How to Travel and Still Come Home to a Home-Cooked Meal
Having some pre-cooked meals on hand and a system for remembering what those meals are will come in super handy, especially when life gets hectic and busy.
For most folks, summer usually means a ton of traveling. There are weddings galore, plus all the typical trips that the season brings.
In the past traveling used to really stress me out. I would worry about all the errands that I didn’t get to run and feel like I would start the week behind on the personal to-do list.
It also typically meant eating out the days after returning from travel because I hadn’t gone grocery shopping or done my weekend prep.
However, this summer I’ve been able to travel without any worry about my meals-upon-coming-home situation. In anticipation of being gone all these weekends, I got in the habit of doubling meals or components of meals that were easy to scale up and freeze. Items like soups, grains (e.g., quinoa, farro), pastas, stir-fries were all easy candidates for doubling and freezing.
And then because my freezer never seems to stay organized, I bought this magnetic white board. Every time a meal (or meal component, like rice) went into the freezer, I just noted it on my white board with the date. It has allowed me to easily inventory what meals and items I have on hand and make a post-travel meal plan. When they get used, they get crossed out or just erased from the board.
From the photo above, you can see that calzones are on the list (get the recipe here!), and I’m so looking forward to heating these up after our next trip.
Even if you’ve wrapped up all your travel for the summer, this is a great habit to get into just to manage your busy life.
As we near the holiday season, we’ll all have chaotic weeks and weekends that just seem to escape us. Having some pre-cooked meals on hand and a system for remembering what those meals are will come in super handy.
For me, between this new habit and the discovery of Instacart, a grocery delivery service, I feel so much more relaxed when I come home from a trip knowing that meals are prepared and any additional groceries we need for the week have been scheduled for delivery.
We first wrote about Instacart here, and since then, our meal plan service has teamed up with Instacart to help you save even more time in the kitchen. In just 1 click, you’ll be able to send your meal plan grocery list directly over to Instacart and have your meal planning and grocery shopping done for you. You can get more info about that in this blog post here.
Do you do anything like this to prepare for travel or busy times? Please do share your tips with us below in the comments.
Note: This blog post was originally published in September 2014 and has been updated with new and helpful info.
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