Eating Leftovers on the Road

In Japan, if you clean your plate and empty your drinking glass, it’s a sign to your host that you’re not quite satisfied with your meal.  Obviously you have room for more in your belly since your plate is empty.  If your host is paying attention (odds are, they’re paying meticulous attention), more food and drink for you is well on its way.  If you’re not careful, they’ll have to wheel you out of their home or restaurant in a wheelbarrow!  This flies directly in the face of the advice our parents gave us as children to “Clean your plate because there are starving children in China.”  Thank goodness I was in Japan.

I’m a human garbage disposal.  It seems like I’m forever eating leftovers.  When I’m home for a week, I’ll cook a week’s worth of food outside on the grill and I’ll happily have it for lunch for days.  I hate to see food wasted and frankly, the sheer mass of wasted food in this country is enough to feed several other countries for a long time.  Think about it, what edible tidbits and trifles have you disposed of over the past 24 hours?  A ? serving of vegetables?  A piece of fruit?  A slice of pie?  This begs the question, “What do you do with the leftovers when you’re traveling?”

Most rooms these days have refrigerators.  This is awesome.  When I see a refrigerator, I usually order up a large dinner of Chinese food or a big pizza, and I’ll munch on it for dinner for the week that I’m staying there.  After all, it’s not always easy to get a single portion meal delivered when you’re traveling alone.  If you eat at a nice restaurant, there’s certainly no shame in taking a doggie-bag back to your hotel.

If your room doesn’t have a fridge, call down to the front desk and ask for one.  Most of the nicer hotels these days can furnish one at little to no extra cost if you ask for it.  Whatever you do, don’t use the mini-bar fridge!  I’ve made that mistake before.  Modern mini-bar refrigerators are equipped with sensors that detect missing cans or cups.  They will, in turn, charge you for those items, even if all you did was remove them to make room for the other half of your cheesecake and you didn’t consume them.

In a pinch, you can make a “cooler” in your room.  Just call down and ask for another ice bucket.  Fill two plastic bags from the grocery store with ice from the hotel’s ice machine.  Tie each of them tightly closed.  Put one ice pack in the base of ice bucket #1, then add your food items in their container(s), the other ice pack, and then place ice bucket #2 upside down on the top of bucket #1.  Viola, you’ve built your own refrigerator, and you can save that slice of pie!

EXTRA: If you have questions for Ken regarding business travel, hotels, airplanes, etc, please send an email!  Your questions will be recorded and Ken will answer the best ones in his Ask the Expert podcast show.