Vacation Menu Planning

A few days before we left for our vacation I jotted down quickly on a piece of scrap paper a menu for the days we would be gone.  My mother laughed at me saying that I really wouldn't be on vacation if I was still having to cook.  Yes I would have enjoyed a "vacation from cooking" but we always do this.  When we go somewhere, anywhere even if it is a soccer game an hour a way I will pack up a cooler with sandwich stuff for our dinner. 

To make my menu as simple as possible - because after all it is vacation I used some of my ready made foods and I also made up some things before we left. 

For example:

Breakfast
I took along a package of pop tarts and a bag of cereal (we bought milk once we arrived) BUT I made up a double batch of my homemade biscuits and enough sausage patties to go along with the biscuits before I left.  I also pulled two loaves of Friendship bread out of my freezer.

Lunch
I have to admit because we tended to sleep a little later and were out driving and sightseeing so much we skipped lunch most days but I took along the fixings for ham and cheese sandwiches on the days we did eat lunch.

Dinner
From out of my freezer I took a bag of frozen spaghetti sauce, hotdog sauce,  and taco meat.  For spaghetti night all I had to do was warm up the sauce and make our pasta.  We had hotdogs a couple evenings (one over a camp fire) but all I had to do was warm up the hotdogs and sauce.  And on taco night I just warmed the meat and chopped my veggies.  We ate good food that filled us up and saved a lot of $$ in the process. 

It wasn't really all that hard either because of the prep work that I had done at home.

What about you?  Do you generally eat out while on vacation or do you cook?  If you cook do you take along already prepared foods?

2 comments:

  1. We always cook while camping. It's part of the fun!

    When doing road trips, conferences and that sort of travel, we try to keep a cooler stocked with things like yogurt, bread, cheese, fruit, etc. That gets us through at least two meals a day. We might splurge and eat out once a day. But, we don't really do fast food. So, it's either a Mom-and-Pop place or the grocery store.

    Last summer we took a trip from Los Angeles to San Antonio for a conference and did the whole trip completely fast food free! We've blogged about the Fast Food Free Challenge. Perhaps it would be of interest:

    http://theprovisionroom.com/2012/07/11/lessons-from-the-road/

    And our YouTube video comparing the drive thru with the grocery store:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-D-S437AHfs

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  2. I try to take as much as possible with us, too. Even just thinking to grab some string cheese and trail mix to take with us in the car for a trip shopping can help us avoid an emergency trip to the drive thru if we're out longer than expected.

    I really liked the biscuits and sausage idea for traveling. Sounds very portable and filling, and it's something we really like.

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