Kitchen Essentials We Never Leave Behind
My family loves to travel. We make an effort to budget for at least one special trip each year, usually alternating between big cities (Wife’s favorite) and something more exotic (usually my choice). Our 13 year-old son doesn’t get a say in the matter, but luckily seems to enjoy every destination. He still likes being with mom and dad 🙂 .
We discovered long ago that we prefer renting properties over staying in hotels. We’ve had great success with online property-rental services like VRBO. It’s amazing how quickly a rental property starts to feel like home in a way that a hotel room never does. Sure, we’re offered fewer services in a rented condo than in a hotel room, but to us, that’s often an advantage. We’re private people, and don’t necessarily want someone coming into our place to clean up every day. Besides, our mess has a certain pattern to it that only we can understand, and we have difficulty finding our stuff if someone cleans it up!
Of course, probably the biggest advantage to renting a property is that it comes with a (somewhat) complete kitchen. We know many people prefer to take a vacation from cooking when they travel, but we like to be able to eat some familiar foods, and enjoy preparing them ourselves. This is especially true of our son, who is a very picky eater. Besides, eating out can quickly get very expensive.
Although we try to choose properties that have fully-equipped kitchens, you can never be quite sure what you’ll find when you get there. To ensure we’ll be happy, we play it safe, and take these four essential kitchen items with us whenever we leave home:
- A chef’s knife. This one is an absolute must. Not only do most rental properties lack decent knives, the ones they have are virtually never sharp. We bring our freshly sharpened Victorinox Fibrox 8-Inch Chef’s Knife. By the way, we obviously pack the knife in our checked luggage when we fly, and have never been questioned about it.
Bonus suggestion: If you travel with a knife, or even if you just tend to toss your chef’s knife in a drawer (we wish you wouldn’t, but if you do…), it’s great to have a blade protector. We love the Victorinox BladeSafe.
- Our favorite pair of tongs. We use them daily at home, and our OXO 12-Inch tongs are just as indispensable when we’re away.
- An instant-read thermometer. We’ve said it before (and we’ll no doubt say it again), temperature control is the key to cooking food to the right doneness. A Thermapen Mk4 easily and safely fits in a suitcase.
- A kitchen timer. We prefer a triple-timer (3 visible readouts at a time). Ours is small and lightweight, and goes everywhere we go. Rental properties rarely have stand-alone kitchen timers! [Update, January 17, 2019: Our previous pick is no longer available. We’ve updated this post to include links to our new favorite kitchen timer.]
The above list assumes that we’re traveling by airplane. We bring a lot more with us on car trips!
