Flyleaf’s “Taste of Tour” – The Maiden Voyage

We recently invaded the tour bus of the hard rock band, Flyleaf, during the Snocore Tour 2015. During the video shoot, the topic of cooking on the bus came up in conversation and the band said that they do cook while on the road and eating at unique restaurants, since health is important to them. Flyleaf’s “Taste of Tour” series has been born! You can check out their first tour food adventure, after the break.

This is it- time to stop talking and start writing! So we travel on a tour bus. We roll around the country and play music for anyone who will listen. We are in a different city, many times a different state, each and every day. And we usually do this for about 6 weeks at a time. Eating well is a huge challenge for all of us. Our days are usually 14-16 hours long. We have breaks, but sometimes we aren’t near any sort of restaurant, and sometimes we aren’t able to get to a market, so the word “meal” is often a very loose term. A few of us are foodies, so we do what we can to stay healthy and eat well while traveling. You don’t get sick days on the road, so we have to take care of ourselves out here, and that starts with our bellies!

We’ve been traveling on a bus for about 9 years now, so we have picked up a few things along the way to help make a kitchen away from home. Some of the equipment we bring with us:
-2 top electric burner (pictured below)
-Small set of pots and pans (soup pot, large skillet, small skillet, and a sauce pot)
-Full set of utensils (spatulas, spoons, 3 cutting knives, ice cream scoop (duh), slotted spoons, etc)
-Microplane (a recent find for $1.99 at a thrift store!)
-Cheese slicer
-Cheese grater
-Small mixing bowls
-Tupperware for the rare leftovers
-2 Cutting boards
-Toaster
-Toaster oven
-Measuring cups
-Convection microwave (these come on some buses, but some just have regular microwaves)
-Vitamix (a MUST have on the road)
-4L Hot water kettle (boils and holds hot water)
-Nespresso milk frother (because Starbucks is just too expensive on a daily basis)
-1 gallon tea pitcher, for the Southern-style sweet tea north of the Mason-Dixon
-An arsenal of spices & teas

There’s an entire set of drawers and a Rubbermaid tote worth of things that we haul on and off of every bus. I know we’ve left some off, but we’ll get around to introducing everything over many more blog posts.

For our debut blog post, so graciously hosted by Josh and DigitalTourBus.com, we decided we wanted a delicious and celebratory meal. Lori, Kristen, and I set off in an Uber to the nearest Whole Foods on a day off. Here’s what we picked up:
-1 large Sirloin steak
-About a pound of small, yellow potatoes
-1 head of fresh garlic
-1 yellow onion
-1 bunch asparagus
-6 medium fresh shrimp
-1/4 lb prosciutto
-1 spray bottle Bragg’s Liquid Amino’s (bus kitchen necessity)
-1 stick unsalted butter
-2 lemons

In order to fully understand our cooking situation, you should stop reading for a second and check out the tour of our bus that Josh at Digital Tour Bus conducted a few weeks ago. And we should also explain that our bus was experiencing a few power issues the night we made our meal. This is just one of the many obstacles you have to work around when cooking on the road.

Once the ingredients were laid out, the onion and garlic chopped, and the shrimp deveined and peeled, we split up the duties and got to cooking. We cranked up both burners on our hot plate and started heating skillets. I browned some butter in each pan while Kristen wrapped chopped potatoes, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with fresh rosemary, in foil and preheated our convection microwave oven. And as soon as she did that, we discovered a strange beeping noise coming from the driver’s lounge of the bus. The batteries on the bus weren’t holding up to the power we were pulling with both burners and the convection oven running at the same time. We turned off every light and unplugged every appliance we didn’t need, hoping that this would help. I even pulled out the Streamlight I use to move Kristen through the crowd each night and turned it on, shining it to the ceiling to fill the room with light. Despite all of this effort, the power would reset about every minute or two, which meant that Kristen would have to reset all of the settings on the convection oven and restart the potatoes.

Meanwhile, I had the asparagus sautéing in butter, prosciutto, and garlic in the big skillet, and I was browning onions in the small skillet, preparing to throw in the steak when the timing was right. As soon as the asparagus was that perfect shade of green and crisp to the bite, I pulled it and put it in an open tupperware container. I needed the extra butter to start the hollandaise sauce. I use Julia Child’s classic recipe for this. It turns out perfect every time. I needed microwave space to melt some butter while I was slowly heating egg yolks in the small sauce pot, so I put a measuring cup full of butter on top of the potatoes in the oven (which was still being reset every minute or so). Eventually, it melted, and I incorporated it into the thickened egg yolks, whisking vigorously to yield that yummy, creamy, buttery sauce that melts in your mouth.

About this time, Lori started the shrimp in the skillet with the browned steak. Several minutes later, Kristen deemed the potatoes soft enough to eat, the steak was done (medium-rare), and the shrimp were ready, so we plated everything up on the finest paper china and toasted to a job well done!

Despite the power issues and cooking (mostly) in the dark, the meal was fantastic. We got a few pictures before we had no more lighting. Hopefully, our next post won’t produce that same problem.

Our goal with this blog is to show you how we live and attempt to treat our bodies well on the road. We don’t always cook out, and traveling this much allows us to find amazing restaurants, sometimes in the most unexpected places. We hope to share these stories with you, and we hope that you are somewhat entertained!

Until next time, best wishes from the Taste of Tour team!

Much love,
Kristen, Lori, and Katy

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