I often spend a week with my family vacationing in a timeshare in Colorado. Food has been a big issue on vacation. Some members feel pressured to eat all the leftovers, most tend to overorder, and someone always ends up having to throw out a bunch of food and worse yet figure out how to transport food on a 12+ hour drive.
One of the other difficulties is that many people don’t want to feel boxed in with plans. However, it’s too expensive for anyone to pick up the tab on 10+ meals out.
Vacation Meal Planning:
This year, my mother proposed that each family member plan and take charge of one meal and that we plan out which meals would be eaten out. Arriving hangry is a real problem so everyone agreed to do supper as they arrived on their own.
My mother’s proposal was only mentioned the day we all arrived, so I’d only loosely been thinking about things to experiment with meal-wise. I had considered trying to perfect a seared sirloin, but that’s not much of a meal. Additionally, the unit had gas so it wouldn’t help me replicate it at home. I have an electric burner and stainless steel cookware only.
I was also thinking about trying to perfect a pesto since I’m struggling with nightshades, especially tomatoes. Tomato is one of those things that’s used in almost all the simplest recipes, but a pesto can almost always stand in (i.e. pasta and pizza). Here are some additional ideas of how to use pesto.
Grocery Shopping on Vacation:
My meal was planned just hours before lunch. My sister quickly confirmed that pesto was made with the ingredients that we thought were in it. Except, I didn’t recall that pesto had pine nuts. That may be an issue. I’ve been trying to limit seeds and nuts. Only time will tell if it’s an issue for my mast cell disorder, but I can still handle a few tablespoons of peanuts once or twice a month. It may just limit other nuts.
I’m not one for measuring things so I didn’t select a recipe. We also didn’t know how many people would eat the meal but Italian typically goes over well. It was difficult to find fresh basil but thankfully, they had these little cups of basil. The pine nuts also only seemed to come in a bag. In addition to the ingredients below, I had picked up fresh garlic.
Since there were only a few hours to prepare the meal, we opted to purchase a rotisserie chicken and it sliced at the deli. My sister is a big fan of cheese stuffed pasta. I don’t know that anyone else really prefers it. We discussed quantity and wound up with two Family Sized bags of pasta. I suspect we could have made one bag work. We ended up with too much chicken, which made a good snack, and too much pasta that my sister snacked on later too.
My mother has resorted to bringing a bag of kitchen things that includes her favorite herbs so she won’t have to keep throwing away barely used ones. It also includes cooking items they just never seem to have in the unit. I’m not so particular but my father is. For this meal, all ingredients were purchased new and we used the cookware in the unit. I’ll share how this turned out in the next post.
Changes in eating on Vacation:
I have noticed that I tend to eat smaller meals on vacation and not snack much either. To a large degree, I think drinking more and being more active makes me less tolerant to feeling full. I wouldn’t think twice about reducing the amount that I would have cooked per person on vacation, especially for a lunch.
Supper doesn’t always follow the same trend but sometimes does. We spend many of our suppers out at local restaurants so those meals were heavy.
Someone was probably at the grocery store every day of vacation so it wasn’t a big deal to get more as needed.
Check out last week’s post about how I prepared my home kitchen to leave for vacation. I’ll get into the pesto experiment and mishaps in my next post.