Cooking in a Hotel Room: How to Pack Spices for a Portable Kitchen

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Tonya Prater, Owner

A 2018 Ohio Travel Leadership Academy graduate, Certified Travel Ambassador, published author, and founder of the "Day Trips in Ohio" private Facebook group, Tonya is a former full-time RVer and aspiring van camper who balances her time between traveling with her husband's job, cherishing moments with her grandkids, and plotting her next road trip.

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I’m always on the look out for ways that I can save money when I travel with my family. For the most part, I’m often able to dig up some pretty good deals but one area we typically struggle to stay on budget is food. Nine times out of ten, if we spend more on a trip than I’ve planned, it’s not because we stayed at the most luxurious hotel I could find or because we bought one too many post cards. It’s because I didn’t budget enough money for food. Feeding a family of five, three meals a day on the road, can easily add up to well over $100 and that’s definitely not from eating at the best steak house in town.

Of course we pack snacks from home, find hotels that offer complimentary breakfast and prepare our own meals to save as much as we can.

Cooking in a hotel room has allowed me to feed my family great meals for a fraction of the cost that we’d normally spend to eat out while we travel. When my family heads out on our 10 day cross country road trip, you can bet that my portable kitchen will be one of the first items I pack but this time it will have a new addition.

While I was shopping at our local dollar store for travel surprises for my teens, I came across this handy container to store pills. I instantly thought it would be perfect to store the spices that I use most frequently when I cook. After all, just because I’m cooking in a hotel room doesn’t ever mean that the food will be bland and I don’t know about you, but space is a premium in our vehicle. I certainly don’t want to take it up with a ton of spice bottles and containers.

The pill container is perfect. Each individual compartment will hold about 3/4 of a tablespoon of spices and screws together tightly. A perfect way to pack spices in a portable kitchen! I could have made my containers really cute by spelling the names of each spice with stickers but a black Sharpie was quicker and cost less. In a matter of minutes I managed to fill and label my containers.

What tips can you share that help you save money on food when you travel?

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