up salads and desserts.
Yesterday I was at Tres Estrellas/La Cocina que Canta not once, but twice — in the morning, for the hike, breakfast, and head gardener Salvatore’s tour (now I know what really good soil looks like and how to pick a turnip), and again in the evening, when I returned by van with a group of about 20 people for a hands-on cooking lesson with guest chef Alisa Barry, now based in Atlanta and owner of a food-products company called Bella Cucina Artful Food, in her own Tuscan-by-way-of-California style.
After which, of course, we ate the scrumptious results — baked goat cheese three ways, cilantro corn cakes with roasted pepper sauce, shrimp grilled on rosemary skewers, and more — a meal made up of antipasti, essentially, which is exactly the way I like to eat.
I’ll diet when I get home.
Farm Stay on Kauai
By Ann Shepphird of GardenstoTables.com
ISay you’re a “locavore” (i.e., you try to eat locally grown food) and you’re traveling. You can stay at a hotel that tries to buy from the local  farmers. You can stay at one that maybe has its own herb garden – or even one that grows some of its own produce. OR, you can go a step further and actually stay on a farm.
Long popular in Europe, farm stays have increased in popularity in recent years in the U.S. and it’s easy to see why: What can be better than staying in a place in, say, Kauai where you can pick a papaya from a tree right outside your door? A farm stay is also a good way to try out the idea of what it would be like to chuck it all and start your own organic farm.
That’s what Lee Roversi of North Country Farms did. Once a typical harried New Yorker, in 1986, she and her then-husband packed up their kids, found some land on the north shore of Kauai and built North Country Farms, which provides a variety of produce that’s sold directly to local families. Also on the four-acre property--which is near the town of Kilauea and many of the north shore's most famous beaches--are two guesthouses that are rented out as bed-and-breakfast cottages. Guests literally look out their front porches at the beautifully manicured rows of crops and are encouraged to pick their evening’s produce from the farm and orchards. The cottages run $150/night and also include a welcome basket filled with local goodies for breakfast (coffee, tea, granola, muffins, fruit).
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