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If you take a large family or friend vacation this is going to be a great episode for you. Susie shares all the tips and tricks for planning and executing an easy meal plan for your group vacation. Click through to the full post sharing 30+ menus to start your planning!
Transcript
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Intro: Welcome. Welcome everybody to another episode of Let’s Make Dinner, your audio library of amazing dinner recipes you can always get on the table. I’m your host Susie Weinrich.
Susie Weinrich: What’s up everybody. Happy July. Oh my gosh. We just had 4th of July and this summer is flying by. I was looking at a calendar the other day and I think by the time the end of the swim team goes by and we have one more vacation, school starts in like a week and a half. So if you’re listening to this real time, I am hanging on to summer with every muscle in my body.
I had my alarm go off the other morning to wake up at 7:30 or whatever time, 7:30, 8 o’clock. Then I thought, you know what? I’m going to go back to sleep because in just a couple weeks, I’m going to have to get up every day anyway. So I slept in and it was wonderful.
Today on the podcast, we’re doing something just a little bit different. Normally I go over a full recipe and we talk about how to make it, the ingredients, tips and tricks, but this time I’m going to go over one of my most popular recipes. Nope, it’s not a recipe. One of my most popular posts that’s on my website, Mom’s Dinner. It is a post for 30 plus meals that are easy to make for large groups that go on vacation together. I consider myself a pro in this area because my family and my extended family have been going on one vacation together Every summer for, I don’t know, maybe 70 years. So this vacation even predates me to when my mom was a little girl. Through all of those years, as our family has grown and we’ve added more cabins, meal planning is Crrrrroosh. I mean, you have got to get the pre meal planning together ahead of time so that you can still enjoy the dinners together and everybody’s not eating in their separate cabins. It’s actually a time to come together and be together. So, I feel like, over the past, I don’t know, I’m like 45 or 46, I forget how old I am. I feel like over the past years of my adulthood and being a part of that menu planning, I have some great tips and tricks to share with you if you are planning a large group vacation.
Group Vacation Recipe Ideas: So we’re just going to go ahead and get right into things. The very first step is that you want to plan ahead. Do not wait until you get on vacation to start planning the meals. You want to plan a couple weeks ahead so that you can make sure everything is the way you want it and everything works for all of the families involved.
You want to plan a meal for each night. What I recommend is that each family plans one night where they’re doing the main entree. So let’s say a meat dish. Then all of the additional families will plan the side dishes to complement that main entree. Going along with that, you want to plan what dinners will be had on each night. So that each family can plan their vacation around the night where they have the most work.
Now, of course, when you’re planning on your meals, if you are planning to grill any of the nights or cook outside, you want to make sure as the vacation gets closer that you’re checking the weather so that you can make sure you’re grilling outside on a night with no rain.
The next thing you want to do is make sure, if you have never been to this vacation location, you want to make sure that they will have the supplies and tools and grills and ovens and dishes and pans that you need to make the dishes you’re planning.
If you’re vacationing with your family, this may not be an issue, but if you’re vacationing with some new families or people that you don’t know, you want to make sure that you are double checking any food aversions, food allergies, to make sure that everybody has something to eat each night. You don’t want to plan a pasta and bread night if half of your group is gluten free, right? Or, if you do, make sure you have gluten free pasta and gluten free bread.
The last plan ahead tip is make sure that you have enough dinners for all of the nights that you’re staying on vacation. But, the last night should be planned as a leftover night. You can even make a game out of it and every family has to see what they can make with the leftovers that they have in their room or cabin or house or wherever you’re staying. So those are all the plan ahead tips.
Now, here is my other tip for the meals on vacation. I recommend only planning dinner. Don’t plan lunch. Don’t plan breakfast for the group. Because usually on vacation, people are sleeping in. People are doing different activities. They have different likes and desires. Some people eat breakfast. Some people don’t eat breakfast. Some people may have slept in and they’ll eat a really late breakfast and not want lunch. I recommend just planning dinner. Now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to make sure that you have some breakfast supplies and lunch supplies. Keep it really simple here. Breakfast supplies to consider, maybe cereal, bagels and cream cheese, packaged muffins, granola bars. Eggs and toast, frozen breakfast sandwiches are really great, or yogurt, fruit, and granola.
Some lunch supplies to consider: maybe some store bought soup or like Panera style soup, grilled cheese, turkey and ham sandwiches, chicken salad sandwiches, chips. Veggies and fruit, ramen noodles, always a favorite, peanut butter and jellies, mac and cheese, frozen chicken nuggets, things like that.
We are talking about a large group vacation here. We’re talking a lot of people, maybe a lot of families. We talked about this in the beginning, making sure that each family or each person is responsible for one part of the meal. So maybe one family takes the main entree. Two other families take the side dish and another family takes the dessert. Or, if you’re a family that has multiple kids, give the kids some responsibilities.
Say on Tuesday, you’re responsible for getting the chips out. On Wednesday, you need to make a vegetable plate with ranch dip. Some easy things that the kids can do to be involved and still have duties so that it doesn’t all fall on the mom and dad.
We’re talking about vacation here. Let’s not make everything homemade. Let’s not make our own bread. Let’s not make our own salsa. Let’s talk about keeping your meals semi-homemade. To me, that means making sure that 50% of the meal is something homemade, economical, and 50% of the meal could be purchased ahead of time or maybe even brought from home, made ahead of time.
Some things to think about when you’re thinking about semi-homemade are maybe meat from your favorite barbecue restaurant, dessert from a wonderful bakery, bagged salad can even make it semi homemade. Some side dishes from your grocery store deli, maybe salsa from your favorite Mexican restaurant. Rotisserie chickens are one of my favorite things ever, ever, ever. They’re so versatile and so inexpensive from Costco. Frozen meatballs, that’s another great semi homemade because you can boil the pasta, warm up the sauce, make a really good salad, make some garlic bread, but then you have the frozen meatballs. Again, Costco is a great place to buy your frozen meatballs.
At the beginning of this episode, we talked about planning a dinner for every night, except the last night. You want to make sure that you plan one leftover night, and I think the last night is always the best night to do a leftover night, because you can clean out the fridge, especially if you flew to vacation. Chances are you are not taking all of the food home with you.
Do a leftover night. Maybe you have leftover veggies from a veggie tray. Cauliflower, broccoli and carrots roast up perfectly and make a wonderful side dish. Maybe you had planned to do a lot of scrambled eggs, but you have a lot left. Make some deviled eggs or make some egg salad. The last night is a great night to make sure that you’re using up all of the food. You can even do a cooking contest and say, everybody brings a dish with your leftovers and then we’ll vote on who has the best leftover makeover.
Another great way to think about making your meals really, really easy is doing some make ahead meals. Some things that are great, especially if you’re driving to vacation. Some great things to think about that you can carry to vacation in a cooler are soups that can be frozen and then thawed later or large cuts of meat like brisket, pork butt, chuck roast that can be cooked ahead of time and maybe shredded and served as barbecue pork or shredded Italian sandwiches, something like that.
So, let’s talk about a few make ahead meals. Within the make ahead meal category, I have about 12 different menus that include everything you need, including, we’ll just go over one here, an instant pot Italian beef sandwich night. So, if you did something like this, you could even cook that beef ahead of time. You want to make sure you have some crusty rolls. Provolone cheese slices, extra pepperoncinis, a pasta salad with veggies, french fries doctored up with maybe some parmesan cheese and garlic powder, and then a fresh fruit salad. That’s the menu that I have fully written out here on my website, MomsDinner.net. You can come over here and look at all of these different menus. I’ve got a taco night, an Italian meatball night, barbecue beef night, spaghetti and meat sauce night, chili, chicken noodle soup, and a beef ragu with pasta night.
Now, the next category on this post are super easy dinners. So maybe you have a really busy day where you guys are out doing activities or you’ve been out on a boat all day and you just don’t want to come home and make something super complicated. So some of the meals that I have planned out on here are fish stick tacos. Yes, that’s taking fish sticks and making tacos with it. Sloppy Joe’s, beef enchilada casserole. It’s a super easy version of enchiladas made in a casserole style. A chili dog bar. So making the really quick chili for chili dogs and then putting out maybe some chips, baked beans, store bought macaroni salad, maybe some potato salad and making a really easy dinner that way. A taco bar is also a really great idea. Meatball subs. We talked about those frozen meatballs. This is a great way to use frozen meatballs or baked Cajun salmon. Salmon cooks really fast in the oven.
Now let’s say you’re on vacation and you have some grills to use and it’s really nice out. You want to get out that grill. Here are some wonderful dinner ideas for your grill night. Hamburgers, pork burgers. Grilled chicken sandwiches, grilled steak tacos. When I say those, those are just the main entrees. I also include all of the side dishes to think about serving with each one of those items.
Now maybe you have a cold night. Maybe you traveled up north in the summer, or maybe you are traveling for a ski vacation and it’s nice and cold. Here are some wonderful soup dishes to serve for a large group on vacation. An Instant Pot Beef and Barley soup. A Classic Chili, Corn Chowder, an Instant Pot Creamy Potato Soup that is sure good. Or a Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup night.
Again, I’ve got all the side dishes written out here that you can come and check out. There will be a link in the show notes of this episode so that you can check out the full menus.
If you are traveling in your car, bringing your instant pot is a great idea. to keep dinner nights super simple. So I have a lot of different instant pot menu ideas. Then at the very end of the post, I go over some really easy desserts that you can serve for a crowd, as well as cocktails for a group. So if you guys like to have a few cocktails, there’s some great easy cocktails that you can make for more than two people.
Like I said, I will link this full post in the show notes for you. So the full post has full menus, not just the main entree. It has full menus and all of the tips and tricks plus more in the actual post. So I will link that for you. You can click through, you can pin it, read the whole thing, print it out, save it for later, share with your family, whatever you’d like to do.
Outro: So until next time, I hope this episode of Let’s Make Dinner makes your vacation time super easy and super amazing. See ya.
Double Dip: All right. Now it is time for the double dip. Thank you for sticking around, guys. I know this was a little bit of a different episode, but next week we are coming right back into going over recipes and dinner ideas. So next week, if you stick around and listen next week, we are making a Chipotle Chicken Burger, Grilled Chipotle Chicken Burger for dinner.
So let me go over all of the ingredients that you need to cook along with me next week. All right, this Chipotle Chicken Burger, it not only has ingredients for the actual burger that you grill, there’s also ingredients for an Adobo Aioli, which is basically just a flavored mayonnaise.
So, for the burger, you need flat leaf parsley, one can of chilies in adobo sauce. Garlic cloves, onion powder, kosher powder, black pepper, two tablespoons of milk, two tablespoons of mayonnaise, one slice of white or wheat sandwich bread. One pound of ground chicken, then four to five slices of pepper jack cheese, and nonstick cooking spray.
Of course you’ll need buns and your favorite burger toppings like lettuce, tomato, and red onion. For the Adobo Aioli, you need mayo, sugar. You’ll need that can of chipotle chilies in adobo sauce, you’ll just need one for both the burger and the sauce. Garlic and juice of a lime.
So I hope you guys will join me then and make that Chipotle Chicken Burger with me for dinner next week on Thursday. So until then, I hope you guys have a wonderful week ahead.
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