Cooking on Vacation

Today I want to talk to you about cooking while you are on vacation. My husband and I just returned from a week at the beach, and we cooked nearly all of our meals in the kitchen of our vacation rental. I also put together a freebie to share my shopping list with you, you’ll find it below!

Annual Beach Vacation

Some of you know this, but my husband and I used to live near the beach in Wilmington, North Carolina. About five years ago, we decided to move to Minnesota. Yes, I know, that’s quite the change. Much of my family lives in South Dakota, and he was excited about having more hunting opportunities.

Before we moved, everyone told us how much we would miss the beach. Turns out, they were right!

So, we try to go to the beach once a year to visit. We don’t make it every year, but we have gone three times in the past five years. Thanks to a working partnership I have with Hobbs Realty, we stay in a Holden Beach vacation rental. This beach is my literal happy place, and this week is my favorite one of the year.

Fall Fishing

My husband (creator of Marshall’s Minnows) likes to visit in October to catch the fall fishing season. I don’t see him much once we arrive. He fishes all around the island, mostly in the East End inlet. I spend my time sitting in the sunshine while I read and relax and walking on the beach looking for seashells and other treasures.

My Friend Daisy

There is also a particularly beautiful golden retriever named Daisy who I’ve had the pleasure of knowing the past two years also. Her owners are our neighbors there, and she’s my people.

Cooking on Vacation

Anyway, while there are lots of really great restaurants in the area, we cook most of our meals in our vacation rental’s kitchen while we are at the beach.  This is a great way to not only save some money but to also eat healthy while you are away from your normal routine. There is a grocery store just a few miles away, but we try to go once at the beginning of the week and get everything we need.

Bringing a Few Things from Home

We also bring a few things from home. It is hard to buy groceries for just one week, and there are some things like herbs and spices, flour, sugar, etc. where it just doesn’t make sense to buy full-size products that you have no way of using in just seven days.

(Yes, I admit it, we brought this tomato from home. It was green and from our garden, and we ripened it in the North Carolina sunshine!)

For traveling with herbs and spices, I like to use these Small Resealable Zipper Bags. For the other grocery items we bring from home, I use heavy-duty freezer bags. I try to be conscious of our use of single-use plastic, so we do reuse the freezer bags as much as we can by washing in between uses.

The Meal Plan and Shopping List

My husband and I don’t do any official meal planning – not when we are at home and not when we are on vacation. However, we do keep essentials on hand and when it’s time to make dinner, we almost always have what we need at home.  We use the same concept when we shop for our week of cooking on vacation.

When I create my shopping list for our week at the beach, I try to keep it simple. I think about how many meals we will eat in the week, and consider breakfast, lunch, and dinner options. I factor in that he will likely be catching fish, and we will likely be buying additional seafood from the local markets. So, I don’t buy much protein from the grocery store – I leave it kind of flexible. Then, I just buy a variety of other ingredients – mostly whole foods – that are versatile and can be used to make whatever we decide to make each day.

Not sure what I mean? You are in luck! I’m SHARING my grocery list with you!

You will, of course, need to adapt it slightly for your tastes and family size, but this will give you a peek at how we do it, and hopefully give you a good start.

Cooking Meals on Vacation

I didn’t get photos of everything we made last week, but here are a few peeks:

A Couple of Meals Out

Now, don’t let me fool you. There is a burger joint in Holden Beach called Mankins Causeway Cafe and they make the BEST burgers with all the fixin’s – chili, slaw, mustard, and onions. We ate lunch here one day. This was the only Holden Beach restaurant we visited this year, though!

We also ate these amazingly delicious Chicago dogs in the O’Hare Airport on the way home. These are the things dreams are made of. Seriously.

By the time we buy the plane tickets to get to North Carolina from Minnesota and back, get the rental car, pay for our pets’ boarding, and everything else associated with a vacation – it’s nice to save a bit of money where we can by cooking in our vacation rental as much as possible.

Bringing Local Seafood Home

One other thing we do at the beach is to go buy fresh local North Carolina shrimp in bulk from one of the local seafood markets. We have an Igloo Marine Cooler, and we buy 35-40 pounds of shrimp and freeze them in freezer bags while we are there. (Again with the plastic use, I’m so sorry.) My husband also usually catches enough fish for us to freeze some of it, and we also bought fresh tuna steaks, lump crab meat, and scallops to bring home.

On the day we leave to come back home, we pack all of the local frozen goodness into our cooler and check it as a bag with the airline. You aren’t allowed to pack any dry ice or regular ice with it, but since it is all frozen when you put it in there – it stays frozen throughout the whole day and is still frozen when we get home and put it into our freezer.  I might not try it on a 100-degree travel day in July, but we haven’t ever had any issue in October (knock on wood.)

Talk about knowing where your food comes from, we can proudly say that most of the seafood we eat in a year comes from the fishermen who caught it (whether it’s my husband or those at the seafood markets in Holden Beach.)

In case you missed it above, here’s the link again to get my free shopping list:
How to Save Money and Eat Healthy on Vacation

Also, I did a video earlier this week discussing this topic, if you’d like to check it out.

As always, thanks for being here. If you use my shopping list, give me a shout in the comments below and tell me how you liked it!