Cooking on the road
Browsing through the net, I was struck by the number of people who seem to have more or less abandoned eating proper meals just because they live in a van.  Some of them, the ones with bigger vans and bigger purses, install a large generator to power their microwave oven.  Others live on a diet of muesli, bread, salad and eggs or all sorts of dubious heat-n-eat meals.  I find this amazing, since cooking in a van is really not much more difficult than cooking in a bed-sit or studio flat.

Before I begin, I must emphasise that we mostly live and travel in countries where wine is cheap and a glass or two is drunk, as a matter of course, with the main meal.  Extensive research has shown that people who neither abstain not drink too much, live longest;  we are not alcoholics but we intend to enjoy our old age.  Neither of us drinks beer but feel free to substitute "a glass of beer" for "a glass of wine" in what follows.

We can, and do, prepare a three-course meal in a kitchen that sits in a box that hangs to the outside wall on one side of the van and measures all of 140 x 60 x 35 cm (55" x 24" x 14") with a fold down lid in front.  There are five compartments, and each compartment has two or three shelves.  Compartment 1 holds our pots, pans, frying pans, beakers, tumblers and wine glasses;  no. 2 holds our washing up bowl, our plates and various bowls, and all our condiments and herbs.  Compartment 3 holds our gas bottle, staples (rice, pasta, bread crumbs) and coffee equipment (we use ground coffee and an espresso pot that sits on our gas hob) and no. 4 holds two 6-litre water bottles.  The last compartment holds spare plastic containers, oil, vinegar, open wine bottles.  Under the kitchen unit are drawers for small items.

Inside our kitchen cupboard, we store a large frying pan, a small frying pan, 2 small sauce pans with lids (and had the devil's own troubles to find small sauce pans with a lid), a Dutch oven, a cast iron griddle and a somewhat larger pan which we can use for soup and for heating up water for washing up;  we also have two wooden chopping boards.  Under the cupboard are small drawers for all oddments such as a plastic spatula, 2 wooden spoons, a ladle and of course some sharp kitchen knives, a potato peeler and a grater with fine and coarse holes, which doesn't take up a lot of space and makes life a lot easier.  Plus table ware and a corkscrew (very important!).  We even have a tin opener which we mainly use for tins of tomato purée.

Meals are usually for the two of us, but we can just as easily cook for four, and we have, on occasion, cooked for six.  No freeze dried instant meals or TV dinners, no cans or deep freeze for us, no TV-dinners, no take-away meals.  No need for a microwave.  We miss the oven, although you can buy very small camping ovens (about 45 wide x 35 high x 40 cm deep) if you have the space for it and want to indulge in pies, fresh bread, roast meat or whatever.  We find that a Dutch oven (a cast iron pan with a heavy cast iron lid) and a cast iron ribbed griddle pan more or less fullfils the function of an oven, and takes less space (see http://whatscookingamerica.net/Information/DutchOven/DutchOvenCooking.htm).
 
To begin with, you will need a gas (or paraffin) hob unit with at least two, and preferably three, burners.  Try to obtain an in-line three-burner unit, or if you can't find one, a two-burner unit plus an extra single burner unit.  Make sure the burner units are stable and can't tip over, whatever sort of pan you put on them.  Our own three-ring hob unit sits inside the kitchen cupboard while we drive, but slides out on to the fold down lid when we want to cook.

For quite a time we cooked on a two-burner unit and made a small BBQ fire outside, but of late many countries have forbidden fires out in the open because of the dangers of forest fires.  In the past, we have often cooked over small barbecue fires.  With the ever-increasing concern over forest fires, there are many regulations these days, so check carefully to see whether it is legal.  If it is legal, make very sure that you control the fire at all times, and that you put it out, but completely out, after you've finished.

To make a barbecue fire, clear a square of about 40 by 50 cm of grass, turf, leaves or anything else that can burn.  Find some large-ish stones and make a low wall all round - this stops the fire spreading and it also lets you rest your griddle so that it doesn't touch the hot ashes.  Now hunt around for small and medium-sized dry twigs and perhaps a few dry branches of trees.

Start the fire with dry newspaper and small dry twigs.  Once it is going, add bigger twigs or even small branches;  keep adding fuel as the fire burns till you've built a nice heap of ashes and charcoal.  Let the fire die down till you have a smouldering bed of hot coals.  I must emphasise: build a small fire and let the food cook (not burn) slowly over the ashes and charcoal.  Keep a pile of small twigs near at hand to add to the fire if you need a little extra heat.

Put the griddle on the stones;  ideally the griddle should be 5 or 6 cm (2" or so) above the ashes and fairly level.  Let the ashes cook the meat or fish slowly, and turn over the food two or three times.  If flames start due to dripping fat, throw a little water (or old beer) on to the fire.  The food should cook about 15 to 20 minutes to make sure all of it has been properly heated - this is especially important if you're dealing with pork.

Once one side has been browned, turn it over and brush the browned side with a mixture of oil, salt, garlic, fresh herbs and perhaps some mustard.  Repeat when the other side is brown.  Cook potatoes (or rice or noodles) and vegetables on your regular hob.  Or you can cook (small) potatoes by wrapping them in aluminium foil and tossing them into the fire.

If you are not allowed to build an open fire on the ground, there are small cast iron barbecue units that are about 40 or 45 cm in diameter, in which you can burn charcoal.  Almost as nice, but the barbecue and the charcoal do take up room in the van, and room is always at a premium, so think carefully before cluttering up what little space is available.

Buying food

In Spain, where we usually travel, it is possible to buy small quantities of meat and vegetables in village shops, just enough for one meal.  However, the large supermarkets in other countries in Europe have, over the years, gradually squeezed out all the small shops, and now you often can only shop in super, hyper and super-duper-hypermarkets.  And that usually involves buying family packs, with enough meat for a family of six for two weeks - well, I exaggerate, but not much.  So what do you do with 1 or 1,5 kg of pork chops, with 2 kg of chicken or 8 pork chops?

To begin with, if we eat in the evening, we usually shop late in the afternoon - we don't want meat lying in a hot van all day if we can help it.  We buy the meat and tuck it under our bedding to maintain as much of the cold as we can for as long as we can, and at night we put everything in a plastic carrier bag and hang it out of the window.  This way you can - usually - keep meat reasonably fresh for two days, even when the outside temperature is 40 degrees C (or about 105 Fahrenheit) during the day.  However, our normal practice is to cook all the meat the first evening, eat a nice hot meal the first evening and eat either a warmed up (but properly warmed) dish or a cold dish the next day.


In some countries, such as Holland, they have supermarkets where they do provide small packs of produce for just a couple or even single people, but they sure charge for that privilege.  One very sneaky way is to approach people inside the supermarket, and see if they're interested in going halves.  Look for a guy on his own at the meat department, chances are he also would prefer to buy a smaller quantity.  You'll get a lot of "No thank you" or "I don't give to beggars" but every so now and then somebody will react in grateful surprise, since he or she might have the same problem. Another possibility is to check out the supermarket car park to see if there are other stealth vans or even motor homes.

Vegetables are less fussy and can be kept several days, although you must take care to remove all plastic wrapping immediately, otherwise you'll be providing a hot-house atmosphere for any wandering yeast spores.  Potatoes can easily be kept a week, and rice or spaghetti can be kept for months.

So when you are faced with a 1,5 kg pack of chicken legs, you can, for instance, fry two legs for immediate consumption, and then pop the other two legs into the Dutch oven to cook while you're eating, as the basis of a chicken stew for the next evening (add a tin of beer for an interesting variation).  Minced meat (or ground beef, if you like) is used as the basis of rissoles (or proper hamburgers) on day one, and the basis of a Bolognese sauce the next day.   If the supermarket provides an economy pack of 8 pork chops, cut off the bone part, taking care to leave a reasonable amount of meat, and eat the boned flesh (with mushrooms) on day one and in a stew (prepared in the Dutch oven) for day two.  I find cold lamb chops delicious if eaten with a mixed salad of onions, peppers and tomatoes in a home-made dressing accompanied by some fresh bread.  And so on.

When it comes to spending a few days or even a week without visiting a shop, yes, you will have to learn to curtail your eating experience.  However, eggs will easily keep a week, there are tins of meat that can be combined with dried beans and peas, and a tin of fish mixed with cold cooked potatoes and various vegetables chopped very fine makes a tasty meal.

One sneaky trick is to buy a pack of minestrone soup - to which you are supposed to just add water for the taste experience of the century, or so the adverts claim.  Just add a little water and a tin of meat plus some fried onions (the onions, if properly ventilated, will easily keep a week) to make quite a reasonable imitation of a Bolognese sauce.

We usually start our cooking operation at about 7.  The first item on the agenda is to find a place to park our van - somewhere level, hidden from the road, near trees and undergrowth to use as our outdoor sanitary facilities and provide shelter from wind and preferably with a nice view from the sliding door.  Not asking much, are we?  Yet it is surprising how often we find such a nice spot;  we mark the nice spot on the map - we can come back again another time when we are in the area.

Having parked, we open the side door, lower the kitchen flap, pull out the hob unit and get out two sharp knives from the knife drawer and two wooden cutting boards from one of the kitchen cupboard shelves.  One of us can cut on the kitchen flap, the other on the table.  Perhaps we pour ourselves a glass of wine - a good cook shouldn't work with a dry mouth.  The wine we keep with the 6 litre water bottles in the kitchen cupboard.

In one of our plastic crates we store vegetables and potatoes.  Tonight we choose to boil potatoes and some fresh string beans;  I peel the potatoes using a small potato peeler from the knife drawer, top and tail the beans and cut them au julienne.  The cleaned vegetables go into two small sauce pans taken from the kitchen cupboard just above the hob storage recess. 


Meanwhile Elvira puts our our left-over sauce and vegetables from yesterday into the third, somewhat larger pan, adds water and a stock cube, perhaps some very fine-cut fresh vegetables and bacon or sausage bits, brings it first to the boil and then lets it simmer.  This will be our soup and should take about half-an-hour to get ready.  It's also a good way to finish off odds and ends from the previous day when you have no refrigerator.

While the soup is simmering, Elvira takes our cast-iron Dutch oven, melts butter (or heats up oil) and then browns the pieces of pork on all sides, adds some chopped-up onions and (but this is Spain or France) bits of fresh garlic.  Once everything looks (and smells) good, she adds half a small can of beer and turns down the heat, adds perhaps mixed herbs, mustard and a touch of tomato purée from a squeezy tube.  Tomato puree in a squeezy tube keeps well (for weeks) but can be difficult to find in some countries.

The soup and the stew simmer quietly while we enjoy a glass of wine and perhaps nibble some toast with a local paté de campagne or fresh Brie.  It's quiet in the forest;  if we keep very still we may spot deer, rabbits or a fox about its predatory business.  We may play some music on our van radio, but it's very soft, just loud enough so as not to compete with the sounds outside.

The soup is ready, we put plates and tableware on the table, and put the potatoes and beans on the two free rings.  While we eat our soup, we can watch out to stop the vegetables boil over or boil dry, turn over the meat in the Dutch oven - it's just one or two steps away.

By the time the soup is finished, the vegetables are almost done.  Elvira puts the meat onto plates, and adds a little flour and wine to the gravy in the frying pan so as to make a pleasant sauce to accompany the potatoes and beans.  These get poured off through the open side door, and are served on our waiting plates.  All right, the meat may be just a little cooler than optimum, but when did you last eat in a restaurant and get really hot food on your plate?  So we eat pork in a beer stew, with boiled potatoes and fresh green beans, all smothered in a rich sauce.

Other meals could be breaded chicken breast with broccoli, a sauce and pasta, rice pilaf, spaghetti Bolognese or with pesto sauce, stewed spare ribs in a beer sauce with apple and onions, stuffed peppers (from our Dutch oven) - a whole host of nice meals.  For starters we can try devilled eggs (hard boiled egg filled with a mayonnaise-and-egg yolk mixture), avocado with a small tin of fish and a mayonnaise-and-yoghourt mix - the possibilities are endless.  Our kitchen unti can cope with all these possibilities.

Sometimes I make savoury pancakes.  First you make the batter out of flour, eggs, milk, some salt and a little oil.  Flour will keep months in a closed tin, a pack of UHT milk will keep for weeks (if you're lucky, you can sometimes find small packs of milk intended as a mid-morning drink for children) and eggs will keep a week or more - so this is a good stand-by if you're off to the hills.  Then use the pancakes as follows:
1. cut up some slices of bacon, or salami sausage, or any preserved meat (or cheese if you're a vegetarian) and drop it into the hot fat of your frying pan.  After a minute or so, carefully add batter, trying to keep the little bits and pieces in their places.  Fry both sides to suit (with practice you can even toss the pancakes) and serve hot with a side salad.  The last pancake I always finish with butter, lemon juice, some sugar and rolled up.
2. Make a white sauce (flour, butter, a little stock from a stock cube, and some milk) and then fry up chopped vegetables and bits of meat till ready to eat.  Add to the sauce, together with a little salt, herbs, spices and soy sauce to suit your taste.  Now fry plain pancakes, and when ready, pour a line of sauce in the centre along the diameter, and roll up the pancake.   Some people put the result into the oven so that everyone can be served at the same time - that depends on having an oven.


Or I make potato pancakes - I believe they're called hash pancakes in the States, but I also know them as latkes (Yiddish), bramboraki (Czech), Riefkuchen (German) - mixed with bits of bacon, chopped cooked chicken or pork, or with fruit.  Peel one or two large potatoes, grate them (well, I did tell you to take a grater with you) and leave in a sieve to drain for half-an-hour.  Add eggs (one or more), flour, a little milk, fine chopped onions, garlic if you like it, herbs, salt and then whatever filling (or none) you fancy.  Fry in a little oil and serve them as they come out of the pan.  A complete meal in a frying pan.

Soups are a lovely way to finish up odds and ends before they rot or go mouldy and have to be thrown away.  After eating your supper, you toss all the remaining vegetables and the surplus meat into your largest pan,  add a little salt and whatever flavouring you like, bring to the boil and then let it simmer for half-an-hour or so.  Meanwhile you take a largish cardboard box, fill the bottom with a layer of crumpled newspaper (box and newspaper picked up at the supermarket before you start cooking), and when you're ready to call it a day, put in the pan, and then fill up the space between pan and the sides of the box with more crumpled newspaper.  Put a folded blanket or an eiderdown on top.  The soup will simmer all night and still be warmish the next morning.  Heat it up once more as you make coffee or tea, and put it into its box before driving off.  Make sure that the box can't keel over when you negotiate a tight turn.  That evening you warm up the soup and serve it piping hot. 

This works fine with soup, but also with stews, whether you call it goulash or Irish stew.  You can add noodles, rice or potatoes for bulk, which you cook separately.  The stew should be brought to boiling temperature for at least 5 minutes before being served, to make sure that all is safe to eat.

Yoghourt

In the supermarket you can usually choose from about 20 to 50 brands of yoghourt, all in their little plastic pots, with an extremely plastic taste and costing anywhere from 4 to 10 times as much as ordinary milk. Ugh!

Now if you were living in a proper house, you could buy an electric yoghourt maker, follow the instructions and end up with your very own yoghourt.  How exciting, how alternative - and such a yoghourt maker costs €15 or €20 and needs mains electricity.  So that's out if you live in a van.  For all I know, they now have 12-volt yoghourt makers, it wouldn't surprise me.

Or you could follow my patent and tested recipe.  No need for yoghourt plants or electric yoghourt makers - just a sauce pan and a thermos flask:

1. buy a litre of pasteurised (UHT) milk
2. buy one of those little plastic pots of yoghourt (choose one without added flavour and hold your nose when opening it)
3. pour the milk into a small saucepan, and heat gently to "baby bath" temperature, i.e about 35 to 40 degrees C (95 to 100 F)
4. pour the yoghourt into a 1-litre thermos flask.  Usually the yoghourt will leave the plastic pot very cleanly, but if it doesn't, use some of the warm milk to "rinse" the yoghourt from its container
5. pour the rest of the milk into the thermos
6. shut the thermos and leave overnight
7. the next morning you have 1 litre of yoghourt for the price of 1 litre of milk
8. save about 2 large spoons of the yoghourt you've just made for use when making the next batch.

For something extra tasty, get out a large tea towel, drape it in a cardboard box (which you throw away afterwards), and dump the newly made yoghourt into the tea towel.  Gather the four corners of the tea towel and pin them to a clothes line or the branch of a tree.  Leave for 6 hours or so to let the surplus water drip out.  Then open the tea towel and you have a delicious concentrated yoghourt spread - we often mix it with fresh herbs (look around in the forest and you'll find them) and/or garlic.

We often mash a banana into a dessert or soup bowl, add yoghourt and sugar to taste, to make a really nice dessert.  Yoghourt also makes a nice base for stews, curries and salad dressings.

Pan Catalan

In Spain, the village baker will bake bread three times a day so that the villagers have fresh bread with their meals.  It has to be fresh, for after two or three hours the bread gets tough, hard or both.  Which means that, unless you buy just enough bread for the meal, you're likely to end up with half a somewhat soggy or stale baguette.  When we're at home, with a fridge and a large kitchen, we make bread pudding, but that's not all that easy in a van, so instead we make pan catalan.

Take some stale bread (brown, white, wholemeal, sandwich or whatever), sprinkle just a little water over the bread and toast it on your cast iron griddle.  Watch out that it doesn't get too black but keep the heat up high enough so that you don't end up with a cast iron slabs of toast.

While the bread is toasting, take a tomato, and chop it fine, but really fine, skin and all.  If you like garlic (we do, but opinions are divided) add chopped garlic to the mix.  By this time the bread is a nice golden brown.   Pour some olive oil (cheap in Spain, but other vegetable oils are just as good) on to the bread and then spread the chopped tomato over the bread.  Add a little salt  Amazingly good, and a lovely way of finishing off stale bread.

French toast

Bread going stale?  Don't throw it away.  In a soup bowl, pour some milk, add an egg, and beat the mixture till fairly even.  Put the stale bread in it (cut the bread to fit) and let it soak up the liquid till saturated - this might be 5 or 10 minutes.  Then fry in a frying pan till golden, put it on a plate, add cinnamon and sugar to taste.

Washing up

Before sitting down to eat, we fill the large pan in which we made soup with water for the washing up (give it a quick rinse first).  If it boils before we finish the meal, no big problem - the hot water will keep, while we enjoy our meal.

Now we wash up in our little square plastic washing up bowl on the table.  Next to the bowl is a thick cloth to catch the sudsy water draining off plates and the like, and as one of us washes, the other dries and puts away. Never leave anything loose in a van, or sooner or later you forget and something gets broken.

Perhaps we will - at some time in the future - invest in a small (20 litre) top loading fridge so that we can serve cold drinks and keep our perishable food for three or four days.  But that's a luxury, not a necessity.  And a microwave is right out.





The Q Van