I'm fresh off the plane from a two and a half week cooking vacation in my home state of California. The first ten days had me with family and friends in Tomales Bay in a house we rented after reading Christine Muhlke's cooking vacation story in Bon Appétit's April issue. It looked so good, I had to do it too. So we signed up, packed our bags, flew to San Francisco, stopped in San Rafael for provisions, and drove to a little town up the coast.
After ten days there, a stay that included visits from both my parents and also some friends from the food world, we drove down Highway One and into Los Angeles where we continued our cooking vacation with a week in the house where I grew up and my mom still lives. By the end of the trip my belly had devoured just about everything I love about food in California, with barely ever setting foot in a restaurant.
Here are some images and ideas for your own cooking vacation. Start planning for next summer now!
When we arrived at the house, we had trouble opening the door, so we walked a few hundred feet down to Hog Island Oyster Company and asked if anyone could help. A few minutes later, the place was closed and the owner invited us to a picnic being cooked by some friends of his. Champagne went into our tumblers, fresh strawberries stained my daughter's mouth, and we had our first of hundreds of oysters. These were served grilled with a kimchi sauce. Brilliant. 
Oysters were a theme of the vacation — a theme of the summer, really (I ate them and wrote about it in Croatia, too) — and it didn't take long before we started grilling our own with bits of bacon, butter, chopped herbs, onion. At $35 for 50 oysters there's still plenty of room to eat them raw. The ice we laid out for leftovers went unused.
In fact, raw oysters, grilled oysters, grilled bread (using the same melted butter concoction poured over the oysters) and a salad with cold rosé was the general dinner formula for the first four days or so. We couldn't help ourselves. Eventually we branched out making pork chops from the local butcher, Marin Sun Farms, a mussel stew, wild salmon, a spicy citrus chicken, pies and tarts and cobblers, and on and on.
A new vacation tradition was born on this trip. Anyone coming to dinner has to stop at the local thrift store and put together their dinner outfit. We gave people a $20 limit. It made cooking and eating our meals, not to make our vacation photos, pretty entertaining. The results were beyond my wildest dreams. I wish I could show you photographs of my mother and my editor Amy, but both of them would disown me. Instead, here is my dad and me, posing with the house cocktail, a foraged huckleberry gin and tonic.
After over ten days of this kind of carrying on like Gatsbyesque characters, we meandered down the coast to Los Angeles with my mother to Los Angeles where we continued cooking in my childhood home.
The first night was perhaps the most magical: we took a bowl, a cutting board, a few knives, and some olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper to the garden. Drinking wine we'd picked up on the way down in the Santa Ynez Valley, we chopped up all the crops that had ripened in mom's absence and called it dinner.
Tell us below about your cooking vacation. I'd love to hear stories from the present and memories of the past. If this idea is new to you, try it. When on vacation, skip a few restaurant meals; just make something, call it dinner, see how it feels.
Related: Help Me Cook an Amazing 3-Course Meal While on Vacation
(images: Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan)
5 Things Paris Taught Me About Travel
Recipe: Ham, Cheddar & Chive Egg Bakes
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Bacsac Bacsquare 04...
Apartment Therapy's Sofa Shopping Guide
Nikki’s Sweet and Cheery Print Studio
Recipes please! Yummy...
One of my favorite ways to vacation is to rent a house somewhere, largely so you have kitchen access. My most memorable such vacation was up on Puget Sound. A big group of us stayed at a friend's beach house. There were no restaurants in the area, so we cooked all our meals. There were oysters and steamer clams, berry pies and cobblers, great big salads, endless pots of coffee, and plenty of beer. The best times were in the kitchen, and then enjoying our meals on the porch. Idyllic.
Brilliant! You've captured the best about northern California's coast. Lovely photographs also :)
ahhh the Vicar at his best..I can not believe he travels with the mitre!! He wears it well, did he bring his incense too??...looks like you all had fun! love kimmer and gang
@KimByrne - no incense - this wasn't a spiritual event, per se.
We did something similar for our honeymoon 6 years ago, in Tuscany. For 2 weeks, we went shopping at the local Coop supermarket in town and bought groceries like we were at home. The foods and produce they had there was mesmerizing and so good, we never set foot in a restaurant for any of our meals. One day, they even had fresh porcini on sale. I want to do that trip again on our 10th anniversary.
I love to make supper straight out of the garden. Fantastic and fresh! Here in England, where I usually spend summer, there is a great trend towards village stalls and honesty boxes by the roadside. Last week, driving thru Cote, I bought tomatoes, French beans and onions. In our village I got some handmade sausages from Graham the butcher, plus fresh basil from the garden. The absolute best supper...all locally grown/made/sourced for about £5. That’s what I love. Wrote about it here:http://veronicaroth.com/?p=1564 When I get back to the West Coast, mid Sept, I'm looking forward to seeing what's left in the garden there.
I love cooking and eating on the Point Reyes Peninsula. Thank you for this.
I love the pic of you and Gil. So like him. We look forward to his visit with us in a few weeks. Your getaway sounds fantastic. I could eat oysters everyday. We have Jake eating them now. He first tried them at 5 and didn't like them, but kept trying on different occassions. Now at 8, he will eat them.
Jennifer
oh these PICTURES!
What a wonderful post! We stay along the Point Reyes coast once/year usually in the summer for just a long weekend and your descriptions of the places and food that you visited are the main reasons we keep going back and back.
Loved this story. One of my favorite vacations was with Outward Bound where it wasn't oriented toward cooking as a vacation (sailing instead) but we had a challenge to forage as much food as we could find and made a meal of mussels with greens, berries for dessert, rose hips and rose petals that we used to make tea.
i'm in awe! would love to experience this kind of thing! please send recipes...pronto!
Everything I love about Bay Area living. Da Best.
I love seeing your photos. That said, I really don't like cooking on vacation. I cook constantly (and am thrilled to do so) at home, but I'm uncomfortable in unfamiliar kitchens and hate cleaning up in them. When we go away for the weekend, I prep everything ahead to minimize cooking and cleaning. When we travel further afield, we love to do "grocery store dinners" and eat cured meats, cheeses, bread, little salads, fruit, and chocolate in our hotel room with wine.
Love it! My husband and I actually just went to SF to do the same thing- inspired by that Bon Appetit article as well! We rented a small kitchenette in the marina district and cooked like mad, produce from the Ferry farmers' market and mussels and fish from a meat market on the block we were staying. We stayed in Napa a bit, too, visiting the Saturday Oxbow market. Eventually our trip found us winding all the way down the coast with lots of stops (BBQ oysters on the side of the road and opening one of the several dozen bottles of wine from winery visits!), coming to an end in LA before cutting back across the country through the desert. It was the best trip we've taken to date. <3