Every time I eat an apple, I’m reminded how much I enjoy apples and how rarely I eat them. It’s kind of bizarre, honestly.
It occurs to me that the same is often true, for me, of cooking. As I’ve mentioned before, I really hated cooking as a kid & refused to let my mother teach me how. I’m sure that’s the root of this oddball behavior of forgetting how much I enjoy cooking.
Well, let’s be honest, that and the fact that sometimes my house after a cooking binge looks like these photos. Or worse.
And, in further honesty, everything in that post about really tasty food “out.”
But, it turns out, I get antsy with not enough time in the kitchen. I hadn’t really realized that before the last couple of days.
You see, Bill and I were traveling recently. When we travel, we often try to find a place through Air BnB. While the site has a lot of options, we always go for a “full home” option, largely for the sake of privacy. However, we enjoy the fact that we have a fridge for leftovers & a guaranteed way to make hot drinks in the morning.
This trip, though, about halfway through it, I realized I wanted more. I wanted to try my hand at travel cooking.
I’m getting tired of all the eating out we do when we’re traveling. It’s expensive. It’s undoubtedly less healthful than if I made the same thing (even you, veggie frittata). There’s noisy kids. I eat all the fried things. (Yes, that’s a personal problem, but still.)
But it’s not just all those negatives. It’s also just that I’ve come full circle. Now, not only do I enjoy cooking and puttering in the kitchen, I am enjoying new challenges in the kitchen.
And I think that’s what happened. I looked around the first rental we had on this trip1 and thought, “Huh. I could make this work. Even with a propane stove.”
It will be a new adventure, and occasionally quite difficult. The second rental made that clear. It only had, as non-flatware utensils, some knives, a pizza cutter, a garlic press and the largest surface area turner I’ve ever seen. It now also has a wooden scraper as our landlords left it on our steps & email is to let us know they’d noticed the previous one had gone missing. But most of my usual tools would be unavailable2.
Oh, it also had a fancy cheese board.
So, the next time we’re in a spot like this, that’s the new plan. We won’t give up on eating out altogether, but I’d like to do this and we’ll both benefit. We started the last morning of the trip, though it wasn’t really cooking. We had breakfast of yogurt, fruit and granola on the terrace of our rental. We both enjoyed it.
So, do you guys have any tips for cooking while traveling?
fn1. Yes, we had two rentals this trip. The trip ended up extended by a couple of days, basically due to weather.
fn2. Including, no joke, a bottle opener. This place doesn’t have one. We had to pull out the multi-tools to open my beer one night. As a beer geek, I made a point of finding a sturdy, but inexpensive, bottle opener and leaving it behind. How is it that they have both a can opener and a corkscrew, two things that often have bottle openers on them, and NEITHER DOES?
