Eat This. With That.

This post is about eating, not cooking.

Does anyone else find it ridiculously hard to eat healthy while traveling? I don't have such a hard time when I'm traveling with my family - we often rent a house or condo, which gives us a kitchen on hand that I can stock with our usual foods. But when I'm traveling for work, at the mercy of other people's schedules and menus, I have a terrible time making the best choices.

This past trip I was determined to be better. So when I had a meal break with no obligatory dining partners, I took a 15 minute walk from my hotel to a great salad place, got a huge salad with lovely romaine lettuce, roasted chicken, carrots, tomatoes, chick peas, and cucumber, and brought it back to my hotel room to eat in my remaining free 10 minutes (all the while quite pleased with my 30 minutes of fresh air and healthy meal option). Only to find that I had returned with no fork (and no time to go find one). Dammit!!! And it's not like you can eat salad with your fingers, though I was so hungry I was about to. Until I looked around my hotel room and came upon the ice tongs. So there I sat, eating my frickin' healthy food, with hotel ice tongs.

Lesson learned. Because I've never met a cheeseburger that required a fork.

Happy holiday weekend to all, and a special thank you to our service members.

On the Road Again

This is how brilliant I am - I decide to start posting again right as I'm about to take back to back trips. Just smashing.

The first one is a road trip to the mountains with my boys (all four of them - sons, husband, and dog) (I'll be the crazy lady strapped to the roof of the car) for a family wedding. I think my packing list is longer than my senior thesis, and it has one very, very important section: food. We've rented in a house in a fairly rural area, and are schlepping four days worth of food on a 6 hour car ride.

So here's a question for you: if you had to pack knowing you couldn't get to a grocery store for 4 days (but also knowing your dinners are covered), what would make your packing list?

Here's mine:
Coffee + half & half
Diet Coke
Coke Zero (yes, caffeine is the secret to happy parents traveling with little boys)
Pumpkin bread
String cheese
Goldfish crackers
Yogurt
Milk
OJ
Eggs
Bagels & cream cheese (crap, as I write this I remember I completely forgot to stop and get bagels this afternoon. Guess we'll be picking them up on our way out of town tomorrow. See, this blog is good for something!)
Bread
Good NY sharp cheddar cheese
Pickles (because what good is a grilled cheese sandwich without pickles on the side?)
Apples
Strawberries
Blueberries

Things that have occurred to me that I forgot to get in addition to the bagels:
Peanut M&Ms
Wine
Wine
Wine
Cheese, crackers, good salami, grapes
Bottle opener

And on that note, I'm off to do one more grocery run and more packing...