How to holiday with kids, pots and pans in tow
Summary
Combining new cuisines with familiar flavours of home can make travel easier for kids—and adults
Who carries a granite pan and a silicone spatula in their check-in luggage for a three-day trip? The same parent who tucks steel bowls and small spoons into cabin luggage, so that their primary-schoolgoing kids have familiar, child-sized cutlery to eat with during the journey. As parents of three children—one aged 9 and two 7—with three persistent and very varied appetites, my spouse and I plan snacks for holidays before we make schedules.
A few months ago, in a little apartment at a ski resort in Switzerland, while I sliced Swiss cheese and stirred homemade, pre-roasted, ready-to-cook buttery millet khichdi, I glanced at my phone. My spouse was walking through the cold aisle at the alpine town’s supermarket, sending me photos of local spiced ham and salami. We were exchanging notes about which one seemed least processed. He’s always been vegetarian, the sole herbivore in our family of five. However, if our kids want to sample some meat products, he’ll dispassionately, albeit briefly, tolerate handling animal parts.
A short while later, we were all sitting around the warmly lit dining table, snowflakes fluttering past our street-level picture windows, eating a meal that to anyone in India or Switzerland would be utterly peculiar: Swiss-butter-finished millet khichdi spiked with curry leaves, turmeric and Guntur chillies, frozen petit pois straight from the bag (they tasted like sweet vegetal popsicle balls), and slices of Emmentaler and Graubünden cold cuts.
In cold weather, fledglings need constant fortification. Through the last 24 hours, our kids had snacked on all these: banana chips, walnuts and pistachios from a Khar market in Mumbai, some macadamias via Amazon, shards of supermarket schüttelbrot from South Tyrol, homey masala kurmura made by their grandmother, caramelly Mejdool dates bought D2C, rajma chips from a supplier in Mumbai, Granny Smiths from the local supermarket, Cosmix hot chocolate mix in cups of delicious full-fat Swiss milk, and freshly fallen snow a few metres up from our temporary home.
Also read: Home chefs bring global cuisines inspired by their travels
I have found that as they visit spots in India and across the planet during school holidays and long weekends, nothing makes kids more adventurous diners than the anchor of some familiar flavours. When the marginal utility of tuna maki starts diminishing, a masala khakhra session makes the segue to the next conveyor belt meal thrilling again. For me, as their mother, as their (I’d like to think) permanent snack charmer, and as a food and travel writer, I see this as win-win times five.
On holiday, when it comes to filling grocery bags, we let the kids lead. Renting apartments instead of hotel rooms helps us eat one meal out each day and cook two. We’re are typically at a local market within 24 hours of the start of our vacation, stocking up on basics and novelties, and plenty of local flavour all via grocery shopping. We might ration the Toblerone and the taiyaki (Japanese fish-shaped cake) but there are no bounds at the fruit and vegetable sections.
In Tokyo, we got white daikon radishes that made bhaji gully bottle gourds look minuscule, and found kaki persimmons that were somehow cuboid. The radish was as juicy as a melon, sweet and un-pungent, and we ate thick slices of the nutritional powerhouse with our meals, marvelling at it being the most kid-friendly radish we had encountered. Luckily, persimmons are also grown by Indian farmers, so they are now a regular feature in our winter fruit basket in Mumbai.
In our Grisons kitchen earlier this year, my son, who had developed an aversion to cheese, decided to sample the local Swiss supermarket staple Rolotini L’Etivaz à Rebibes, translucent double-layered rolls of slightly funky aged cow cheese. Since then, at home, he’s open to the idea of Kodai Parmesan and mozzarella in family meals. Sometimes, just like grown-ups, being hungry elsewhere in the world can make youngsters become more adventurous eaters at home.
Market visits are key, but we also know we’ve had an exceptionally successful holiday if the kids ask when we will go back for a meal to a restaurant where they tried something for the first time. We’ve had success with kaiten-zushi in Japan—it is fun for kids to pick from a selection of endlessly moving colourful plastic plates on a conveyor belt until they’re stuffed and sliding off their stools.
Six years ago, in Dubai, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant where the kids enjoyed the ätk lt bäyaynät, Ethiopian injera (fermented teff flatbread) with wots (spiced Ethiopian stews made with veggies, lentils or meat) that taste close enough to dosa and sabzi and dals made at home. In Singapore, we tossed tender cuts of meat, springy tofu skin, mushrooms and glass-like slithery sweet potato noodles into vats of bubbling broth and made a sport of fishing them out. Hotpot can count as family game night, if you play it right.
In Delhi, last month, we wound through lanes in Humayunpur to meet unfamiliar cousins of beloved dishes at a tiny Korean restaurant, including sushi-adjacent spicy tuna gimbap and ramen-ish ramyun. In Goa, towards the end of the pandemic, we hiked to a hidden waterfall, and after a sun-dappled swim in a lake in the middle of a forest, ate a Gomantak thali in a tarp-covered bamboo shack. Hunger is the best sauce, even when you are a five-year-old trying masaledar rawa fried fish for the first time. In Fort Kochi, years ago, one of the rare times we chose a hotel instead of an apartment with a kitchenette, we had the breakfast buffet. Sweet coconut milk alongside that textural marvel better known as appam made the vegetables in the ishtew go down much easier.
On a small village island in the Maldives, over New Year’s Eve last year, we were suddenly hit by a terrifying thunderstorm that made our windowless apartment’s roof rattle. We’d grown to love coconutty, lemony mas huni over the week we were there, but in the absence of being able to order the local flaked tuna salad, it was time to make the most of my trusty granite pan and silicone spatula. We’d carried a pancake mix with sattu and flaxseed powder and we had eggs, milk and ripe bananas, thanks to our supermarket run a few days ago. We made a dinner of pancakes with chunks of local sweet, aromatic mangoes and freshly shucked coconut flesh from the trees outside our door.
We ate the fruit from those same palm-sized steel bowls we had carried from home. The apartment’s kitchen was wanly stocked with beaten-up non-stick pans and half-melted black plastic ladles. I looked at my pan with fondness. On tough travel days, even parents need something easy and familiar to hold on to at meal times.
Also read: How restaurants plan child-friendly menus
Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi writes on food, travel, and design. She posts @roshnibajaj on X and Instagram.
