Our Kitchen - How We Cook
Not having sufficient caloric intake will greatly hamper your ability to enjoy life on the road. With this in mind, we decided that including a kitchen in our build was a solid idea.
Pretty early on in our design phase, we decided that an oven was not something essential to our plan. Neither of us bakes and we weren’t planning on becoming bakers in a van. Propane wasn’t something we wanted to have to rely on either. We knew we’d need a kitchen that wasn’t a space- or energy-hog, but that would still support our love of cooking and eating.
Here is the breakdown of what’s in our kitchen.
Appliances
We went with a customizable appliance based kitchen. Instead of a built-in range, we have a few key items that allow flexibility based on our energy supply and can work in either rural or urban locations.
Instant Pot 6qt: A great way to cook one-pot meals that keeps dirty dishes to a minimum. It also uses less water and electricity than a regular pot and seems to behave pretty consistently at high or low elevations.
Induction stove: We use this for boiling water (coffee!) and quick cooking. We use this in the same way you’d use your stove at home.
Propane Gas Stove: This is our propane based cooking alternative when we don’t want to grill over a fire or use electricity. The Camp Chef Everest is on our list of “must-have” gear. Read the article! It’s amazing!
Electric Hot Air Fryer: This is the most recent addition to our kitchen and we can’t get enough of it. Crispy sandwiches and veggies are now minutes away without a lot of oil or clean up.
Travel Berkey Water Filter: You gotta stay hydrated! Read more about why the Travel Berkey is a “must-have” for us.
Coffee Grinder: This comes in handy for grinding up flax seeds, and spices in addition to our coffee.
Blender: Most weekdays we breakfast on healthy fruit smoothies from chef John. Fast, filling, and uses very few dishes.
Compressor Refrigerator: It’s small! Living a #tinylife can mean living with a tiny fridge. It has less room to store items that need to be cool, so shopping trips become more frequent and “stocking up” is on a smaller scale.
Pots, Pans, & Dishes
No break dish options are a good call when your house is mobile. We went with materials we thought would rattle the least, but rattling is part of life in a van. To reduce scratching and noise in for our skillets and pans, we layer them with our pot holders to reduce noise and abrasion.
2 nonstick frying pans and a 3qt pot: We use these for cooking over propane or on our induction stove. These were essential tools in our apartment and made the jump to vanlife.
2 cast iron skillets: These are perfect for cooking over a fire. Use them together for a makeshift dutch oven!
Nesting break resistant plates, bowls, cups
4 each: knives, forks, spoons
2 plastic mugs for smoothies and/or wine
3 ceramic mugs: Yes they are breakable, but we loved our 2 coffee mugs and brought them with us. The 3rd mug gets frequent use as a small mixing bowl for eggs and dressings.
Shot glasses from Mexico: Salud!
Water bottles: We have 2 that are insulated. We use these to hold the extra hot water left over from making coffee. The insulation keeps the water piping hot for dishwashing throughout the day.
Accessories & Utensils
We did our best to purchase or bring utensils that had multiple purposes. At present, we still have more than we need or use, but here’s what we brought:
Silicone kitchen utensils: We love these because they don’t scratch our pots and pans, are easy to clean and are great at scraping every last bit of food out for low waste and more efficient dish washing.
Grill tools for the fire pit including a spatula, fork, tongs, basting brush, and grill cleaning brush.
Collapsible dish drying rack: With the exception of the tray, the whole rack fits into our sink.
Gator French Press: Really happy with our unbreakable press that keeps contents nice and hot and makes great coffee.
2 cutting boards: Both are fold-able so that chopped food or waste can be scooped right into your pot or bowl.
3 nesting plastic mixing bowls
An over the sink colander and hand colander.
Wolf and Grizzly Grill M1 Edition Kit for fires that don’t come with a grill
Assorted cutting knives, knife sharpener, and honing steel.
Can opener
Bottle opener and corkscrew
Peeler
Measuring cups and spoons
Grater
Sushi roller mat (?) Yeah, we not sure why we brought it either
Citrus press
Jigger and shaker
Lighters
We’re still getting the hang of organizing our pantry. Most days we have to pull food out to find what we’re looking for. We’re still learning what we want to have handy for meals that plays well with our appliances.
Food Storage & Organization
We find that moving things from awkwardly shaped packaging to a box-shaped container helps us to keep the food shelves organized. We also store items that we use less frequently or larger items in the back to help make it easier to navigate our food cabinets. Having the right kitchen goodies will go along way in making sure you’re spending more time in the sticks and less time at the grocery store.
Reusable Silicone Food Storage Bags: No more single-use plastic storage bags! These can be a little tricky to dry after washing, but overall we’re pretty happy with them. and the awkward shape can often fit into those leftover spots in the fridge.
Ikea’s BPA-free food storage boxes: We don’t often have leftovers, but when we do we store responsibly. We also use these to store dry goods. There are a variety of sizes and they stack well too.
Chip clips: We clip a lot of chip bags, half-eaten bags of nuts, and other yummy things but these come in handy for hanging laundry and other assorted hacks too.
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