The Journal Of The InnKeeper

I have been meaning to write up a semi-permanent article about Con Hacks for so long that I didn't realize that I hadn't actually done it yet. So here's my first draft:

1. Remember the 1-2-5 rule: Every single day get 1 shower, 2 full and balanced meals, and a minimum of 5 hours of sleep.


2. Have a con pack that contains the following:
   • Phone, charging cable, power block, & battery backup if possible
   • ID, room key, & con badge (if not on a lanyard)
   • Painkillers, cough drops, & daily meds
   • You Met Me cards (business cards with appropriate contact info for the convention)
   • Actual pen & paper
   • Sewing kit & makeup touchup kit for costplayers & costumers
   • Safety pins & superglue
   • Snacks & water
   • Paper conference program (if available)
   • Earbuds
   • Earplugs
   • Reading glasses (even if not needed - they make great magnifiers)
   • Travel size tissues
   • Travel size wet wipes
   • Travel size hand sanitizer
   • Mask
   • Non-electric busy-maker like dead-tree book or knitting


3. Have a spare pair of "comfy shoes" to change into.


4. Pack or buy con food for the hotel room, some of which is to be eaten in the room and some to pack in above "con pack":
   • Mixed nuts
   • Peanut butter
   • Honey and/or non-refrigerated jam / jelly
   • Tortillas (they travel better than bread)
   • Bananas
   • Canned chicken salad or tuna
   • Fruit leather
   • Honey sticks
   • Cheese in wax (like Babybel)
   • Granola and/or protein bars
   • Dried seaweed
   • 100 calorie or "snack size" bags of chips
   • Individual cups of guac and hummus (if there is a fridge or consistent cooler available)
   • Individual cups of cereal
   • Individual cartons of shelf-stable milk
   • Breakfast pastries
   • Mini candy ("Halloween-size")
   • Bottled water
   • Coffee grounds / tea / roasted cacao grounds, scoop, & tea bags or coffee filters
   • Drink sweetener


5. Food assuming some method of heat such as room microwave or travel slow cooker:
   • Microwave bags of seasoned rice
   • Canned chicken
   • Canned soup
   • Frozen meals if there is a freezer in the room
   • Hard-boiled eggs if there is a fridge in the room or pre-scrambled eggs in a squeeze bottle if bringing an electric burner/hob
   • Meal-prepped breakfast burritos if there is time to prepare them before con & a freezer in the room


6. Kitchen gadgets (pick and choose according to needs, finances, & travel restrictions):
   • Electric travel kettle
   • HotLogic Mini
   • Electric induction burner / "dorm" hob
   • Mini CrockPot
   • "Dorm" size microwave
   • Electric cooler


7. Travel pillows and blankets, personal pillowcase


8. Towel

I, personally, find that I only need 2 kitchen gadgets: an electric kettle (mine looks like the white one top-left) -

and the HotLogic Mini -

The HotLogicMini is a soft-sided lunch-box style "slow cooker" that uses a low-temperature hot plate inside an insulated bag to heat food. It is safe to use with most containers (although I would be cautious when heating up restaurant leftovers in styrafoam containers) and even safe enough to touch without burning (but it will be hot so don't grab the plate and hold on). I have accidentally left plastic forks inside when heating, and most of the time they're fine. Occasionally they warp a little but are still usable. It is safe to travel with and can be checked or carry-on. It can be purchased with a standard wall plug or a car plug, so make sure you read the listing carefully when purchasing to get the correct plug.

Anything that has "microwave cooking instructions" can be cooked in the HotLogic, usually right in its own package without any de-packaging faffing about - just stick the whole container right inside! I will put a whole can of soup inside and eat it straight out of the can like "campfire beans". I also put a whole bag of microwave rice and a tin of canned chicken in the HotLogic together, then I drain the chicken and add it directly to the bag of rice for a wide variety of chicken-and-rice meals. Be careful, though, packages, especially metal ones, can be very hot and will need to be opened carefully because of the pressure build-up from heating.

The HotLogic is a slow cooker, so you will need somewhere to plug it in for a couple of hours (1-2 depending on if the food is frozen / raw or room-temp and cooked first). Unless you stay inside one track room all day (as I do when I'm working), this may be best to leave in your hotel room, assuming you're staying on-site.

The good news is, though, that because it's such low-temp cooking, you can leave your food in there heating all day long and it'll be fine. I once started my food heating in the morning but then at lunch time found out that management was feeding us. So I ate the free catering and forgot about my lunch until it was time to go home, leaving it heating for like 8 or 10 hours. I just put it back in the freezer overnight and reheated it the next day and it was fine. So plug in your meal before you go downstairs in the morning and pop back into your room whenever you're hungry later for a hot meal.

I have literally not had to buy my lunch at work since buying one of these more than a decade ago and I have started using it at DragonCon for the last 3 or 4 years and I love it. Many of my coworkers have them or similar items now because they are so convenient. I seriously ought to become a distributor for them or get a commission or something because of how many video techs I have talked into buying one. If I ever thought about it, I would have a box of these and a box of screen pullers to sell at every gig I work.

The electric kettle is very important for anyone who likes hot drinks. Hotel coffee pots are notoriously unsanitary, and if you like anything other than coffee, using water heated by a coffee pot (especially the k-cup type) adds a bitter coffee tinge to whatever your drinking. You can even make coffee using "homemade tea bags" out of coffee filters and steeping your grounds in your hot water like tea bags. The longer you let it steep, the stronger the drink will be. Some kettles have batteries or USB cords or act as thermoses so you can bring your kettle around with you like a large water bottle and drink down on the con floor.

For food, while your specific dietary needs may vary, if you just follow the Food Pyramid you should be able to eat a healthy diet that is suitable for a weekend or a week at con even without access to a full kitchen and from-scratch meal prep. You want a good source of protein every day, complex sugars and carbs, healthy fats, and a source of vitamins and minerals that isn't solely a daily multivitamin. I car-camped for 2 weeks with the above diet and was fine. Oh, and minimize the caffeine use. I know, fandom cons are extended parties and everyone wants to be awake for the whole thing, but seriously, keep the caffeine to the bare minimum, especially later in the day.

Plan for at least one hot meal per day (hot food seems to be important for emotional and mental health, and going without for too many days can negatively impact your mood and immune resistance abilities) and have ready access to a variety of "grazing" food throughout the day, that includes just a bit of "indulgent" food, again for mood and emotional / mental health.

To sum up -

I carry a small, lightweight, easy for me to carry all day, mini-backpack with my daily essentials and a few "just in case" items that I have found to be very helpful at conferences. I make the investment to carry or wear comfortable shoes. I practice good hygiene including bathing, deodorants, good tooth care, and good sleep practices such as plenty of sleep hours and bringing my own pillows / pillow cases and towels. And I get 1 hot meal and around 1200-1800 calories per day and some kind of food that makes me happy with the diet above (I do not need more than 1200 per day).

Drink water, buy a HotLogic if you can afford it, wear good shoes even if it doesn't work for the outfit, shower, brush your teeth, and get sleep.

 

Also, this video was made 12 years ago so there are a couple of points that are out of date, but it's still pretty applicable:

 

Watch on YouTube

 

I'm getting closer to perfecting my pudding-frosting recipe. I'm not a big fan of buttercream icing. It's OK, and I'll eat it, but I usually have to scrape most of it off and have just a touch of frosting on top for flavor because it's just *too* sweet and *too* overwhelming to taste anything else. So I've been mucking around with whipped cream-based frostings, pudding-based frostings, marshmallow-based frostings, whatever I could find that wasn't some variation of powdered sugar. To me, the powdered sugar frostings are best on sugar cookies, but even if fluffy and frothy, it's just too sweet for cupcakes and cakes.

The difficulty with the other frosting bases is in texture. While many of the other frostings taste great, they don't quite have that fluffy, spreadable texture that makes buttercream such a good frosting. It needs to be somewhere between Cool Whip and peanut butter. Puddings tend to be too ... puddingy. Not quite thick enough to form a nice, fluffy layer. It doesn't dribble down, but you can't build it up like a stiff buttercream either. The marshmallows tend to be hard to spread because of how sticky they are. The whipped creams are almost *too* fluffy, and not quite thick or substantial enough to carry enough of the flavor.

This time I tried one package of vanilla pudding, 1 cup of heavy whipping cream (instead of the usual milk), 1/4 cup of Baily's Irish Cream, and a carton of whipped cream.  Delicious! It's still just a touch too light, but the substitution of the heavy cream for the milk and the significant decrease in the amount of liquid both gave the pudding more weight and spreadability. Prior to adding the whipped cream, it was very similar to peanut butter, but I thought that was too dense for spreading on delicately soft cupcakes. The whipped cream lightened it up considerably and still allowed it to be thick and hold its shape.  And it turned out to be even better after the cupcakes had sat in the fridge for a couple of days (leftover cupcakes).  That frosting became almost the consistency of canned frosting.

The basic ratio that I'm going for is this - pudding calls for 2 cups of milk, so I take half that for milk or cream and make up the other half with whipped cream, even though 1 carton of whipped cream is more than 1 cup because the whipped cream is less dense than the liquid milk.  How much of the flavoring that I'm going to add depends on the strength of it.  A flavor oil only needs a few drops so the milk / cream amount doesn't need to be adjusted.  But something like alcohol is more diluted - less flavor per liquid volume and the alcohol is *really* liquidy.  So sometimes I might reduce the milk / cream by about a quarter cup or more and replace it with the the same amount of alcohol or other flavoring like juice.

I'll try experimenting with different flavors of pudding and different flavor oils to see if that helps make it taste more substantial.