Our Northern hemisphere summer trip is always our longest trip away without any home base. This year, we were away for about 15 days, which according to Chris, felt like a longer trip than last year given that we had an overnight flight form New York to Santiago in June 2024. It felt like a good amount of time to be away to feel like we really got to reset and be offline. But at the end of this trip, while I am always a little sad the trip is ending, I’m actually happy to come back home, get back into my daily routine of exercise, work, and cooking. The part I tend to miss the most when I am away from home for a long while is cooking. A friend of mine thought I was crazy when I shared this, but I actually do mean it: cooking is one of my passions, so when I haven’t made anything in a while, my mind and hands tend to feel a little idle. Maybe at some point in the future, we could do an AirBnB where I could have access to a proper kitchen, cooking equipment, and be able to buy local ingredients to cook. But until then, this trip will always mean that we’ll be eating out the whole time, even if “eating out” can simply mean going downstairs to our hotel breakfast.

For dinner today, I made sure to soak lentils and rice the night before so that we’d have dal and rice as our base. I thawed some frozen chicken and frozen tomato onion masala. I trimmed the chicken and cut it into smaller pieces for a Malaysian style curry using the Sambal Lady’s Burlap & Barrel curry spice blend packet. The tomato onion masala got used in the dal I made in the Instant Pot. I cooked some jasmine rice in the rice cooker, and then I made two salads: Chinese-style cucumber salad, plus an arugula salad with beets, carrots, tomatoes, sun dried tomatoes, and toasted pepitas, tossed with a French-style vinaigrette. I also made a side of stir-fried bell peppers for the Pookster.

It always feels good to come back home from a trip and have home-cooked food that is less fatty, oil, salty, or sugary. I’m not saying all the food we eat out is salty, fatty, or oily, but well, you can’t really know what’s in your food unless you make it yourself. That’s what “home sweet home” is all about.