Breakfast and dinner in the hotel - menu ideas please!

[koima]

My family is planning a trip to Disneyland next spring and I'm getting started on our budget. We're on a pretty tight budget and don't want to blow it on food!

We're driving from Northern California, so I can bring along kitchen gear and grocery shop nearby, and we'll be renting a nearby hotel with a mini fridge. We're a family of five with two young kids, mom and dad, and a grandma - the kids will be 4.5 and 18 months - so we'll be back in the hotel after lunch for naptime. I think it would be least expensive to plan breakfast and dinner in the hotel room and lunch at the park or a nearby restaurant.

We're healthy eaters in general and don't eat much processed food. Anticipating that we'll need all the energy we can get for our trip, I don't want to load up on easy but unhealthy options like hot dogs or Hamburger Helper.

I was thinking about bringing a crock pot so I could make some meals to be ready when we get back to the hotel. I have an electric pressure cooker, too, which is the same size as a crock pot and makes really fast meals rather than all-day-cooking meals.

With limited fridge space and wanting to keep prep and clean up to a minimum, what kind of meals and snacks would you suggest? Is it crazy to think of cooking so much on vacation?

 

[NotUrsula]

I'm just going to throw this out after a recent convention trip to DLR, regarding the cost of food.

Unlike at WDW, offsite food is easy to access within walking distance at DLR, but tends to be overpriced, except for some breakfast places, which there seem to be an oddly high number of. There is a strip of so-called "Casual Dining" chain restaurants nearby on Katella east of the parks, and a few on Harbor on the East side as well. The ones on Katella are mostly things like Bubba Gump, Cheescake Factory, etc. These restaurants are mostly a bit higher in price than some of those in the Downtown Disney shopping area and in the Disney hotels, though for the most part they are not really high-priced, with a few exceptions such as a Morton's Steakhouse. There is very little commercial fast food in the immediate area, except for a Subway on the corner of Katella and Harbor.

Food in the offsite hotels in the area south of the parks tends to be VERY, VERY expensive as those cater to convention attendees. The irony when I was there was that my cheapest meals walking-distance meals were purchased on Disney property. As long as you have a car and a reserved parking space, you shouldn't have too much trouble venturing out for meals; it isn't like at WDW where going off-property takes 2 hours round trip.

Things like fruit or muffins or cereal for breakfast are good and don't require cooking. Salads and cold sandwiches for dinner would work, too. I'd be careful of things like crock pots, however. I don't know how Anaheim's fire codes are about that sort of thing, but a lot of hotels instruct their housekeeping staffs to unplug any outside appliances that they find turned on in unoccupied hotel rooms.

If the room you have doesn't have a true kitchenette, I'd suggest also bringing a small folding camp table -- it's hard to do food prep on the bathroom vanity.

 

[tzolkin]

Never been to Disneyland, but we do much of our eating from groceries in our room to save on food costs (and also because my kids would rather snack than eat larger meals).

We did not cook anything. We had various breakfast items that we ate before we left the room or walking to the bus. We usually did am EMH, so we just woke the kids up right before we wanted to head out. We brought snacks into the park and came back to the room every day to relax and nap from about 12-5. When we hit the parks I always had some healthy snacks and I cut pb sandwiches into dinosaur shapes. My kids liked being able to have a little snack or 1/2 a sandwich whenever they got hungry-- especially the pre-schoolers waiting for a rider swap. We used hydration backpacks and just drank water when we were in the parks. We usually ate the equivalent of 1CS meal per day in the parks. (We would often stop twice and just get a meal or two to share at a time. Sometimes just the kids would get something and then a few hours later DH & I would split a sandwich and salad while they snacked on fruit. Or we'd get a few orders of chicken and all share.) A few times we ordered a pizza at the food court (around $15) in the evening and ate it in the room.

Foods we had in the room: whole wheat bagels and bread, cereal, milk, juice, yogurt, pepperoni, cheese, crackers, apples, bananas, carrots, peanut butter, fruit leather/dried fruits, nuts/seeds, pretzels, a few more similar items.

We spent around $125 on groceries and $240 on all other food in the parks and at the resort (never went off property). We did not set a certain budget, we just ate what/when we felt like it. We didn't buy many snacks, but we did get mickey ice creams a few times.

 

[koima]

Thanks for the suggestions.

A camp table is a good idea. It would give the kids a place to sit for meals, too.

Good thinking that housekeeping might turn off a crock pot. I'll have to think of another option for easy meals.

tzolkin, your snack suggestions are good ones!

I was talking to DH about menus and he reminded me that we have a microwave rice cooker that can be used to make pasta with sauce or lentils and rice, so that may be an easier option than the crock pot. It's a lot lighter and more compact, too.

We could use the coffee pot to boil water for oatmeal and add dry milk powder to that for a higher protein and long lasting breakfast. Add fruit and go!