Gourmet Food on the Cheap

I’ve written and even posted a video before about eating well on vacation. It’s hard to do.

Most places that tourists are likely to go serve far too large portions of overpriced, unhealthy food.

While staying in Martiniqué recently, we rented a room from a wonderful French woman who lived on the island. In addition to the room, she offered to prepare meals for us for a small additional fee.

Vegetable casserole with sweet potatoes. Salad. Orange liqueur. Cold water. (Dessert was a berry crumble.)

Toast, butter, Camembert, Brie. Guava juice. Oranges picked from the tree in her yard. Capuccino, hot tea.

I had her prepare dinner on the day of our arrival and breakfast the next morning purely as a matter of convenience. That was all it took to sell my daughter and I both on having her make more of our meals.

It isn’t that we didn’t want to go out and sample the food elsewhere on the island. We drove around nearly the entire island and even stopped in at a few places for lunch.

Carrot salad with balsamic. Mushroom torte. Bread “sausage”. Baked cucumber casserole. Local beer. Cold water. (Dessert was strawberry ice cream, homemade chocolate brownie and homemade coconut cake.)

What we found, which is the case in most of the places we’ve traveled, is that vegetarian friendly options are difficult to find. Especially when you’re in a strange place and doubly so when dealing with a language barrier. Throw in a desire for healthy, tasty and affordable and the search becomes all the more difficult.

Waffles. Toast. Pineapple juice. Banana. Mochaccino, hot tea.

We don’t want to spend our vacation stressing about food. Neither do we want to make major compromises, go hungry, go broke or spend so much time looking for places to eat that it cuts into the vacation part of our vacation.

Vegetarian lasagne. Spinach salad. Pear liqueur, local beer. Cold water. (Dessert was a pineapple torte.)

So we did each lunches out wherever we happened to be. (And yes, we did have great difficulty finding places that met all our expectations.) However for breakfast and dinner, it was a relief to find a place that reliably served inexpensive, delicious, healthy, vegetarian meals. Even better that it was under the very same roof where we were sleeping each night.

Assortment of warm pastries with jam and butter. Banana, Persimmon. Capuccino, hot tea.

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