Freezer Meals and Travel

Freezer meals make my day to day life much easier, but they are also very useful for travel when we drive and stay in a rented condo or house.  Now I'm not advocating bringing all your meals with you when you travel.  Trying new foods and discovering the local specialties is one of my favorite things about traveling.  For New Years we spent five days in New Orleans with my in-laws.  We definitely wanted to do some eating out because it's New Orleans!  However, eating out three meals a day for five days gets pretty expensive.  Plus we have little kids, which makes eating out not exactly an relaxing, easy experience.

A ride down the Mississippi aboard the Creole Queen.

Eating out all the time is expensive and difficult, but I really don't want to cook or clean on vacation. That's where the freezer meals come in.  I knew about the trip a couple months in advance, so when I did my freezer meal cooking I made a couple larger ones for this trip to accommodate the larger group.  We took a meatball casserole, green chile turkey casserole, and chicken curry (recipes to come).  For breakfast we took egg puffs, carrot pancakes, and savory muffins.

The Barataria Preserve is a swamp preserve in New Orleans.  I wasn't able to capture how beautiful it is, but it was gorgeous.  I highly recommend visiting.

Most days we had breakfast and dinner at the rental house and lunch at a restaurant while we were out.  We did have breakfast one day at a jazz brunch and another day we had dinner out because we were out late.  This plan worked out really well.  It was great to have a solid breakfast ready to put in the microwave every morning before we left and then to have a dinner ready to go in the oven when we got home tired from the day.  No one had to cook, and the cleaning was minimal.  We still got to try many of the wonderful foods New Orleans is famous for (muffaletta, gumbo, beignets, jazz brunch and more).  All the food was delicious both out and at the rental house.  We had a wonderful trip.

A house in the garden district that has a cornstalk wrought-iron fence.

For the New Orleans trip we planned ahead, and I prepared meals with that trip in mind, but freezer meals are super convenient for spur-of-the-moment trips too.  Last year we decided at the last minute to go to the beach for Memorial Day weekend.  The condo we rented wasn't really near a lot of stuff, and we mainly planned to spend our time relaxing at the beach and condo, not going out.  I grabbed a few breakfasts and dinners out of the freezer and we had our meals for the weekend.  It was great!