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Campervan Cooking Equipment: Our Top Recommendations The Campervan Podcast Transcript: Top 4 Vanlife Cooking Skills
Today I have for you my top four van cooking and kitchen skills.
Before I start, let me just say that most of these βlisticalsβ, that is, list posts, I think are kind of ridiculous.
I probably have 150 kitchen and cooking skills tips for you, but it helps to condense the ideas now and then, and that's what I've done over the last few days.
Iβve thought about kind of the most important things if you're not the greatest cook or you don't have cooking experience.
Hopefully this will help you understand what you might want to focus on early on as you develop your ability to cook.
I think cooking is one of the most valuable things that you can do for your camper van travel skills and experience.
I love to cook. I spent a few years working in restaurants, mostly as a waiter, but working as a waiter makes you kind of a foodie because you're always paying attention to the menu and understanding specials and things like that.
I also worked for catering companies. I was a a room service waiter in a high end hotel in Seattle years ago, many years ago.
Also I was a retail and wholesale produce worker for a about 15 years in warehouses and grocery stores, so food is kind of in my veins and my blood.
And I've been cooking for myself since I was kind of a latchkey child and that forced me to be able to to make my own lunches and sometimes even dinners.
The number one vital cooking skill for vanlife
In the French cooking world there's an expression; βmis en placeβ. Thatβs the area of your kitchen where you do all your work and it needs to be organized.
The shorthand often used by cooks and chefs is βmisβ.
Is your mis set up? And what that means is, do you have your knife and your rags, and are all of your ingredients in place for the day?
Of course, this would be for a professional kitchen. So the ingredients for the various specials and common things on the menu need to be within arms reach either right under the counter, in the refrigerator, or up on top for room temperature things.
Is your cutting board is ready? Your rags are ready. Your knife, your measuring equipment⦠Are your pans ready? And in the van, that just means that you set up just before you start cooking.
We can extrapolate this all the way out to your van design.
There's a concept in, in kitchen design called the three point kitchen. And that's basically a counter, that is, workspace, refrigeration, and cooktop.
And obviously it's easy to make all that happen in a van because the space is so small.
The same applies to setting up to cook in a campsite or if you're working out of a chuck box or out of the tailgate of a minivan or something like that.
Keep it in mind, if some builder tries to put your refrigerator at the other end of the vehicle away from your stove, don't let them do that because you'll be stepping over the other people in your van or other equipment to get back and forth to the fridge when it comes time to cook.
So keep that three point concept in mind in terms of mis en place as an organization concept.
Also, organization includes planning and shopping for meals. So if you have an apartment or a house, the tendency is to wander into the grocery store at some point and kind of meander up and down the aisle and, and get some...
