How To Cook While Traveling: 5 Tips For Great Meals
Do you like cooking your own meals while travelling?
Maybe you want to save some money by making your own meals on the go or you just want to eat well and cut out the junk food completely. Or maybe you even have a special diet that makes it challenging to eat out in foreign countries.
Whatever it may be, here are some travel hacks to make cooking while travelling a breeze.
Recipes Around The World
I recommend getting an app like the CookBook App to manage all your recipes, meal plans and shopping lists. This smart little app keeps your recipes with you, in your pocket everywhere you go!
When travelling to the furthest corners of the planet, you can come across some weird yet wonderful recipes. From scraps of paper torn from magazines on a plane, to blogs you discover through chatting to locals.
CookBook allows you to add all your favourite recipes by scanning with OCR (very futuristic!) or importing them from any website online, even from your favourite Pinterest board.
Internet however isn’t always accessible when you’re travelling so for me, so having my recipes accessible offline is super important. CookBook will save all recipe data & images locally on your device so they are safe in your pocket wherever you plan to prepare that next meal.
Plan Your Menu
Foreign supermarkets can be as confusing as they are fascinating. When it comes to cooking your own meals while travelling, the most important thing is to get organised!
What I love about CookBook especially, is the meal planning function which not only lets you add all your favourite recipes by scanning or importing them from any website online, even from your favourite Pinterest board, it also let's you plan out neatly your breakfast, lunch, dinner and all the snacks in-between.
Once you got your meals planned for the week, the app will give you a grocery list based on your diet. Talk about hyper-organisation on the go!
Opt For A Place With A Kitchen
The reason why I love Airbnb and housesitting is not only that you can find some very cool places to stay, but most of them come with great kitchens.
Especially when staying in a city for a longer time, I find it essential to be able to prepare and cook my own healthy meals. Choosing an apartment with a kitchen over a hotel room also allows you to feel homier and make your favourite dish if you're starting to feel homesick.
I actually find staying in hotels over a long period of time depressing and would much rather opt for an Airbnb apartment for the sake of routine and maybe even making friends with the neighbours next door. You never know when you need that local friend next!
If You Don't Have A Kitchen, Keep It Simple
If there is no way you can find an apartment to stay at because everything is overbooked or you are opting for a hotel room in the first few days of arriving in a new destination or worse, there is nowhere to eat out anywhere nearby your accommodation, fear not!
Often hotel rooms have a fridge, hot water boiler and cups and spoons, sometimes even a microwave, which are all handy tools to cook simple dishes in your hotel room.
So go ahead, and make the most out of these in-room appliances. Yes, even a hair dryer can melt cheese. And a coffee pot can cook you some rice or quinoa. Holy, haven't your meal options just expanded!
If anything fails, make yourself a bowl of muesli.
Store The Leftovers
Leftovers can sometimes taste even better the next day. Some meals don't even need re-heating as they will taste good when cold as well.
Make sure you have some ziplock bags handy and eat the leftovers no more than one or two days after you cook your meal.
If you want to make a whole new dish with the leftovers, the CookBook App has a great feature where you can search for leftover ingredients and it will find you a recipe that you can cook with those leftovers. Brilliant!
Take What You Can't Get From Home
If you have favourite spices that you know will be hard to get in your chosen destination, then it makes sense to bring these with you.
Sometimes countries like Bali or Thailand for example have an incredible cuisine and it may be worth giving local spices a try too.
Also, it may be worth thinking about bringing some essential tools for your travel kitchen kit, such as a veggie peeler, a good chef's knife, specific oils or even beeswax food wrap to store leftovers all fresh and food safe. Do you cook when travelling or rather eat out?
This post is brought to you in collaboration with CookBook App, a recipe manager accessible on and offline to store and organize all your favourite recipes.
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