Airplane Food

Some kind of vegetable stew with rice and mystery sauce, salad, and fruit

Now that I've shown you some of what I ate while in Turkey, I wanted to touch on one more important food-travel topic: airplane food.  I've never requested a special meal before but it's been awhile since I've traveled on any flight that even offered a meal. Oh, a minuscule pack of pretzels and a drink? Sure that'll be fine for this 5 hour flight (scenes from my trip to California).

The flight to Turkey was 10-11 hours and I was guessing that a vegetarian meal would be much more appealing to me than any Delta Airlines mystery meat, so I decided to request the Vegetarian (non-dariy) option (you can select this online so it's really easy).  The meal on the way there (pictured above) was OK, but non-dairy was a bit of a stretch as there was cheese on the salad.  Aside from that, it was fine but obviously not good.  On the way back, the meal was some sort of bean and vegetable curry with rice-- they actually gave me a piece of cheese with that one.  They also didn't have a vegetarian option available for one of the snacks on the way back so I wasn't given anything.  Really lame.

I'm still glad I chose the Vegetarian option because other people's meals were much less appealing to me, but the moral of the story, which I'm sure anyone with special dietary needs already knows is: bring your own food and snacks.

Salad with green beans, kasar cheese sandwich, and homemade almond cake

Here's the real question: Why is airplane food so much better on non-US airlines?!?  When I went to Japan a few years ago, I flew Japan Airlines and was fed often and well.  This time, I flew to another destination in Turkey aboard Turkish Airlines and was presented with the above.  No, it may not look that much more appealing than what I was given on Delta, but it tasted so much better, and was vegetarian without any special request.  The green beans were delicious, the cheese sandwich was decent, and the almond cake was pretty fabulous-- it tasted real, not like the processed fake-ingredient sweets that are given on US Airlines. 

Does anyone else ever make special requests on airlines? Any exceptionally good or bad experiences to share?  I'll be back with some actual recipe posts soon, it's just taking me a little while to get back in the swing of things.