It seems obvious that you could find all kinds of wonderful new restaurants in which to enjoy great food while traveling. A couple of keystrokes on the computer and you can find the best places to eat wherever you go. A little pre-trip planning and you can sample delicious local fare for every meal of your trip. Of course, the reviews on-line aren’t always correct and eating out for every meal for days on end gets old, not to mention expensive.
It might be somewhat less obvious how making good food and travel go together and how cooking in your hotel room lets you explore new places and people the same way sitting down at a local restaurant does. But with a bit of preparation, cooking for yourself on vacation can be more fun, interesting and delicious than many of the eateries you might found along the way.
One of Jon and my early dates involved staying in a cabin on Orcas Island and cooking almost all our meals on a mini Weber grill armed only with a few tin pie pans and a serrated butter knife for cooking implements. We managed to make eggs, bacon and toast for breakfast and oysters and salmon for dinner. The whole experience was fun and creative. We laughed so hard about trying to cook with a butter knife, which we had affectionately named “the mangler”, that we had to take it home as a souvenir. We explored the small grocery store near our cabin and checked out the local fishmonger. We also learned quite a bit about what to do on our next trip to make our cooking on the road experience even better.
To have a great cooking experience on the road requires a few key things. The first is staying in the right place. Mariotts and Holiday Inns are not going to be very happy when the smell of bacon comes wafting out of your room every morning, and you won’t have much fun trying to cook it in the microscopic microwave they provide. Instead of looking for standard hotel rooms, look for ones that offer full kitchens or, better yet, find a house or condo to rent for a few nights. You’ll make up the little bit of extra expense by the saving on not eating out for every meal (or at least that’s how I rationalize it, although I’ve never bothered to do the math).
The second key ingredient is to bring your own knife. Our “mangler” experience has been repeated several times, although not quite to the extent of our first bad knife episode. Assume that whatever cooking knives you find in your rental kitchen will be as dull as a butter knife and bring at least one sharp knife from home. If you luck out and find a place with decent knives, you and whoever else is cooking with you can chop veggies together (but don’t plan on it, we’ve only stayed in one place where this actually happened).
Bring some basic ingredients from home as well. Most kitchens will have salt and pepper but that’s about it. Packing a few of your favorite spices so you don’t have to buy a whole jar just to add a sprinkle here and there will pay off. A small jar of cooking oil is also nice to have. If you are going to be traveling for a while and you’ve got room in the car for a cooler, pack some eggs or any veggies that won’t make it until you get home. We also pack tea, coffee and sugar so we don’t have to go searching for some first thing in the morning in a new town.
Jon is the breakfast cook in our family and he is rather particular about his egg pan, so we pack one with us. If you’ve got a kitchen utensil you feel naked without and you’ve got the space, by all means bring it along. However, I would recommend not bringing along the Kitchen Aid or the bread machine. There is a point of diminishing returns.Once you arrive at your kitchen away from home and scope out what kind of equipment you’ll be dealing with, it’s time for the fun to begin. Wander around town and check out the local shops. Is there a co-op or a small grocer that might have some local products you won’t find anywhere else? Is there a farmer’s market or a fish shop to pick up what’s fresh and local? How about a winery or brewery for just the right accompaniment to your meal? Can you actually cook all those great ideas in your less than well-stocked kitchen?
Be creative and fearless with your away-from-home creations. The great flavor of fresh local ingredients help you keep your recipes simple yet you’ll still wind up with a delicious dinner. Some of the best dinners we’ve made on the road have involved less than five ingredients and were put together quickly after a day of sightseeing.
There is one drawback to cooking on the road and that is that you still have to do your own dishes. There’s no waiter to whisk them away for you. But at least you’re doing them in some beautiful location, and if you did your research on lodging well, you might even have a view of the Pacific Ocean to do them by.
Dilly Bean and the ManglerMakes 5 pints
This recipe has nothing to do with travel cooking but I just made some this weekend and I can’t wait to eat them. They won’t be ready for a couple of weeks, just when I get back from a short trip so they’ll be a nice homecoming present.
2 lb. whole green beans, tips and tails removed and trimmed to fit upright in pint jars
1 t. red pepper flakes
5 dried dill heads or 2 t. dill seed
10 cloves garlic, peeled
3 c. vinegar
3 c. water
¼ c. non-iodized salt
5 pint canning jars with lids and rings
Sanitize the jars, lids and rings in boiling water for 5 minutes. Drain the jars and add one dill head, 1/5 t. of red pepper flakes and 2 garlic cloves. Divide the beans between the jars, standing them upright and packing them in as much as possible.
Boil the vinegar, water and salt together in a saucepan. Pour the hot liquid over the beans and fill to ½” of the top of each jar. Seal the jars with lids and rings and place in a simmering water bath. Once the bath returns to simmer, cook for tem minutes. Remove from heat, cool, and make sure the jars are sealed. Store for 2 weeks to let the flavor develop.
⁃
