How to Make Great Vacation Food (No Lots of Tools)
Vacation rentals aren’t quite suitable for home cooking, but good food can be prepared using limited tools. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Cooking vacation rentals seems like a great idea. What could be more cozy than home cooking by the fireplace with your loved ones after a day out, hiking, biking or skiing? Then you open the cabinets and find a tiny saucepan, a set of dull knives, a glass cutting board, a can opener, and a rancid bottle of butter that expired 2 years ago. If you’ve had your share of culinary disasters on vacation, don’t despair. Great meals are possible in even the poorest of cuisines, but they require careful planning, careful preparation, and smart packaging. After 10 years of trying, I finally figured it out on our recent ski trip. I fed a group of 9 people twice a day, and that didn’t stop me from doing whatever I wanted.
Here are some lessons I’ve learned the hard way:
- Do not cook foods that are too cooked (steak, fish, etc.). Scaling this up to a large number of people and different preferences of the degree of readiness is difficult, especially when you take into account unfamiliar equipment.
- Carcasses and stews are your friends. They can be cooked before vacation and reheated without any problems. If you think life will get a little hectic right before you travel, clear the road ahead of time and freeze it.
- The pressure cooker is a lifesaver. Stuffing food is not a waste of space in your car. If you are a multicooker lover, you can take it with you, but the pressure cooker has many advantages: 1) it is thinner and takes up less space in the machine, 2) does not require preliminary planning, and 3) it also works like a regular large pot, which is not always available in country houses. Bonus: if you didn’t manage to start your dinner in the morning, don’t worry – it will be ready in no time.
- Always bring a cutting board, knife and tongs with you. Depending on what I plan to cook, I also bring a spatula and grater with me.
- The main items of the pantry. Be sure to bring salt (it will probably be a little, but almost certainly not the salt you are used to), some acidic ingredients (my favorite lemons, Dijon mustard, pomegranate syrup), black pepper in a meat grinder, oil and squeeze out a bottle of olive oil.
- Ingredients that lose moisture during cooking are best done in advance. They will be smaller and easier to transport. These are also the types that require chopping, stirring, and attention (such as mirpois for soups, caramelized onions, stews, fried vegetables, etc.).
- Ingredients that cook in water and expand during cooking are best cooked locally. These are your beans, grains, pasta, etc. They are much more compact when dry.
- Bring one large Teflon skillet with a lid . Teflon pans are great for cooking eggs, frying vegetables, and reheating stews. While the stainless steel skillet is my workhorse in my home kitchen, it doesn’t know how to cook egg dishes, and its main advantage of giving me brown chunks to remove icing isn’t that big of a deal. Convenience is there. On vacation, I skipped steaks with less red wine. Instead, I prefer stewed short ribs – even in the kitchen, where there is nothing but a microwave, dinner is served.
- Leave the last pinch of salt to warm up. Most vegetables will become duller when cooked in advance. But a pinch of salt and a little lemon juice will wake them up.
If you’re looking for ideas on how to make this theory a reality, here’s what we’ve got for this last vacation:
- Fried cheese with caramelized onions, apples and pecans (caramelized onions are already cooked and cheese is already sliced)
- Chopped Pea and Ham Soup (carrots, celery, onions, garlic and thyme were already cooked and I used a pressure cooker to make the whole thing in a 10-minute slice of cake)
- Lentils with bulgur,caramelized onions and fried tomatoes (lentils are lightning fast in a pressure cooker, but bulgur just needs to be soaked for 30 minutes. I did both on the spot.Caramelized onions and fried tomatoes were already cooked)
- Braised pork shoulder with osso buco sauce , pasta,green beans (the pork was already cooked, it needed to be reheated, and the pasta and green beans were cooked on the spot)
- Farro mushroom risotto, fried cauliflower (the onions and mushrooms were already cooked and the cauliflower was already fried, it was only necessary to reheat it. I used the pressure cooker to make the farro so no stirring and it was done in 10 minutes)
You will likely be able to adapt some of your favorite recipes for your trip by following the guidelines above. Don’t get hung up on the perfection you strive for at home – unless your friends are professional chefs, they’ll likely be overwhelmingly impressed anyway!
Food Packaging During Ski Holidays | Besides salmon
Photo by Karlie Lesser and Art Drauglis .