How To Cook Great Food On Holiday (Without A Lot Of Tools)

Holiday rentals don’t exactly lend themselves to home cooking, but it is possible to make some good meals with limited tools. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Cooking in a holiday rental seems like a wonderful idea. What can be more cozy than a home cooked meal by the fireplace with your loved ones after a day or hiking, biking, or skiing? Then you open the cupboards and find a tiny little pan, a set of dull knives, a glass cutting board, a can opener, and a rancid bottle of oil that expired 2 years ago. If you’ve had your share of vacation cooking disasters, don’t despair. Lovely meals are possible even in the worst kitchens, but they require careful planning, advanced prep, and smart packing. After 10 years of trying, I finally got it right on our recent ski trip. I fed a group of 9 twice a day and it didn’t interfere with all the fun things I wanted to do.

Here are some lessons that I’ve learned the hard way:

• Don’t cook anything with sensitive doneness (steak, fish, etc). Scaling that to a large number of people and different doneness preferences is tough, especially when you take into account unfamiliar equipment.
• Braises and stews are your friends. They can be made before holidays and reheated with no hassle. If you think life will get a little hectic right before your trip, make them way in advance and freeze.
• A stovetop pressure cooker is a life saver. It’s not a waste of space in the car if you stuff it with food. If you are a slow-cooker person, you can bring that instead, but a stovetop pressure cooker has many advantages: 1) it is thinner and wastes less space in the car, 2) it doesn’t require planning ahead, and 3) it doubles as a regular large pot that is not always available in vacation homes. Bonus: if you didn’t manage to start dinner in the morning, no worries — it will be done in no time.
• Always bring a cutting board, knife, and tongs. Depending on what I plan to cook, I also bring a spatula and microplane grater.
• Basic pantry items. Be sure to bring salt (they will probably have some, but almost certainly not the salt you are used to), some acidic ingredients (lemons, dijon mustard, pomegranate molasses are my favourites), black pepper in a grinder, butter, and a squeeze bottle of olive oil.
• Ingredients that lose moisture during cooking are best made ahead. They will be smaller and easier to transport. They are also the kinds that require chopping, stirring and attention (e.g. mirepoix for soups, caramelised onions, braised meats, roasted vegetables, etc).
• Ingredients that cook in water and gain in volume during cooking are best cooked on-site. That’s your beans, grains, pasta, etc. They are much more compact when dry.
• Bring one large teflon pan with a lid. Teflon pans work great for cooking eggs, frying veggies, and reheating stews. While a stainless steel pan is the workhorse in my home kitchen, it can’t do egg dishes, and its biggest advantage of providing me with brown bits to deglaze is not that important. Convenience is. I gave up on steak with a red wine reduction while on holiday. Instead I go for braised short ribs — -even in a kitchen with nothing but a microwave, dinner is served.
• Save the final pinch of salt for reheating. The flavour of most vegetables will get duller if they are cooked in advance. But a pinch of salt and a splash of lemon juice will wake them up.

If you want some ideas of how to put this theory into practice, here is what we cooked on our last holiday:

• Grilled cheese with caramelised onions, apples, and pecans (the caramelised onions were already cooked and the cheese was already sliced)
• Split pea and ham soup (the carrots, celery, onions, garlic, and thyme were already cooked, and I used a pressure cooker to make the whole thing a 10-minute piece of cake)
• Lentils with Bulgur, Caramelised Onions, and Roasted Tomatoes (Lentils are lightning fast in a pressure cooker and bulgur just needs to soak for 30 minutes. I did both on site. The caramelized onions and roasted tomatoes were already cooked)
• Braised pork shoulder with osso buco style sauce, pasta, green beans (the pork was already cooked, just needed reheating, and the pasta and green beans were cooked on site)
• Farro mushroom risotto, roasted cauliflower (the onions and mushrooms were already cooked, and the cauliflower was already roasted, just needed reheating. I used a pressure cooker for cooking farro, so no stirring and it was done in 10 minutes)

Chances are, you can adapt some of your favourite existing recipes for the trip using the guidelines above, too. Don’t get too caught up in the perfection you strive for at home — unless your friends are professional chefs, they will probably be mighty impressed anyway!

Packing Food on a Skiing Vacation [Beyond Salmon]

Helen Rennie teaches cooking techniques and food science at Helen’s Kitchen Cooking School in Natick, MA and on her YouTube Channel.

Photo by Carly Lesser & Art Drauglis.