JACQUIE PHELAN
After a dalliance with road racing, Jacquie burst onto the MTB scene in 1980, and made up for lost time by riding with Joe Breeze and the klunker gang. She co-founded the original US racing governing body NORBA and was national champ three years running, helped launch the trail advocacy organisation IMBA and set up WOMBATS (Women’s Mountain Bike And Tea Society), for riders more interested in socialising and enjoying nature. Now in her 60s and still living near San Francisco, Jacquie writes an occasional blog, the excellently-titled Salivation Army, about “good eatin’ on the cheap”.
“Food is a major pleasure. I guess I think of it as therapy. Since I got cancer [in the early 2000s], I’ve just stopped paying for it, because I’ve had to pay for ‘hell insurance’. I’m sure I’ve saved at least $100,000.
“Us dumpster-diver ‘gleaners’ know that something like 50 per cent of the
American food supply is thrown away. Stores have to empty the shelves every single day to make room for new stuff, so I go to the back door, if it’s not barb-wired off, and try hard to find a good home for ‘lost’ food. I bring it all home and then I have an overcrowded fridge, so I try to fob it off onto my friends. My motto is ‘no calorie left behind’. I haven’t bought food unless I absolutely had to have exotic ingredients that I couldn’t find. It’s worth it. I have a backpack and it’s an adventure!
“I make a smoothie every single day for both Charlie [Cunningham, Jacquie’s husband and the cofounder of WTB] and myself, because one of the things that I find a lot of is yoghurt, and if you don’t peel back the foil layer, you can keep it for a year. The smoothie comprises whatever fruit I can find, plus a big teaspoon of mushroom powder for cognition. Every other day – well, sometimes daily – I drink a 12oz [354ml] beer or a 10oz [295ml] glass of wine. But that’s only a few times a week. I’m scared of alcoholism, which all my siblings have. And I drink tea, of course!
“I usually like to have heavy food, because I want it to fuel me for a long time. I’ll have French toast with cream cheese and lemon curd or jam, or I’ll have soup and rice and beans, whatever I feel like. A healthy go-to dish that I make often is bread pudding (see recipe above). It’s like a crustless quiche, but it’s got a lot of bread in it. I’m very into bread.
“The first dish I learned to make was lemon curd – equal measures of egg and lemon juice, plus finelygrated lemon zest, sugar and fat. It’s absolutely heavenly, like the inside of a really great lemon meringue pie. I have it on my French toast, with cream cheese spread on the toast and then a couple of globs of lemon curd spooned on top.”