I travel fairly often to teach classes that last two to three days. My hotels of choice are usually extended stay places that have SOME kind of kitchen facilities.
I always pack the following in my bags: K-cups of coffee and hot chocolate, a set of travel utensils (hard plastic set I got on Amazon, including a couple cooking utensils), a roll of plastic wrap, two lightweight microwave-safe plastic plates and a big bowl, an insulated travel mug and top, and a small stack of paper towels. I don’t trust a hotel to have any of this stuff available, even if it has a “fully equipped kitchenette.”
I also take Pop-Tarts in a crush-proof container, but that’s a different story. I will often stop on the way to the hotel to get some breakfast and snack items, but nothing for elaborate cooking. Very typically, I will order a pizza or bring home some take-out. Sometimes it’s a doggie bag. But I really want utensils, decent plates and bowls, and a way to wrap left-overs.
It depends on if the vacation is a “we are here to do things” or “we are here to not do things” type vacation.
On a “do things” vacation, I’ll obsessively plan out what restaurants to hit/local food to try in between the museums/parks/tours etc.
But some of my best vacations have been a cabin or a beach cabana for a few slow languid days of hanging out with friends and cooking together is a big part of the experience.
If the location is within driving distance, I’ll usually pack an entire cooler. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s annoying to procure on a trip, vanilla is always my go-to example. It’s so much easier to cook when you have stuff like vanilla, spices, demerara sugar, honey, hot sauces, dijon mustard, good vinegar, soy sauce etc. and you don’t have to trust the random assortment of leftovers of indeterminate age at your accomodations. I also pack a few small kitchen utensils like tongs, a peeler, pepper grinder, wooden spoon, citrus squeezer, chef’s knife, etc. since they don’t take up a lot of space and vastly improve your experience working in an unfamiliar kitchen.
Another thing I’ve started strongly preferring is to pack at least all the ingredients for the first meal from home (something simple like sandwiches or a pasta salad) so you have a solid plan for when you land and then to go grocery shopping locally after the first meal. You’re way less stressed because you’re shopping on a full belly and you can plan around what the kitchen is actually like (vs deceptive photos).
As much as I’m generally bored of Italian food most of the time, I find myself usually drawing from a very Italian inspired repertoire when cooking while travelling as the whole “simple ingredients, done well” ethos is very amenable to cooking from a sparse kitchen.
If it’s just the two of us I’d probably pick up drinks and snacks.
If it’s a bigger group and they want to cook, I have a travel cooking kit I’ll bring along. (I do cooking and bartending demos a lot. I also have a travel bar kit. Saves time.) But I’ll still probably do the grocery shopping locally if I can.
That’s a great way to put it. We rent a cabin to go fly fishing and we’ll usually cook a nice dinner one or two nights. Usually, we’ll just shop locally, but sometimes we’ll bring stuff from home in a cooler that we want to use in the dinner.
Recently I started a new strategy: A few days before leaving, I cook up a one dish meal that freezes well and reheats easily. Last time, it was a lentil/vegetable/ham soup. In its frozen state, it keeps the few foodstuffs in our little cooler cold while we travel. Then on our first night, when we’re tired from driving, it’s easy to heat up in the microwave for a no-fuss dinner.
We’re going to travel in a week, and I have red beans and rice cooking as I speak. That stuff freezes great and it’ll go with us for dinner on the first night.
Usually the kitchenettes with have minimal pots, pans, knives and utensils and they’ll be low-end in terms of quality. Set your expectations accordingly. But they are good for making simple meals when you don’t feel like going out. When we travel with kids, we often look for a kitchenette and use it at some point. There are times when it’s much more convenient to whip something up rather than try to get everyone to go someplace. But we usually don’t pack food to cook. We just do our shopping when we get there. Coffee is pretty much the only thing we bring with us.
What they said. Even in smaller locations there will be often a convenience store or something like that easily accessible so I can stock for that light-meal scenario.
For us it kind of depends; we tend to try to balance sampling local cuisine with saving money. So what we do is generally try to eat out one meal a day wherever we are at a local place, get places to stay with free breakfasts, and then eat one meal a day with whatever we bring/buy along the way. We take a cooler, and load it beforehand with lunch meat, bread, drinks, etc…
Often the meal we prepare ourselves is sandwiches, especially on road trips. But sometimes we’ll eat lunch out and prepare meals in the room if it’s got a kitchen of some sort. And sometimes, like last summer in Hawaii, we did two meals because we had a full kitchen and were near a grocery store, so we did breakfast and dinner in the room (well, suite really.). And on longer road trips, we usually try to reload at a grocery store somewhere in the middle.
And other times, it’s all-out, if we’re somewhere known for culinary excellence. New Orleans a couple years ago is a good example- breakfast in the hotel, then all the other meals were out in various parts of town. I’ll be damned if I’m making a sandwich in my room if I can go to any of the wonderful places there!
No, unless I’m going to a remote area where there won’t be any place to buy food. Otherwise, if I’ve got access to a kitchen or kitchenette, I’ll go to a supermarket for milk / cereal / some sort of local beer after I get there, and maaaybe sandwich stuff if I’m planning on a day of hiking or something. But mostly, trying new food is part of the point of traveling for me, so I’m not going to do any serious cooking myself.
My D&D group used to do an annual gathering, where we’d rent a condo at a resort in the Wisconsin Dells (a tourist area in central Wisconsin) which had a full kitchen; we’d play RPGs and hang out together for four days. We’d go out to eat once or twice over the course of the stay, but otherwise, make meals in the condo. We’d bring some food from home, and supplement that with a quick run over to a mom-and-pop grocery store in the Dells when we arrived.
Our last vacation hotel with a kitchenette was chosen due to it’s proximity to a grocery store. That said, I should have brought sugar, as the smallest amount we could buy meant that we had way too much for the 5 days.
If we have a kitchenette, then breakfasts and evening snacks will be at the room. We usually have a big lunch while we’re out during the day, and might have a late coffee+pastry stop in the late afternoon.
When we went to Islay, I brought the dry ingredients for blueberry muffins and single-use mini-loaf pans. I bought eggs, milk, butter and blueberries at the store there and then made mini blueberry loafs. I also brought coffee. That was our second trip there, and we already knew that groceries are expensive and the selection is limited. But I only brought dry goods as we were flying, plus the weight restrictions on flights to Islay are rather strict.
When we’ve done driving tours, we bring our own coffee, sugar, and breakfast foods (cereal, breakfast pastries) but everything else is sourced locally.
Yes, in fact eating was not really high on my list of things to do when I had a choice of the first two.
Coffee was the most important and meaningful thing I prepared in the room.
Finding decent cream for coffee was a chore, seems to be rare in some cultures.
I enjoy eating out, but I also enjoy cooking. I don’t enjoy schlepping heavy things. What I would do would depend on who I was travelling with, where I was going, and for how long.
If travelling outside your country, this means dealing with customs. I once brought various sealed new bottles of cooking spices into Mexico (with receipts). Customs were unenthusiastic, took and tested a few samples, and asked what dishes I planned on preparing - but let it go. You really don’t want to bring food into Australia, or many other places.
Some countries have high prices and mediocre food. It makes more sense to schlep expensive stuff to Iceland than to France.
In practice, schlepping food is only worth it if the equivalents are not available in the area, or would be cheap and light to transport but expensive to buy. If making curry, you might use small amounts of a dozen spices only available for purchase in much bigger quantities. So I could see that. Travelling long distances with cooking oil, meats, eggs, etc. may make sense driving to a cottage, or locally for a few hours - but is a false economy for flights and big distances. It makes more sense with bigger groups.
In summary, I like the ability and freedom to cook if needed. I’m happy to buy most ingredients at the place - including oils and alcohols. It is also fun to visit local markets. But given costs and customs, it might only make sense if you already have specific dishes in mind which use lots of spices or other relatively expensive or hard to find ingredients.
I might cook in that scenario, but a hotel with a kitchenette is something unknown to me, so not sure - I might just use it for preparing some sandwiches or breakfast.
When we take our main holiday, we typically book a self-catering holiday cottage or apartment or similar, which will usually have a fairly well-equipped kitchen, and we’ll cook most evening meals and maybe a breakfast or two. I have even baked cakes and made bread and such in self-catering holiday places.
The quality of the utensils can vary widely, so I usually take my cast iron skillet, and at least one decent sharp kitchen knife. I also take a little travelling spice kit that I usually stock with something like: salt, pepper, paprika, mixed herbs, curry powder and bouillon powder. We tend to try to buy local specialities (and I forage stuff where possible) and cook meals from what we can get locally.
I normally plan to cook on vacation. I have even brought ways to cook to various stays when I didn’t have things like a kitchenette. I almost always buy locally at my destination.
Yeah, sugar for my coffee is one of those things that I often bring because I don’t want to buy a 5lb bag just so I have a teaspoon for my morning coffee. I also keep a bottle of hot sauce in my travel kit.
I rarely cook at home, I’m sure not going to cook in a hotel room. However, when we rent a house for a week in the San Juan Islands, we do bring some food. (and a lot of beer and wine)
If we’re staying somewhere with a kitchen, it’s almost certainly a mobile home in France, and we’ve driven there. We’ll take basics - salt, pepper, tea bags, that sort of thing. For evening meals we’ve fallen into the habit of relying on ready meals - you can do that and eat well in France…
Here’s a story - in Brittany we bought a stash of ready meals, some of which - mysteriously - had a large W on the packaging. In a classic piece of Trep overthinking, I reasoned that whilst there isn’t really a W in French, there is a W in Breton. So this meant… what?
Eventually I realized it was W for Weighwatchers. And they’re very good too - ready meals in the evening cut down work and calories - (light) lunchtimes we’ll be out and about, so we’ll eat out and sample local cuisine.
If we’re in a location for a week, I can tell you exactly what we’ll have for evening meals. We’ll cook a vegetable curry* and that will do two nights. We’ll have (bought) breaded fish one night and four ready meals (three if we eat out one night).
