As many of you already know, I live in a campervan and travel around the country, posting diaries of places I visit. When I started my travels almost four years ago, I ran a diary series explaining how everything was set up. I am now re-running it, since some of my methods have changed and the diaries have been expanded and updated.
So, how do I cook while living in the van?
Often, I don’t. Walmart parking lots are usually surrounded by restaurants, ranging from fast-food McD’s and Burger King to more upscale places like Outback or Red Lobster. And Walmart Supercenters always have delis where I can get readymade hot meals.
Usually I carry a compact high-calorie lunch with me in my backpack wherever I go for the day, such as cheese, fruit snacks, backpacking gorp, jerky, or sandwiches. (A tip: if you want to carry sandwiches in your backpack all day, it is best to use bagels instead of bread—they are much less likely to get squished.) Or else I’ll get lunch at a cafeteria or restaurant where I’m visiting. And if I find one, I always make a habit of visiting the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets or Golden Corrals.
If you habitually camp out at a Walmart, you have access to a ready supply of fresh food that does not require cooking, from healthy things like fruits, raw vegetables, cheese, trail mix, and tuna, lunch meat, or peanut butter for sandwiches, to unhealthy things like cupcakes, cereal, and candy bars. In the summer when it’s too hot to cook in the van, I go weeks at a time eating dinners that do not require cooking. But I do also have facilities for cooking inside the van.
One option for a van kitchen is a small camper refrigerator, powered either by electricity or by propane. These are sometimes found in Class B camper vans, and provide a place to keep things like lunch meats, milk, or beer. The electric versions require either shore power or a lot of solar-panel and battery capacity. The propane versions run on the same fuel tanks that propane grills do. Neither option is really practical for me since I don’t really have the need for it, so I have no fridge. Of course, camping out at Walmart gives me ready access to all the frozen food I want. If you do a lot of boondocking, though, you’ll need a way to store perishable food for a period of time, and a fridge (or even a freezer) may be an absolute necessity.
If you want an effective short-term refrigerator that doesn’t take up much room and uses no electricity, a camping ice chest or cooler will do the job. For best results, place a smaller plastic tub inside the cooler and fill it with ice, then pack your food around the edges. This protects your food from floating around in water when the ice melts. How long the ice lasts depends on how hot the weather is. Some people add extra insulation to their ice chests by gluing slabs of styrofoam on the insides. The “five-day” coolers available in camping supply stores have a lot of insulation and will act like little refrigerators, allowing you to keep things cold for days at a time. (And the cooler can do double duty as a small bench to sit on.)
I have a small six-pack cooler that I lined with extra styrofoam, which works well enough to store leftover hot dogs, lunch meat, fruit, etc, for a day or two. I’ve found fast-food drink cups useful for obtaining a sufficient amount of free ice, and even without ice my micro “fridge” is usually sufficient to prevent chocolate from melting.
Most Class A motorhomes and some Class B campervans also include microwave ovens, which run either from shore power or batteries. I did give serious thought to including a small low-wattage microwave oven in my van for heating up soups and hot dogs and such, but even the smallest microwaves use a lot of electricity, and running one even for just four or five minutes a day would have been way too much for my solar power system to handle without at least a doubling in size. So I gave up on the “nuke” idea. But it can be done with a generator, or large solar panel and sufficient battery capacity.
Many people who live in dorm rooms or small apartments use electric “hot plates” for cooking. Like any electric device that produces heat, however, these use enormous amounts of electricity, and they are not really practical for use in a van unless you have constant access to shore power.
Instead, most van campers use propane-fueled camping stoves that can be found in any sporting goods department. These run off of canisters of compressed propane, about the size of a soda bottle, that connect to the stove using a hose and coupler (you can also connect the stove to the larger propane tanks used for BBQ grills). Other versions of camp stoves use canisters of butane fuel, which usually screw into the bottom of the burner. Another older style of camping stove that is also still available uses kerosene as fuel, and some use “white gas”.
These stoves come in one or two burner versions. (The two burner versions are safer to use inside a van, since the one burner stoves tend to sit with a pretty high center of gravity which makes them prone to tipping over, while the two-burner stoves are low and flat. Of course, with any sort of open flame in the van you have to be careful: don’t put it in a spot where it can be knocked over, and keep it away from anything that is flammable.) Some stoves even include foldable metal ovens that you can use to bake pies, cakes, or brownies.
I don’t use any of the store-bought camping stoves, however. Instead, to cook in the van, I have a little alcohol-fueled stove that I have had for years to use while backpacking. (If you are handy, you can make quite good homemade alcohol stoves out of empty soda or beer cans.)
There are many reasons why I prefer to use an alcohol stove rather than a propane or kerosene camping stove. Alcohol is much safer to use as a fuel in a confined place like a van than propane or kerosene. Denatured alcohol burns more cleanly and produces less smoke or fumes. The cotton wick absorbs all the fuel, so there’s no flaming liquid to spill. Alcohol stoves are also smaller and cheaper to use—propane stoves require canisters or tanks, which take up room in the van and are kind of pricey, and also have to be replaced pretty often. My stove is smaller than a hockey puck, and I can store it along with fuel and all my cooking equipment in a small plastic bin tucked away on a shelf. And alcohol stoves require no connecting hoses, nothing to hook up or install, and no moving parts to wear out or get lost. Just pour in a half ounce or so of fuel, light it with a barbecue firestarter, and you’re cooking. It will boil a pint or so of water in about eight minutes.
My stove uses denatured alcohol from the hardware store. In a pinch, the stove will also burn plain ole ordinary rubbing alcohol as fuel, either the 90% or 70% grade (the 90% burns better), which I can get in any drugstore. (Rubbing alcohol produces quite a bit of sooty smoke, however.) The stove will also work with alcohol-based winter engine treatment from the auto parts store, or even the gelled alcohol in hand sanitizers (though that doesn’t burn as well as the liquid alcohol). And in a real emergency, I can burn 151-proof vodka or rum in it.
I am no gourmet chef, but using a camping stove I can cook anything in the van that can be made on a stovetop at home. Mostly I just make quick meals: I’ll heat up some soup or canned pasta, using the can itself—with the label peeled off—as the cooking pot (this riles up some of my more health-conscious friends who tell me that this might release harmful chemicals from the can lining, but I’ve been cooking this way on a backpacking stove for decades without any apparent ill effect). I can also boil water in a pot (my “cooking pot” is an empty coffee can) to make ramen noodles, rice, pasta, or anything else that only requires water, or I can use heated water to make any of the freeze-dried MRE-type food that is available at any camping store or sporting-goods department. And when I feel ambitious, I have a nonstick frying pan to make bacon, spam, and eggs, as well as skillet dinners, sausage, pancakes, ham, pierogies, stir-fry, steak and home fries, frozen pizza, or whatever else I want. The Walmart has every sort of food imaginable—it’s like having the world’s biggest kitchen pantry—though this usually produces leftovers since most foods are not packaged for single servings. The birdies outside love it when I give them my extra food.
Another useful cooking option is the metal vacuum bottle or thermos. This can be used for pasta, beans, rice, ramen, hot dogs, hardboiled eggs, or anything else that is made with just hot water. Fill the thermos with your uncooked food, add boiling water, and seal on the lid. The insulated water will cook your food while you carry it around, and then keep it hot for hours. It’s great for taking a warm meal with you to eat later for lunch or dinner, even in winter. The disadvantage of this method, though, is that you will have to clean out the thermos bottle between uses. The wider the mouth, the easier it will be to clean.
If you place some ice in a ziploc baggie and insert this inside, the metal thermos bottle can also act as a nano-refrigerator for temporarily storing small amounts of leftover perishable foods like hot dogs or lunch meat for a day or so.
As far as dish-washing, I try to avoid that by using paper plates and bowls, and plastic cutlery. Since I use my cooking pot mostly to boil water, it just requires a quick wipe with a paper towel for cleanup. The frying pan also just wipes clean. Many people want to minimize their trash, however, and eat with reusable plastic dishes instead of paper plates. These can be washed in a simple dishpan. Some folks add a dash of vinegar or chlorine bleach to their wash water for disinfecting. If you have grease on your pots or dishes, you will need a bit of liquid soap to get it out. Rinse your dishes in plain water and let them air-dry.