100 Simple Recipes for Your Kitchen on Wheels: A Cookbook
January 1, 2022
The allure of RVing has increased for many people in recent years, for reasons including the fatigue of being at home in pandemic times, the ability to travel on one's own schedule, or the opportunity to bond with family and friends closer to nature. One of the challenges of cooking in an RV is the limited amount of space and reduced supply of culinary tools compared to the home kitchen. In addition to recipes, this book offers strategies for organizing and streamlining the process to make RV cooking easy and enjoyable. Planning is a key factor, and the book includes sample meal plans that allow the reader to account for every necessary ingredient and utensil. While many of the recipes are for old standards like sloppy joes and foil-packet potatoes, care is taken to make sure there is a balance between easy preparation and flavors that exceed expectations. As readers may expect, each recipe is limited to a controlled number of ingredients, tools, and prep time, so that the cook can also enjoy the trip.
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January 17, 2022
When it comes to camping, “food is a huge part of the experience,” asserts Schlueter (Cooking with Your Instant Pot Mini) in this uninspiring collection. For RV kitchens where a small propane cooktop, oven, and fridge are the norm, Schlueter offers tips and uncomplicated recipes, “so that you can spend less time stressing about food and more time enjoying your own RV experience.” The “RV experience,” though, seems to be of more importance than the actual recipes at hand. While ideas for maximizing storage space (use “small plastic bins that fit into smaller kitchen cabinets to store spice jars”), essential pantry checklists, and prep-ahead techniques prove useful, cooks will find no glamping here. In fact, the recipes are untempting assemblages that hearken back to vintage Betty Crocker–esque casseroles, boxed cake hacks, and refrigerator biscuits. For breakfast, classic corned beef hash comes from a can, and tater tot breakfast casserole (calling on a frozen bag of tots) favors nostalgia over flavor. On offer for lunch are chili cheese hotdogs using canned chili, BLTs, and sloppy joes, while dinner is served in the form of a bland shepherd’s pie and meatloaf muffins, with a side of ranch beans made with canned beans. For a freewheeling lifestyle, this is quite unadventurous fare.