![]() ![]() Keep drinks in their own cooler, to minimize exposing food to a blast of hot air every time someone needs a fresh drink. ![]() Freeze water bottles before leaving the house, then remove from the cooler and thaw throughout the day as needed. Stick lunchtime hoagies in the middle, snack dips and s’mores chocolate on top (more on these food choices below). Stack food according to when you’ll be using it to minimize shuffling - layer steaks, burgers, and bratwurst meant for your dinnertime cookout on the bottom (anything raw belongs on the bottom, to avoid cross contamination). (Next-level-insulation-obsessed Yeti prides itself on its coolers’ ability to maintain a long-term relationship with ice.) Start out strong with a mixture of block ice or reusable freezer packs on the bottom of a cooler, then layer with blocks, freezer packs, and cubed ice as you go, packing as densely as possible - buy about a pound of ice per quart capacity of your cooler. If you’re in it for the long haul, losing ice power early is no joke: Per the FDA, cold cuts and other perishable provisions should be kept at or below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (and if it’s uncertain, always adhere to the stomach-preserving “when in doubt, toss it out” precept). ![]() Here’s a handful of tips designed to help you have the best possible beachfront feast, while avoiding common pitfalls like a gutful of grit, open-container citation, sad snack selection, ice shortage, slipped disc, and/or underwhelmed date. Move your picnic from the park to the beach, and these aforementioned challenges follow, with one terrifying additional all-natural foe: sand. As founder of the Portland Picnic Society and co-author of The Picnic cookbook, I’ve been stung by yellow jackets, stepped in a plate of deviled eggs, fended off ravenous golden retrievers, and worst of all, forgotten the wine opener. As light-hearted and idyllic as they may appear in meticulously filtered Instagram posts, picnics have their (admittedly mild) perils. ![]()
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