Aaron Wolfe salivates for cycling almost as much as for a big plate of homemade food. Here he’ll drool publicly and sometimes count calories with weekly recipes aimed at you finicky cyclists. Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here.
Can you trust recipes from such a skinny man?
Sending out some SOS
With the entire cycling world and practically none of the non-cycling world dying to know more about Floyd Landis, I did a little digging online for some authentic recipes from his hometown. It quickly became clear that there would be two ways to approach Mennonite food. One is the nostalgic look at how early American immigrants ate and why some still eat that way. This approach has nothing to offer the modern palate.
The other approach is for the cyclist who is sick of pasta, rice and potatoes. When European emigrant life revolves around subsistence farming and attendance at church, the main ingredients in the kitchen will inevitably be flour, milk and meat. Sugar if you’re lucky, but definitely not spices. This approach also has nothing to offer the modern palate. However, I’m pretty sure that when Mennonite farmers need to carbo load for tough days in the fields and barns, chipped beef is what they eat. It’s super easy and fast to make, leaving more time for work and worship. I mean bike maintenance and training.
As for Floyd, eating chipped beef will not make you a champion, but it may cause you to leave home and later become a champion. Yet, I know someone who claims to love this pasty, near-flavorless dish. Her family apparently had in-depth dinner table discussions of the merits of tearing up the toast versus pouring the gravy on full slices. Of white bread vs. whole wheat.
Chipped beef is also know as Shit on a Shingle, or SOS for short, in the US military. Believe it or not, there are long debates about the main ingredients of SOS. Apparently SOS in the Marine Corps was made with dried beef until the early 1970s, when the switch was made to ground beef. And we haven’t lost a war since, so what does that tell you? Never mind.
Now that the bar has been set as low as possible and nothing is expected but a bland mass of mess hall paste, let’s throw some wood in the stove and get out the cast iron. This recipe is guaranteed to bring a little bit of Lancaster County, PA into your kitchen. That may not sound or smell so appealing if you’ve ever raced there in the rain.
The name of this dish would be more accurate if the emphasis were on the flour content rather than the meat. The meat is mostly for flavor. I was unable to find dried beef in several locations. It is supposedly sold thinly sliced in jars, or in packages in the bologna section. If you can’t find it you could go upscale and Italian with bresaola, another air-cured beef product that will be more flavorful than dried beef, or Swiss with Bundnerfleisch. Or you could make a military move and use ground beef, which is what I did. Whatever you do, don’t go too far out of your way for this one.
8 ounces Dried Beef, Ground Beef or Bresaola
1/2 cup Butter (cut this in half if you’re using ground beef)
1 cup White Flour
3 or 4 cups Milk
Toast
Salt and Pepper to taste
Break the meat up into small pieces, season with salt and pepper, and brown it with the butter in a large pan. Stir in the flour and cook for a few minutes longer. Let the flour turn a bit brown, but not too much. Begin adding the milk 1/2 cup at a time, stirring after each addition until the gravy thickens. When it looks good enough to eat, you’ve added enough milk. Add more salt and pepper if you like. Pour over toast.
Variations: SOS is really just a shortcut for biscuits and gravy. You could use sausage and pour over biscuits. Dig up the earlier recipe for that. Substitute some stock for some of the milk, or heavy cream if your arteries can handle it. I read one recipe that called for the meat to be browned with a couple tablespoons of sugar. Add onions and/or garlic to the meat. Thyme. So many ways to make this better, yet we should be glad that this dish is as awful as it is in its original form and drove our boy Floyd away from hearth and home to the mountains of France.
Cure for the common crash
@##=#<11,r>@##=#You wouldn’t think it would be possible to gain 5 pounds in 4 days, but that’s exactly what happened at the Fitchburg Longsjo stage race. With nothing to do but visit the all-you-can-eat pasta buffet, Pizzeria Uno, Applebee’s* and sample the rarer Ben and Jerry’s flavors that don’t make it this far south, it’s a wonder anyone made it up to the top of Wachusett Mountain.
Fitch is no Green Mountain Stage race with consecutive 70+ mile days. Try 6, then 18 then 48, then 17. That’s barely enough to burn off a single pint of ice cream, let alone the pizza, pasta, bread and nachos.
Skipping right over a turtle-paced TT and a throwaway of a circuit race, my last opportunity to move up in the GC was the road race. I had three goals: Enter the final climb at the front of the pack, try to make myself puke at the top, and ride the race for my dad on his 70th birthday. ** All three were accomplished. Well, I didn’t puke, but I couldn’t really stand up.
If anything, this year is the year of the crash for me. *** I’m just a hapless racer who keeps finding guys with the shiny side down right in front of me. The Fitch crit kept to the norm when I found myself pinned to the hay bales after I tried to ride over a LeMond with Zip 404s. Those flat spokes are stronger than they look and feel, and I couldn’t rip them out with my pedal even after several strong tugs.
Everything checked out at the pit, and I was off again in one lap, back to the plan of trying to ride like I felt at Grant’s Tomb: fast and in control before the final lap crash that took me out. Somehow, at the Fitch crit in the final lap, I found myself off the front with maybe 15-second gap, and no power thoughts or killer instinct or drive to win or oxygen in my brain. Yes, I was going as hard as I thought I could, but, but, but, could I have held on for that last 500 meters if I had been training my killer instinct as much as I train my legs? I