RVs and the cookin' ain't easy

Sweet potato/yam soup

Simple is best.

That’s a motto that is near and dear to the heart of anyone who cooks in a recreational vehicle. RV kitchens are miniscule, making food preparation challenging. It’s pretty hard to be a gourmet cook when you don’t have room to prepare an elaborate meal.  

Most EV kitchens don’t have room to bring all the pots and pans you use in everyday cooking in a house. For example, I only had room for one of my six frying pans. I also could only bring two sauce pans. And forget about all those handy-dandy appliances, such as pasta makers and food processors. I had room only for the blender, toaster and waffle iron, only bringing them out when I needed to use them. 

Plus, only one of the three burners on our trailer’s propane stove had an adjustable temperature control. They others had one setting: high.  

Undoubtedly there are some cooks who can function under these challenges. I wasn’t one of them.

One pot/pan meals quickly became the norm, and the simpler the recipe, the better. Macaroni and cheese, and soups became my go-to dishes.

Sweet potato soup quickly became one of our favorites. It’s hearty and filling, and easy to prepare. I found this recipe online, but tweaked it a lot, adding this, eliminating that, until I found the combination we liked best

In the recipe below, I used ham chunks from a package of pieces and slices. I saved the slices for lunch sandwiches, and used the pieces in soups. You can also buy ham cubes in packages, but they’re really too tiny for this soup. The original recipe called for chicken broth, but I just mixed powdered chicken bouillon with water. The original recipe also called for just sweet potatoes, which can be hard to find, especially in small towns. We tried it with yams; it was OK, but not as good as sweet potatoes. The ideal combination turned out to be one of each, as show in the accompanying photograph.

 I don’t use measurements in this recipe, but it will feed 2-3 people easily, with maybe some left over for lunch the next day. You can easily double or triple the recipe depending on how hungry or how many people you have to feed.. Serve it with a green salad and fruit for dessert. 

Cheryl’s Sweet Potato Soup

Sauté ham chunks (4-6 ounces)  in a couple of tablespoons of oil. Sprinkle some dried minced onions over the top. Stir the ham frequently to make sure it doesn’t burn or stick to the bottom.

Peel and cut up sweet potatoes or yams.  Don’t make the chunks too tiny. Add them to the ham chunks in batches, sprinkling a heaping tablespoon of flour over the potatoes between batches; stir after each addition.

Pour chicken broth or powdered chicken bouillon mixed with water over the potatoes to cover them. Bring to a boil, then simmer until the broth is thickened and the potatoes are done. Stir frequently throughout the cooking. Salt and pepper to taste – I normally don’t add salt because of the ham, though. Ladle into bowls and enjoy!

 

The joys of RV cooking

At least these pancakes didn't get burned!

Cooking in an RV’s small kitchen is proving to be a challenge. Not only is there inadequate preparation space, storage space for pots, pans and ingredients is limited. No siree, cooking is not a lot of fun these days.

The stove has a cover you can put down and sink covers that are supposed to provide additional counter space, since the counter space is in inches, not feet, like a house’s kitchen. In theory this sounds good, but in reality it’s not. If you’re cooking one dish while preparing another, you can’t have the stove cover down. Not to mention that I hate this stove; it runs on propane, and only one of the three burners has an adjustable temperature. When I have to use more than that one burner, I frequently end up burning a lot of food. (My apartment at China Daily had a gas stove, and I never burned so much food in my life. It probably didn’t help any that the temperature dial notations were in Chinese!)

I suppose I could cook one dish at a time, but that means the first-cooked dishes would be served cold. I suppose I could warm them up in the microwave, but running the microwave at the same time the air conditioner is on trips a breaker in the fuse box and we have a trailer-wide power outage. It’s such a hassle to go back and reset clocks, computers, etc. We have the AC running most of the time because of Yuma’s triple-digit temperatures. (109-degrees in April? You better believe it!)

I also don’t do as much baking as I used to, mainly because you have to get down on your knees, stick your head in the oven, and wave a lighter around to ignite the pilot light. I can usually sweet talk Jon into doing this, but that means I can’t surprise him with treats.

As I was packing up my kitchen in Kennewick, I organized my spices, herbs, flavorings and other ingredients into plastic boxes by the frequency with which I used them. I then placed them in the trailer cupboards in that same order. This turned out to be another thing that sounded good in theory, but in reality doesn’t work out. It is such a hassle to get the boxes out of cupboards I can barely reach unless I stand on a shaky step stool.

Even if the ingredients were more easily reachable, I don’t have the necessary pots and pans for cooking like I used to. At home in Kennewick, I had two woks and six frying pans, each used for a different purpose, and the same amount of sauce pans. Due to limited storage space in the trailer, I was only able to bring three frying pans (two small and one medium-sized) and two sauce pans. It just isn’t enough to do the type of cooking I want to do.

We eat a lot of sandwiches for dinner.