By Perri
Food matters! Though we don’t have a “real” kitchen, a freezer or much food storage space, Dan and I do our best to cook healthy, delicious meals. We miss our toaster oven occasionally. But, cooking creative meals in a van isn’t as difficult as it might seem. In this post, I’ll share a few things we’ve learned about camp cooking. Whether you are full-timing it or on a road trip vacation, you can cook interesting, creative meals without much fuss or expense.
One Pot Wonders
The one pot meal is key to easy living on the road. When your kitchen is a picnic table (or a teeny van counter on a rainy, messy night) less is definitely more. I guess it’s possible to cook many-course meals while camping, but why the heck would you? One-pot meals are perfect for van travel: less clean up, less prep, less fuss. If it can be served in a bowl, all the better!
Here are a few of our favorite one pot meals:
We generally keep a range of ingredients on hand and decide spur-of-the-moment what dinner will be. There are a few non-negotiables though: It NEVER takes more than 20 minutes to prepare, and it ALWAYS includes fresh vegetables.
Sauces + Protein + Veggies + Grains
This is the general method behind the magic of our one pot meals. We don’t typically plan weekly menus or buy ingredients for specific recipes. But we always have sauces, proteins, veggies, and a variety of grains on hand. These are the building blocks of our van-life kitchen.
Start with sauces. We devote an entire drawer to spice packets and sauces. Stir fry sauces, curry pastes, enchilada and fajita spices, jars of shakshuka and pad thai sauce, really any interesting flavor we happen across goes into the drawer. We also keep “squeeze garlic“, “squeeze ginger” and this spendy-but-amazing chili crunch to dress up any meal that needs a little pizazz.
We frequent “international markets” such as H Mart when we find them, as well as alternative grocery chains, such as Sprouts and Natural Grocers. In addition, we scavenge the supermarket close-out racks. Ya never know what you might find there!
Sauces are a hack of sorts. Yes, it would be healthier (and probably better tasting) to build the flavors of our meals from scratch. But nomadic living is full of compromises, and we just don’t have the room!
Once we’ve decided on a sauce, we select from whatever protein is on hand. Though we have (mostly) given up red meat for health reasons, we always have some interesting meat substitutes handy. Some favorites are tofu, eggs, beans, lentils, and chick peas. Sometimes, we buy chicken breast strips (precut strips means less risk of cross-contamination in our tiny kitchen), ground turkey, or no-nitrate chicken sausages. Every once in a while, we buy fresh seafood or canned clams. Proteins are pretty flexible; you can insert tofu, chicken or shrimp into almost any dish, and you know it’s gonna be good. With beans or homefries, eggs can be a main course. Or they can be scrambled in fried rice or soft boiled in ramen. And beans, lentils and chick peas are a staple as well.
Next, come the vegetables. Veggies aren’t quite as interchangeable as proteins. In our year of full-time travel, we’ve learned to be more selective and stopped throwing every carrot, broccoli bunch and brussel sprout into every meal. Instead, we stretch them a bit, making meals with the more fragile veggies first and saving the hardier ones (potatoes and brussel sprouts, for example) for the days when we really need to get to a store and restock. Sometimes, we throw caution to the wind and buy fresh cilantro and parsley. We LOVE these herbs, but they don’t last long in the rough and tumble of our chest style refrigerator.
Healthy grains make a huge difference. But they do require a second pot. We cook up the pasta, noodles, rice, quinoa or couscous in our small backpacking pot and add it into our dish at the end. The mess is minimal as they just boil. With grains, the trick is to select those that won’t use up all your propane when cooking. A short boil time is key. We recently switched to parboiled brown minute rice. Not as awesome as the chewy whole grain rice we used in a house, but it’s a reasonable compromise. We’ve found some awesome, quick cooking noodles in asian markets, and use thin whole wheat pasta or lentil/chick pea pasta as a substitute for pasta made of white flour.
A Camp Kitchen
We have a two burner camp stove and just three cooking pots in our kitchen: a large non-stick pot with a tight lid, a small backpacking pot, and a small non-stick frying pan.
We threw caution to the wind and cast off our cast iron pot and frying pan. There just wasn’t enough room for those clunky, heavy things in the van. Guess what? We don’t miss them at all! If you are a big meat eater, it’s possible, you will want to have that kind of gear. In a house, we did a lot of slow cooking, searing and broiling in cast iron. But what we have is exactly enough for us right now.
Our kitchen also includes a cutting board, large collapsible bowl, a large serving bowl, a cutting knife, ladle, serving spoon, tongs (I call them “grabbers”) and small measuring cup. That’s pretty well it.
“Cook” Just Once a Day
Nobody likes doing dishes, doubly so when the “sink” is outside and everything is just a little less clean and convenient. To minimize the mess, we typically prepare hot food only once a day, at dinner time. Our breakfasts are mostly cereal and fruit. Lunches are bag salad (with added veggies and fruit) and/or sandwiches.
If we’re planning to stay put a while– or if it’s especially cold– we might make a hot breakfast. But it’s rare that we break out the pots and pans more than once a day. There are just too many other things to do!
A few special breakfasts:
To Grill or Not To Grill
It may surprise you to learn that we rarely make a campfire and cook on a grill. (It certainly surprised us!) I guess this is what separates “van living” from “camping”. After a while, a campfire just feels less important. And often, especially in the western states and provinces, there are burn bans, beetle infestations, and other safety considerations.
When we do grill, we cook up a whole package of chicken to use in meals throughout the week. It’s an easy add on to salads or stir fries, burritos or tacos. And, we do love those occasional s’mores!
Shop for Flexibility
As in so many things “van life”, flexibility is key. Limited kitchen space means you can’t always plan and shop for specific recipes. Nothing worse than having to lug around an ingredient you can’t use.
With that in mind, we have a general list of items we stock. But we are open to switching things up when we happen across a good deal or interesting ingredient. In the Pacific Northwest, we bought smoked fish (often!) and added it to salads, scrambled eggs, even tacos with homemade slaw. In the Southwestern US, we bought frozen tamales and grilled them on a campfire.
A Few Staples of our Camp Kitchen
Here’s a quick little list of mix and match ingredients we use often:
Proteins: Chicken breast strips, ground turkey, extra firm tofu, eggs, chicken or veggie sausage, feta cheese, parmesan cheese, smoked fish, canned clams, black beans, refried beans, chick peas, lentils (For health reasons, we rarely eat red meat or pork. But if you do, add these to your list of proteins)
Veggies: onions, mushrooms, bagged “slaw”, bagged collard greens, spinach, and kale, broccoli/cauliflower (cut and bagged), carrots, brussel sprouts, green peppers, jalepenos, sweet potato, yellow potato, cherry tomatoes, avocado, baby bok choy, green onions, canned diced tomatoes, canned tomato paste, canned lite coconut milk.
Grains: parboiled brown rice, lomein noodles, mai fun noodles, whole grain thin spaghetti (takes less time to cook), israeli couscous, quinoa. …and whatever else strikes your fancy when you are cruising down those aisles! We admit to a not-so-healthy desire for “fancy ramen“, which is a grain, sorta…
Sauces & Spices: Enchilada sauce, mole’ sauce, salsa, hot sauce, canned chipoltle peppers, curry pastes and powders, stir fry sauce, ponzu sauce, pad thai sauce, ma po tofu sauce, pasta sauce, shawarma spice, soup mixes like this “chicken tortilla soup” Look through the “international aisle” of the supermarket or visit a specialty market to gather an array of interesting flavors to spruce up your one pot meal. Though we can never quite find the same sauces, we enjoy our constantly rotating experiments.
Creative Cooking on the Road is Easy
That’s pretty well it: If you keep a mix-n-match selection of good foods on hand, cooking creative meals on the road will be a breeze! We’d love to hear your own camp cooking stories? What meals are your “go tos” on the road?
