How We Plan Our Trips (and Find the Best Food!) & What I Cooked Last Week

All our secrets for planning a great trip, soy marinated eggs, healthy shrimp tacos with mango salsa

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re having a great week! My book tour wrapped up last Wednesday, and to celebrate the milestone, Doug and I planned a trip to Thailand. I’ve been working around the clock on marketing the cookbook since the holidays, so I wanted something special to look forward to right after. I thought I might feel more burnt out from all the travel (my mom and I went to 10 cities in one month!), but the tour ended up being so fun and energizing. By the end, I was ready for a change of scenery and something a little adventurous.

Hello from Thailand! We overlapped with my cousin and her husband for one night in Bangkok - they’re on their honeymoon!

Today, I’m sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how Doug and I plan our trips, from finding the best flight routes to choosing hotels and mapping out where we want to eat. I’m also including my favorite tips for researching ahead of time, plus the resource I always use to uncover hidden food gems. 🍜

First, here’s a recipe for soy sauce marinated eggs. They’re deeply flavorful and remind me of the eggs you get with ramen. I love serving them over warm rice with a little butter or toasted sesame oil. The recipe is very simple and uses just a handful of ingredients, but the eggs need to sit overnight to fully absorb the marinade.

As always, my cookbook Maxi’s Kitchen is now available for purchase at your local bookstore or online:

Thank you so much for your support 🤍

What I Cooked Last Week! ↓

Soy Marinated Eggs

These marinated eggs are infused with sweet-savory flavor and so easy to make. Just like the ones served with ramen, they’re delicious over warm rice with scallions and sesame seeds.

Soy Marinated Eggs

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You can download the PDF recipe above and watch the video here :)

All Our Secrets for Planning a Great Trip ✈️

We like to divide up responsibilities when planning a trip. Doug usually handles researching and booking the flights and hotels, and I take care of all the food.

For flights, Doug typically starts researching on Kayak, which scans across airlines and shows different route options. We don’t recommend booking directly through a third-party site like Kayak. We use it just to find the best route, then book directly through the airline’s website, since it’s much easier to make changes that way if needed.

For this trip, we knew we’d need a connection since we were flying straight from Houston, the final stop on my book tour. If the trip involves a long journey, we prefer to do the longest leg first, followed by a shorter one. In this case, we flew 17 hours to Taipei and then 3.5 hours to Bangkok. We do have some airline preferences based on loyalty programs, but the most affordable option this time was Eva Air, a Taiwanese airline, so that’s what we booked.

Doug knows a lot about hotels. Although you might think he’s just an Instagram husband (lol!), he’s actually an entrepreneur and founded the hotel app Safara (you can download the app here). Safara lets you book any hotel globally and earn consistent rewards regardless of hotel chain affiliation or not. They curate the best boutique hotels all over the world and have a really cool feature where you can keep track of past hotels you’ve stayed at, rate them, and share your recs with friends. It’s fun!

I personally love Safara’s hotel curation and used it to pick all of the hotels for my book tour. There’s a range of price points, including hidden gems that can be harder to find on your own, and they also pull together hotels featured in the press, so you don’t have to sift through dozens of articles. When choosing a hotel, we usually start by identifying the neighborhoods that feel interesting to us, and then look for hotels within easy reach of the restaurants we’ve saved on our map.

Doug’s company ❤️!

While Doug is researching flights and hotels, I start building a list of restaurants.