How to Make a Long Weekend Easy: Pack the Meals, Skip the Shop

The long weekend does not get ruined by rain. It gets ruined at about ten o'clock on Saturday morning, in the car park of the only supermarket in town, where you are queuing behind everybody else who also drove up on Friday night and also has nothing in the house.

You booked three days away to stop doing things. Then you spent the first morning of it doing a full shop in an unfamiliar aisle layout, paid more than you would at home for a worse selection, drove it back, unpacked it, and by six o'clock you were cooking dinner in somebody else's kitchen with one blunt knife and a saucepan that does not sit flat. That is not a break. That is your normal week, relocated, at a premium.

Full disclosure before we start: Providoor sells the answer we land on at the end. It will keep. What is worth reading first is what the holiday-town shop actually costs you, because both CHOICE and the ACCC have put numbers on it.

The long weekend that quietly disappears

It is worth walking through, because almost nobody plans it this way and almost everybody ends up here.

Friday, 3:40pm. You leave early to beat the traffic, along with everyone else who left early to beat the traffic. 7:20pm. You arrive at the place — the South Coast, the Mornington Peninsula, the hinterland behind the Sunshine Coast — and it is dark, and the drive took ninety minutes longer than the app promised.

7:45pm. The kitchen has salt, pepper, half a bottle of oil and a jar of something the last guests left. The pub stops serving at eight, or is booked out, or is a twenty-minute drive back the way you came. Dinner on night one is chips and whatever was in the servo.

Saturday, 9:50am. The shop. Not a top-up — a full shop, because you need everything, and you are buying three days of food for a house you will leave on Monday. You will overbuy, because you are guessing, and you will carry the leftovers home or bin them.

11:30am. Back at the house, unpacking. The morning is gone. 5:30pm. You start cooking, in a kitchen you do not know, with equipment you did not choose.

Sunday. A second trip, for the three things you forgot. That is most of a day and a half of a three-day break, spent on catering.

Why the shop in the small town costs more

This is the part people assume is just holiday-town gouging. It mostly is not, and the real reasons are better documented than the assumption.

What CHOICE found

CHOICE runs a quarterly grocery basket survey, pricing a comparable basket across the chains. In March 2026 its fieldworkers priced groceries at 104 supermarkets across 27 locations, using a basket of 16 items — seven fresh, nine packaged. Without specials, the baskets came to:

• Aldi — $68.80
• Woolworths — $77.53
• Coles — $78.58
• IGA — $91.65

That is a $22.85 gap between the top and the bottom on sixteen items — the IGA basket costs about a third more than the Aldi one. This matters on a long weekend for a simple structural reason: in a small coastal or hinterland town, the independent supermarket is very often the only supermarket. You are not choosing the dearest option. It is the option.

Two caveats worth stating. CHOICE selects the most comparable products it can at each store rather than an identical trolley — the Coles and Woolworths baskets carry a few name brands where the Aldi one takes its home-brand equivalent. And CHOICE is comparing chains nationally rather than holiday towns specifically, and a single store in a town of eight hundred people cannot buy like a chain with a thousand sites.

What the ACCC found

The ACCC's supermarkets inquiry final report, published 21 March 2025, looked directly at why regional prices sit higher. Its conclusion was not villainy but logistics and competition: "The higher freight costs to serve regional and remote areas are likely the primary reason for higher prices in these areas."

It also found that thin competition makes everything else worse, not just price: "A lack of competition is also likely to affect prices and result in reduced range, store amenity, opening hours and service quality compared to more competitive markets in metropolitan areas."

Range and opening hours are the ones that bite on a Friday night. The problem is rarely that you cannot afford the town's only supermarket. It is that it shut at seven.

Build the weekend around one showpiece

Here is the part worth planning properly. A long weekend does not need three ambitious dinners — it needs one. One night where everybody sits down at the same time, something substantial gets carried to the table whole, and the meal takes two hours because nobody wants to leave. That is the night people remember. The other two nights just need to not be a problem.

So pick the centrepiece first, then let everything else do the heavy lifting around it.

That third column is the one that matters when you have just driven three hours with an esky in the boot.

The lamb shoulder is the one to take if you want to think about it least. George Calombaris' version has been on the menu for years, it is twelve hours of slow cooking already done, and it will go into the oven straight from frozen for 60 to 70 minutes at 190°C. If it has thawed in the fridge overnight it is about 40 minutes. Either way it goes to the table whole and gets pulled apart with a spoon. It serves four, it is gluten free and dairy free, and it is the least demanding centrepiece on the list.

The pork knuckle is Marco Pierre White's, and it is the value play at $46 for four. It also goes in from frozen — 45 minutes at 150°C, then up to 180°C for fifteen to crisp the skin and 200°C for a final five. The stepped temperatures are the whole trick, so it wants an oven you can actually trust.

The porchetta is the showiest of the three and the only one with a genuine catch: it must be fully defrosted, and the skin needs patting dry — ideally left uncovered in the fridge for a few hours — or the crackling will not crackle. Then it is 220°C for 25 to 35 minutes to blister the skin, down to 160°C for another 30 to 45, and a 10 to 15 minute rest before carving. It serves six, which makes it the one for the weekend where three couples share a house, or where somebody has brought the kids. Plan it for Saturday, not for the night you arrive.

Let the other nights do the heavy lifting

The point of the showpiece is that it is the only thing you have to think about. Everything either side of it should ask nothing of you at all.

Friday, when you arrive in the dark

This is the meal that decides whether the weekend starts well. It needs to be on plates in under fifteen minutes, from a kitchen you have not unpacked yet, using one pan or a microwave. Butter Chicken, Green Chicken Curry, Satay Chicken, Slow Cooked Malay Beef Kari and South Indian Village Chicken Curry all reheat in four to five minutes in the microwave, or six to eight in a pan. Add Aromatic Rice, which goes from frozen in five to six minutes, and Garlic and Coriander Naan.

The Coconut & Prawn Curry is the one exception worth knowing about: it is stove top only, five to seven minutes from defrosted — the prawns finish cooking gently as you reheat it, and the pack says to check they are firm and cooked through. Worth the pan, but not a dish to microwave.

If the house is more pasta than curry, Marco's Signature Bolognese, NY Style Carbonara and Authentic Italian Meatballs do the same job in the same time.

Sunday, when nobody is trying any more

By the third night the ambition has gone and that is fine. This is oven-tray territory: Classic Italian Lasagne, Braised Beef Moussaka, or the Roasted Pumpkin, Spinach and Ricotta Lasagne if someone is vegetarian. One tray, one oven, no decisions.

Or go back to the braises — Tuscan Braised Lamb Shanks and Slow Cooked Country Beef Cheeks both come up beautifully in a covered pan in ten to fifteen minutes and feel far more considered than the effort involved. Wild Mushroom Ragu is the meat-free version of the same idea.

Lunches, grazing and the bits in between

Long weekends are mostly not dinner. Zucchini & Haloumi Fritters, Mini Beef Wellingtons and Cheeseburger Pasties cover the two o'clock gap and the pre-dinner grazing, and the soups — Pumpkin, Roasted Cauliflower and Comté, Roasted Tomato and Red Pepper — are the easiest lunch in the house on a cold, wet Sunday. Sticky Date Pudding serves four and goes in the oven from frozen for twenty minutes, which is exactly as much dessert effort as a holiday deserves.

A worked weekend, for four people

Three nights, dinners and one dessert, built the way described above.

That is about $21 a head per dinner, dessert included, for food cooked by named chefs and eaten at a table you are not paying a service charge on. It also clears free delivery in all three states, which the supermarket run never does.

Plan the delivery, and the rest looks after itself

This is the part that decides whether any of the above works, and it takes about ninety seconds.

You choose your delivery date at checkout, and you can book it up to ten days ahead. That is the whole planning window, and it is generous on purpose — it means a long weekend is something you set up a week and a half out, on a quiet evening, rather than something you scramble at on the Thursday.

The one rule: do not pick the day you leave. Choose a date at least a couple of days before departure. Deliveries run to a window rather than a minute, and a long weekend is exactly when traffic and volume are at their worst — so the day you are trying to load a car and get out of town is the worst possible day to also be waiting on a driver. Take delivery on the Tuesday or the Wednesday, let it sit in your freezer getting properly hard, and leave on Friday with nothing outstanding.

The method, start to finish

1. Up to ten days out. Order, and pick your delivery date. Choose the showpiece first and build the rest around it — the deciding happens on a normal weeknight at home, when deciding is cheap, instead of in a queue on Saturday when it is not.
2. Two or three days before you leave. It arrives frozen. Straight into the freezer, and leave it alone.
3. Friday, as you walk out the door. Esky, ice bricks, meals in last, still rock solid. Not the night before, not into a warm car.
4. On arrival. Freezer first, before the bags, before the bottle of wine. If the showpiece needs defrosting, move it to the fridge now, not tomorrow.
5. Saturday, ninety minutes before you want to eat. Oven on. That is the entire day's cooking.

Nobody spends a morning in the supermarket. Nobody cooks from scratch in a kitchen they do not know. The weekend goes on the reason you drove there.

Loading the car, and the question of who controls the music

Two more things that decide how the drive goes, and neither of them is about food.

How to load a boot properly

1. Heavy things low and forward. Weight sits best low down and over the rear axle rather than piled high at the back. The car handles better, and there is less behind you to move if you have to stop hard.
2. Nothing above the seat backs. If it sits higher than the headrests it is a projectile, and it blocks the rear window. Pack to the line, not above it.
3. Fill the esky. A half-empty esky warms up much faster than a full one, because you are also cooling all that air. Pad the gaps with a tea towel or the bread — dead space is the enemy.
4. Esky in last, out first. It is the only thing in the car that cannot wait twenty minutes while you find the keys and argue about bedrooms. Keep it out of direct sun; a rear footwell is usually cooler than a dark boot.
5. One bag you can reach. Chargers, torch, coffee, milk, the house instructions. It saves unpacking the entire car in the dark to find one thing.

How to be a good DJ from the passenger seat

If you are riding shotgun you have been handed the aux, the map and the snacks. The music is the one people remember.

• Download it before you leave. The run between the city and the coast is full of blackspots, and a playlist that buffers out on a mountain pass is worse than no playlist. Make it available offline while you are still on wi-fi.
• The driver has veto. No appeal, no debate. They are the one doing the work.
• Read the leg. The first hour can be loud. The middle is for the songs everybody knows the words to. The last forty minutes, when everyone has gone quiet and the light is going, is not the moment for your new favourite ten-minute track.
• Never skip a song someone is singing. Even if you are sick of it. Especially if you are sick of it.
• Everyone in the back gets a song. At least one an hour, played without commentary. That is the entire price of keeping the aux.
• Podcasts need a unanimous vote. One person half-listening to a true-crime series is how a good drive goes quiet.
• Keep your phone charged. You are also the navigator, and a flat phone loses you both jobs at once.

Or make life easy

The whole argument of this article is that a long weekend is worth one properly good meal and two easy ones, and that none of it should involve a supermarket in a town you do not live in.

Providoor is around 46 dishes developed by six named chefs — Marco Pierre White, George Calombaris, Silvia Colloca, Christine Manfield, Luke Nguyen and Anna Polyviou — plus the in-house Providoor Market range, cooked properly and then frozen hard. The showpieces travel because they are frozen, and two of the three go in the oven without defrosting at all. There is no subscription and nothing recurring to cancel.

Delivery runs across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and you choose the date at checkout up to ten days ahead. Metro delivery is a flat $15, and free once the order reaches $179 in New South Wales or $199 in Victoria and Queensland — a weekend order built around a showpiece clears that comfortably. The minimum order is $80, counted after any discounts.

It will not make you a better cook. It gets the shopping and the prep out of a break you booked in order to stop doing exactly that.

Common questions