Close Quarters Cuisine (aka How To Cook In An RV)

One question we get on a fairly regular basis is about cooking and eating in an RV. These questions generally can be summed up by the following:

(1) Do you have a kitchen in the RV?

Answer: Why yes, we do. We have a gas oven with gas burners on top (3 of them), a microwave, a fridge, and a double sink.

(2) Do you cook in the RV?

Answer: Yes! We both enjoy cooking, and I do lots of baking as well.

(3) How do you cook in such a small space?

AH HA! THAT, my friends, is the trick question! The one thing missing in our kitchen is that: space. Cooking can be a bit challenging for that simple reason.

Generally, I cope with it by making only 1 or 2 things at once, and making sure to put away the ingredients as I use them. Or I use the crockpot, since it's 1 pot cooking.

However, sometimes a feast is called for! In those cases, you end up juggling a lot of stuff. Every year on the first day of fall, I like to make an Autumn Feast. This year was no different. I made marinated pork loin, dressing, roasted root vegetables, and a cobbler. As you can imagine, my work space (the new desk Noel installed) was absolutely overflowing with cooking stuff:

I decided to try cooking all of it at once (except for the cobbler), since it could all be cooked at roughly the same temperature. But! My oven isn't very big - it's much smaller than a normal oven - closer to the size of a microwave on the inside. So I got practical and started shoving:

It worked! The feast was great. It just took a little piling of pans in the oven.

One other thing to consider when cooking in an RV, however, is whether or not your RV is level. Usually when you stay in a campground, they try to keep the sites nice and even, so you don't have to use your levelers, jacks, or pieces of wood to try to make the RV level. Sometimes, however, you just can't get it exactly right. Normally it isn't very noticeable. Until you bake a cake:

Um....guess we needed to lift the RV a little more on the right. Oops.

But you know what? It still tasted just fine! And that's the important thing.

We're planning a big feast for tomorrow too. I've never made a turkey in this oven, so this might be interesting. Honestly, I don't even know if it'll fit! We got just a turkey breast, so we wouldn't have 6 months of leftovers. Here's our Thanksgiving menu:

Turkey breast

dressing

mashed sweet pototatoes with brown sugar & cinnamon

green beans

parmesan walnut salad

homemade bread with honey butter

pumpkin pie

The kitties will be having their favorite: chicken & salmon in sauce, courtesy of Nine Lives. They're already excited.

I'd better go check the bread now.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!