How to Eat QECH-Style While on Vacation

The elements of a perfect vacation:

• spending time with family
• relaxing and having fun
• eating good food

All these and more were present in abundance during my recent vacation with my family. We rented a huge house in Kentucky, and spent 5 days seeing the nearby sights (namely, the Creation Museum), popping into the pool when the rain stopped for a moment, playing games (daily Wii and Dutch Blitz tournaments), watching movies, and pigging out to our hearts’ (and tummies) content.
Good times!

Thanks to my sister, Jennifer, and her capable organizational and cooking skills, we also enjoyed a great variety of tasty, healthy, homemade food throughout our vacation (not counting the random assortment of very unhealthy snacks like Oreos and potato chips that also abounded) without busting our budget.
Besides the unavoidable costs of lodging and airfare (or exorbitant gas prices), food is one of the biggest expenditures on the average vacation. A family of four can easily spend $20 on every meal, even at the cheapest fast food joint. Add that up, and for a weeks’ vacation, you’ve spent $300 or more on food alone. Eat anything more than value meals and that price ratchets up considerably.
I highly doubt any of you spend anywhere near that much on a weeks’ worth of groceries, at least I hope you don’t (unless your family is much larger than 4). If you’re interested in (or require by necessity) a leaner food budget for your vacation, there are definitely ways to cut costs, and yet still have fun and relaxation. For 10 adults (occasionally more) and 4 kids (double that number for a few meals), we spent somewhere between $200 and $300 on groceries for the week (not counting extra snacks for the fun of it, and not counting what I spent on additional allergen-friendly foods for my Certain Little Someone). This cost was divided between 4 family units and 4 or 5 individuals, making our personal budget approximately $50. Not bad, considering that’s what I usually spend on groceries for the week, anyway.

Your vacation likely looks different from mine, but here’s what we did for food and how we did it.
1. Rent a house (or hotel room or time-share) with a kitchen. Even if the kitchen only has a fridge and a microwave, you can prepare most of your food in-house, without resorting to constant eating out at restaurants.
2. Develop a menu that features easy basic foods that can be quickly prepared. You don’t want to spend all of your vacation in the kitchen, and you don’t want to bring (or buy) all kinds of specialty ingredients either. My sister did a fabulous job creating a menu with easy-to-make and easy-to-please foods. Some items on our menu:

• spaghetti
• pulled pork on rolls
• lunchmeat sandwiches
• eggs & bacon (yes, breakfast, too!)
• tacos
• tuna sandwiches

3. Create a shopping list from your menu. Figure out what foods you can bring from your own pantry that you don’t have to buy (condiments and basic spices, for example), or what might be available at your vacation home (ours already had some very basic spices and oil, plus some condiments and other items in the fridge).
4. Determine the best place to buy the items from your shopping list and bring what you can. There was a Walmart and Sam’s Club about 15 minutes from our vacation rental, so we bought most of the food there. We also were able to pick up a few things in the weeks preceding our vacation, taking advantage of sale prices and coupons for items like pasta sauce, tuna, cereal, and snacks. If you are driving and not flying, it’s a great idea to bring as much as you can with you so that you can get the best price possible.
5. Share the cooking and cleaning burden. We didn’t have a set schedule or rotation for who cooked and cleaned when, but that’s certainly an option. We all just chipped in so that no one person was responsible for cooking all the food for everyone. It is vacation after all; no one wants to be stuck in the kitchen the whole time!
6. Plan ahead, and budget for, meals at restaurants. What’s vacation for if you don’t enjoy a meal out once or twice? Our vacation happened to coincide with Father’s Day, so we treated the dads among us to a meal out. We also planned in advance to order pizza in for one dinner.
7. Bring snacks, food and drinks for the road. This is one area where I could definitely improve. We don’t have a cooler, although we now have a vehicle large enough to bring one, so we can’t really bring anything perishable. I did bring all our snacks for the road, but it would have helped our budget tremendously to have been able to pack some sandwiches and the like for at least one meal on the road.
8. Bring coupons for nationwide restaurant chains. If you’re going to be driving over a couple days, you probably won’t be able to pack all the food necessary for your meals. I know I wouldn’t want to try to keep foods fresh for any longer than one day, especially in hot weather. It’s likely that you’re going to have to pick up some food somewhere along the way, so be prepared! I brought along all our current restaurant coupons, and we were able to eat at Denny’s for less than $10!