Are you making plans for your 2009 vacations? Or are you, like many of us,
wondering if you’ll be taking a vacation at all? Last summer people stayed home because of high
gas prices. This year the financial meltdown has many wondering when, if ever,
they’ll be able to take a real vacation again.
I’d like to suggest a vacation that my husband, Peter, and I have been taking for
several years now. We’ve always had a wonderful time and afterwards, we were refreshed, relaxed and
reinvigorated; not least because we had no fatigue from a long car trip or
flight, worries about bad weather, road conditions or flight delays. In fact,
we never leave our house.
I’ve written about vacationing at home in Illinois Times before — last March, in fact; and parts of this column are taken from that earlier one.
But it seemed especially appropriate — and especially worth repeating — in these financially troubled times.
It may seem as if a home vacation wouldn’t be all that special, but the truth is that my husband, Peter, and I, like most
people these harried and hurried days, rarely take time to savor the home we’ve created — on which we’ve spent a lot of time and more money than we like to contemplate. More often
than not, it’s a nice backdrop to a host of activities, some pleasureful, but most of which
are the “have-to’s” of modern life.
Vacationing at home, we’ve found, doesn’t require much effort, but does require some planning. Surprisingly, the biggest
effort — the hardest thing, especially the first time — was not giving in to guilty feelings that we should be doing something, not just lazing around. We kept reminding ourselves that if we’d traveled, we wouldn’t be feeling guilty. Our kids were grown by then, but I’d think that, depending on ages and level of cooperation, it would be possible
to vacation at home with children, especially in midwinter when there are fewer
activities.
Planning is crucial for a successful home vacation. Here’s a checklist we’ve come up with over the years:
• Decide which time(s) of year work best for you. Midwinter’s our favorite. Summer hasn’t been as successful when we tried it, but I know a Lake Springfield family that
takes an annual week-long vacation at home in the summer, enjoying their boat
and lazing around the pool.
• Make sure the house is reasonably clean and tidy. Nothing makes those nagging
guilty feelings shout louder and be harder to resist than piles of dirty
laundry and dishes or floors that need cleaning. Minor repairs need doing? Plan
on getting them done ahead of time, or plan to deal with them at a later date.
• Make a rough plan. It shouldn’t be a tight schedule — that’d defeat the purpose — just a concept of how things will play out. The planning should be done jointly
and the activities be ones you both enjoy. What will you do? Reading, hiking,
cards or games, watching movies, or even working on a creative project
together? Will you stay in the entire time, as we do, or go out for some meals
or to movies? Once you’ve decided, be sure to get necessary items in advance. Nothing spoils home
vacations more than fighting Saturday shopping crowds.
• Meal planning is one of the most important parts of a successful vacation at
home; the more specific you are here, the better. Peter and I both like to cook
and we like to cook together — in fact it’s something we’ve done together since our first dates. Cooking is an integral part of our
vacations at home, but our rule is that the preparations must be simple and,
most importantly, don’t create huge messes. On other occasions, we enjoy collaborating on an elaborate
meal like the Asian menu we recently made that took three entire days to
prepare (we finally sat down to eat late Sunday night) and literally used every
pot and pan we have — and we have a lot of pots and pans. We had fun, but preparing it and cleaning up the resultant
mess was far from relaxing. For our home vacation meals we try to make some
elements ahead, and keep last-minute prep and cleanup to a minimum. Write out
menus, make a shopping list, and be sure you have everything you need before
your vacation begins.
Breakfast might be an omelette, or we may pre-buy and freeze some of the
fabulous croissants and breakfast pastries from Incredibly Delicious (they’ll be happy to tell you the best way to reheat them). Lunch might be a soup such
as French Onion that we’d frozen earlier in the year, or sandwiches made with special ingredients.
Dinner can be as simple and luxurious as a good steak, baked potato and salad — easy even if you don’t like to cook. Or how about lobsters? — both Schnuck’s and Meijer’s will steam them perfectly, so all you have to do is warm them; or king crab
legs. Melt a little garlic butter and you have a feast. If you don’t want to cook at all, consider ordering carryout. Even upscale restaurants not
normally associated with carryout are happy to prepare a meal you can take
home.
• Splurges: With the money we’ve saved on transportation and hotel, we always indulge in some luxury foods not
in our normal budget. Prime dry-aged steaks, shell oysters or other seafood,
fresh wild mushrooms from the Pacific Northwest and caviar, are some of the
things we’ve mail-ordered for various home vacations. We also stock wines that are usually
only for special occasions, always including at least one bottle of Amarone, a
rich, warming, unctuous red that just begs to be sipped in front of that
warming fire.
Once our pantry and wine cellar is stocked, the house clean, advance
preparations made, firewood stacked and ready and books, magazines, and DVDs
lay waiting, we’re ready to slip into something comfortable, sit back, relax, and enjoy our home
— and each other.
image-1]
Porcini are among the most flavorful — and highly prized—mushrooms. As good as they are fresh (and I’ve only been lucky enough to have fresh ones a very few times in my life),
drying them intensifies the flavor. I buy them in pound containers in Italian
groceries in Chicago and St. Louis, but they’re available in small packs at Angela’s (1535 MacArthur Blvd. 787-7922) and at several local groceries. This rub is
one of my favorite treatments for steak — absolutely delicious without overwhelming the flavor of the steak itself.
PORCINI RUB FOR STEAKS
1 oz. dried porcini
1 T. minced garlic
1 T. freshly ground pepper
1 T. hot pepper flakes, or more or less to taste
1 tsp. dried thyme
1 T. salt
3 T. dark brown sugar
7 T. extra virgin olive oil
Grind the mushrooms to a powder in a spice grinder or food processor. Combine
with the remaining ingredients to form a paste. Rub steaks generously with the
paste. Place the steaks in a resealable plastic bag, squish out the air, and
let stand at least an hour and up to 24 hours. If the meat will be marinating
more than 1-2 hours, refrigerate it. Remove from the refrigerator an hour
before cooking to bring to room temperature. Wipe excess rub from the steaks
before cooking.
Grill the steaks over charcoal, or sear on both sides in a heavy, oiled
ovenproof skillet, then place in a 500° oven until the desired doneness is reached. The time will vary based on the
type and thickness of the steaks. Begin checking after 10 minutes for rare
meat.
Makes enough rub for 4-6 steaks, depending on size. Leftover rub may be frozen.Contact Juilianne Glatz at realcuisine.jg@gmail.com
This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2008.
