Living Off The Land

 

Savor nature’s delicious bounty during your next motorhome journey.

 

By Juddi Morris

August 2015

 

Enjoying fresh, local produce is one of the pleasures of motorhoming. Farmers’ markets and fruit and vegetable stands pepper the highways during the growing season. Buying from farmers and growers during our travels gives us the freshest food and connects us to people of the land in a way that supermarket purchases cannot. Much like RVing itself, the social isolation of not speaking to strangers is safely broken by such travel stops.

 

You can be sure that when we’re on the road, my drawstring bag is never far from my side. From June to October, there’s no telling when I’ll see a crooked homemade sign that reads, “Fresh Picked Corn,” or one that never fails to stop our caravan: “Vine-Ripe Tomatoes.”

 

Thank goodness my companion is always ready to brake for fresh produce. He knows that lunch at some tree-shaded roadside spot a couple of hours later will star a BLT sandwich or feature a platter of those firm but juicy red tomatoes that were covered with morning dew just an hour before we bought them.

 

If we’re in New Mexico, we’ll find green chilies. The evening meal will consist of big soup bowls of pasta covered with a fresh salsa we’ve concocted from more of those tomatoes. The combination of hot pasta and cold salsa is wonderful. Add bread from a local bakery that has been topped with curls of Parmesan cheese and run under the broiler until it’s hot, and nothing could be finer.

 

For me, spring and summer are one long feast of nature’s bounty. In California’s Central Coastal Valley, we’ll pork out on baby artichokes dipped in a simple sauce of olive oil and chopped garlic, or asparagus stalks that have been quickly sautéed in our wok and sprinkled with kosher salt. Or, maybe we’ll prepare a big stir-fry using snow peas, cabbage, and fresh celery bought field-side.

 

Dessert is enjoyed in those same soup bowls, which we often fill with luscious strawberries. Their fragrance is even sweeter than the lilac bushes that surrounded the truck farm where we picked more than two gallons of strawberries during a stop.

 

No telling how many we ate while picking, but when we tried to pay for those as well, the smiling teenager manning the fruit stand laughed and said, “No way. What we charge includes what you eat while you’re picking.” They were a bargain at three times the price! The 30 minutes we spent among the rows of berries in the warm sun, with views of the Pacific Ocean like wrinkled blue silk on the horizon, was pure soul time.

 

During that week, we had a strawberry festival. We enjoyed strawberry shortcake, a strawberry pie, cereal topped with strawberries, strawberries dipped in brown sugar and sour cream, strawberries covered with melted chocolate, and — probably best of all — just plain, unadorned strawberries.

 

I even squirreled away enough of the dark red berries to make two small jars of jam. When the jars are opened this winter, we’ll relive those golden days as we spread the thick, scarlet mixture on morning toast.

 

But once we get a hankering for barbecue, there’s just one place to go. We head for Texas, where grilling meat has been elevated to pure science.

 

Once there, we’ll eat barbecue every day. Everybody knows it takes a long time to cross the Lone Star State; this is especially true when you’re on a barbecue quest. Stopping at every wide spot in the road to sample the wares of a local barbecue purveyor can be a time-consuming pleasure quest.

 

Leaving New Mexico recently — once we had stashed a stack of blue corn tortillas and Las Cruces chilies in the motorhome fridge — we crossed the border into mesquite smoke country. After driving through El Paso, we stopped for fuel on the far side of the city. Once we finished filling the tank, we took a leg-stretching stroll around the humongous truck stop.

 

Immediately we detected a mouthwatering aroma. Sniffing the air like bird dogs, we followed the scent. Barbecue? It certainly smelled like it. Alongside an RV that started life as a yellow school bus, a man hunkered down beside a homemade smoker engineered from a small barrel.

 

He had set up camp at the edge of a giant parking lot. On the brow of the hill, overlooking the cottonwood trees and farmland of the Rio Grande Valley, he had staked a claim to an overnight parking space that was splendid.

 

“Hey there,” he greeted us as a German shepherd came forward, wagging its tail. We shook hands with the man and told him where we were from. Fred was his name. He introduced his canine companion, William (not “Bill,” because he was such a noble animal and deserved a dignified name, Fred explained).

 

“What are you barbecuing?” I asked. “It smells wonderful.”

 

Fred lifted the top of the small setup, and the spicy, garlicky aroma almost did us in. He was cooking a large roll of bologna. Bologna?

 

My companion and I were amazed that bologna came in rolls. Like city kids who had never seen a cow and thought milk came from cartons, we had assumed that “bologna” meant slices only. How good could lunchmeat be, even if it were barbecued? This smelled delicious, though.

 

Fred told us that he bought “bologna chunks” whenever he could find them, because they tasted so good when smoked. Country grocery stores in areas with large German settlements were good sources, he added.

 

Would we like a sample? Yeah!

 

Using a sharp knife, he sliced off two pieces. Then, grabbing a roll of paper towels, he tore off a section and, with the point of his knife, placed the meat on it. We dove into the savory meat, which looked like ham. It tasted nothing like the bologna we had eaten in the past. It was wicked good.

 

The generous camper moved over to a small Coleman stove, where a dark brown liquid simmered in a small, dented pot. “Here,” he said. “I want you to try my special barbecue sauce.” Once more, he cut bologna slices, thicker this time, since he knew we liked the meat, and spooned on a little of the rich liquid. We ate, hunkered over, sauce running down our chins and through our fingers. It may have been the best thing I’ve ever tasted, that bologna in a truck stop parking lot!

 

It was hard to tear ourselves away from Fred and William, but we had camping reservations elsewhere. We thanked him for our very first taste of barbecue on this trip, and for introducing us to smoked bologna.

 

I hurried back to our motorhome and put six ripe peaches in a sack; we had bought them at a roadside stand in New Mexico the day before. After adding four pieces of pound cake, I looked around for a special meat treat for the noble William. I finally came up with a pound of ground round. I wished it had been a filet — two filets, in fact, one for the hospitable Fred, who had fed two strangers on the road, and one for his traveling companion.

 

As we walked back to their bus to deliver the treats, I thought to myself, “Another priceless memory made along the trail.” Exploring the highways and back roads while enjoying delicious foods and meeting such friendly, generous folks along the way are prime ingredients for a fulfilling motorhome journey.

 

If you carry a computer, tablet, or smartphone, use the Internet to seek out produce sellers in the area through which you’re traveling. Conduct an online search using keywords such as “farm and vegetable stands,” “farmers markets,” and the like. Add the name of the state you are in, or nearby cities, villages, roads, etc. to narrow the search.

 

If you see fields of chilies, rows of fruit trees, or other crops growing in abundance along your route, it’s a good bet that someone is selling some of it alongside the road.

 

Also, stop and ask the locals about farmers’ markets in town; or, search for that online as well.