By far the smallest kitchen I ever cooked in was in our self-contained travel trailer aka RV. The kitchen counter was about 6 feet long and included a small double sink and cooktop effectively removing work space for food prep. The total work space available worked out to about 4 square feet. Surprisingly I was able to get a lot of good food coming out of that tiny kitchen.
RV cooking presents a few more problems besides space issues because they are self-contained units meaning you are essentially hauling all your needs (cooking fuel, electricity, water). The fuel used is propane. We had 2 - 30 lb propane tanks on our unit designed to equalize. Running out of propane in the middle of cooking dinner is definitely not on my top 10 favourite things to do. All water used in the unit (toilet, shower, sinks) goes into a holding tank. A water pump provides pressure. Running out of water while cooking or clean-up is not a lot of fun either. Used water goes into a holding tank that must be emptied at the dumping station or into a portable tag-a-long blue container. If the holding tank gets full it will start backing up in the sink and shower stall. When not plugged into electricity the unit runs off of battery power so you do learn to be quite conservative with energy usage. An RV refrigerator differs from a normal refrigerator in that it uses ammonia as the cooling agent. To aid in cooling a solar powered fan is often needed. Heating up an RV via cooking is always an issue but more importantly moisture from cooking can cause a lot of problems given the design of RVs.
Here is a video I found of a full time RVer. Full time means she lives in her RV year round so this is the kitchen she has to work with. This kitchen is fairly typical of most RVs. The white cover towards the wall is the stovetop cover that covers the propane burners typically 3 or 4 burners depending on the model and some units do not have this cover. Most sinks have some type of cover to increase the working space or a large cutting board will work. I do not recommend using a glass cutting board as shown in the video as glass cutting boards will dull your knives. I like the grocery bag tip for cutting the jalapeno pepper. Leaving the seeds and pith in the chopped jalapeno pepper will add to the heat. The recipe for the guacamole is at the end of the video. Enjoy!
2 food lovers commented:
Greetings Gnome! Evanne from the RV Cooking Show here. Thank you for sharing this episode with your readers - it's a great recipe.
A little backstory on the glass cutting board (which I no longer use anymore except as a sink cover for the very reason you mentioned). This was the first thing my new husband and I bought when we set up house 21 years ago this month - wow!
Thanks for the terrific family of blogs...and I love tea and cookies!
Evanne/RVCookingShow
Hi Evanne and thaanks for visiting. Thanks for the great recipe and a chance to show my readers what cooking in a small space is like. I will be checking out more of your videos to share here.
New husbands must think alike as my husband gifted be with one close to 30 years ago. Glass cutting boards are still available as countertop inserts or stand-alones.
You're quite welcome and I'm glad you are enjoying my blogs :)
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