Traveling while lactose intolerant to the point of having to carry exra supplies if I or the chef includes any butter or cheese to any unsuspecting dish, like milk added in with the oatmeal at breakfast time has always made travel irksome for me.
I travel to only the best of places, to only the high rated hotels. Of course they fry their eggs at the buffet table only in butter and they add milk to the eggs they serve scrambled. Don't you? But I am not in any hotels where the chef would prepare a separate meal for me.
Austin and I use food and restaurants to help us tolerate the emotional toll of tracing our ancestor's path toward the spot where he was murdered.. This morning we are in Zagreb.. The ample table has an assortment of cheeses and pastries that look wonderful, made better with butter of course.I love the local breads and rolls as I settle for a hard boiled egg, as I do most mornings at home. Most mornings, Austin doesn't eat at all,or very little.
My personal restrictions don't end there however, since I don't eat food made from pigs or cows or sheep or goats and baked beans with mushrooms might be delightful for lunch as will any one of the fresh fruits offered, but not breakfast.
For lunch I usually can find a salad in any country we visited. Balsalmic vinegar makes a wonderful dressing when I remember to ask the waiter not to dress my salad. In Frankfurt I was served a Salade Nicoise which came as a do-it-yourself salad. The lettuce leaves were whole, the sliced olives from a can, the tuna also from a can dumped on top with large quarters of tomato and hard-boiled egg halves.
In Frankfurt also I had a real treat called a vegetarian burger which is the same as the new Impossibe burger I enjoy at home. I tried a tofuburger for a late supper in a quaint Renaissance style hotel near Rymanov in southern Galicia and lo and behold, it was the same thing. I was a happy camper! Austin is loving the food; the bratwurst in Frankfurt, the Italian dinner with Hendrik and his parents, the Wiener schnitzel in Vienna, the huge steins of beer, too.
When I ask that a chicken or fish dish have no dairy ingredients, they comply, serving me a dry protein with no flavor. I had chicken schnitzel with vinegar potato salad and once chicken in a tomato sauce with mashed potato pancakes as a side in Vienna. We have not had green vegetables served often with a meal, but lots of potatoes.
Last night in Crakow, we ordered pasta outdoors among many other diners at many charming outdoor tables seemingly set up in the middle of the street or on the square, accompanied by a three piece band playing old American standards from atop a low roof. By eight, when we left the hotel for dinner, the temperature had decreased to 88 degrees which was comfortable. During the day it had soared to 32 C. which is in the 90's somewhere, but who's counting. It was SO hot.
Austin's bolognese was juicy and he reported "delicious." Mine was with seafood with hardly any sauce as if the chef knew it had butter in it and was treating it sparingly. I did not get sick, so it worked to my benefit and I twirled it down with two glasses of sparkling white wine.
Today it is raining and will only get to 84 degrees as Austin will drive to the Jasenovac concentration camp on the last part of our journey retracing Grandpa Salaman's journey as he tried to escape.
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