Family holidays with kids, pots and pans in tow

Combining new cuisines with familiar flavours of home can make travel easier for kids—and adults

- Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi

Who carries a granite pan and a silicone spatula in their check-in luggage for a three-day trip? The same parent who tucks steel bowls and small spoons into cabin luggage, so that their primary-school-going kids have familiar, child-sized cutlery to eat with during the journey. As parents of three children—one aged 9 and two 7—with three persistent and very varied appetites, my spouse and I plan snacks for holidays before we make schedules.

A few months ago, in a little apartment at a ski resort in Switzerland, while I sliced Swiss cheese and stirred homemade, pre-roasted, ready-to-cook buttery millet khichdi, I glanced at my phone. My spouse was walking through the cold aisle at the alpine town’s supermarket, sending me photos of local spiced ham and salami. We were exchanging notes about which one seemed least processed. He’s always been vegetarian, the sole herbivore in our family of five. However, if our kids want to sample some meat products, he’ll dispassionately, albeit briefly, tolerate handling animal parts.

A short while later, we were all sitting around the warmly lit dining table, snowflakes fluttering past our street-level picture windows, eating a meal that to anyone in India or Switzerland would be utterly peculiar: Swiss-butter-finished millet khichdi spiked with curry leaves, turmeric and Guntur chillies, frozen petit pois straight from the bag (they tasted like sweet vegetal popsicle balls), and slices of Emmentaler and Graubünden cold cuts.