15 days and 3,750 miles but no fast food

Finding good food on our driving vacation down the East Coast, over to Louisiana, and back wasn't easy but we did it -- with the exception of one really awful meal. We had some terrific meals in unlikely places and ate like royalty in New Orleans.

Local restaurants usually don't advertise on the interstate. And venturing a few miles off the highway in search of food isn't always rewarded. We never took the easy way out by stopping at one of the hundreds of McDonald's, Burger Kings or Wendy's. The one time we had lunch at a Denny's was a disaster.

Despite all the fast food, there are lots of people knocking themselves out every day to prepare slow food and we were delighted when we found one of them. One is a Jersey girl who is now a caterer and runs a lunchroom in a small town in Georgia and the other is "a country cook" who took over half of the convenience store at a truck stop in Alabama.

I'll tell you more about them and what we ate in the next several days. Today, I went to Costco in Hackensack to stock up on fresh produce, organic salad greens and fresh wild salmon.

Pacing around with no food shopping to do

Despite all the little details you have to attend to before vacation, one thing you don't have to do much of is food shopping. You'll want half-gallons of milk and orange juice with sell-by dates of a week or so after you return and not much else in the way of fresh stuff.

My wife stopped at ShopRite this week for Applegate Farms cold cuts (no antibiotics, hormones or other additives), some salad greens and some fruit, and at Balthazar Bakery for the baguettes we'll use to make sliced ham, chicken and turkey sandwiches for the first day of our road trip. I'll go to Costco tomorrow for bottled water to keep in the car and smoked wild salmon I'll stow away for our return.

What I really miss when we go away are the familiar foods, familiar takeout and familiar restaurants. When we returned from Barnegat Light the other day, I enjoyed a light dinner of the wild Copper River salmon I had cooked several days before, straight from the frig, with some tuna-sardine salad (extra-virgin olive oil, chopped red onion, cumin), kimchi, olives and pita. With the first bite, I knew I was home.