Cooking in a motorhome
Motorhome holidays are great fun, you can’t beat them. Freedom to roam around wherever you like and explore the wonderful outdoors with some of your home comforts close by, what more could you want? One of questions we get asked by our customers is how easy is it to cook in a motorhome and what do we provide? The kitchens in our motorhomes are fully equipped with all the cooking utensils you need and have hobs, a grill & oven and even a microwave but it’s still a relatively small space so there are some limitations.
We’ve put together some top tips and favourite meals to help you out on the road if you get a little bit stuck for meal ideas.
Keep it simple
Our first piece of advice is to keep it as simple as possible; you don’t have a huge amount of space so a big roast dinner with six pans is best avoided unless you have a whole day to waste. When planning your meals think about how space you need to prepare the meal and how many pans or baking trays you need to cook it, and if the number is 2 or more then you may want to reconsider. This is not as limiting as you might think and there are plenty of dishes that can be made without needing many ingredients or pans.
One of the best things to cook in a motorhome are one-pot dishes; think casseroles, pasta, risottos, stir fry etc. Once you start thinking about it there’s actually hundreds of lovely dishes you can make in one-pot!
Think about time
Once you’ve eliminated recipes that use every pan under the sun consider the amount of the time that a dish is going to take, you want to be outdoors enjoying yourself! Try and pick meals that take 30 minutes or less to cook and consider making enough to keep the leftovers for the next day (if you’re not feeding a huge family that is) – saving you even more time to enjoy yourself!
Minimise the washing up
Water is at a premium in a motorhome so using lots of pans means lots of washing up, and if there’s washing up then there’s drying up... both of which you don’t want on your holiday. Things like roasting bags can be really useful because you can just throw them away and baking food in foil is also easy and is a nice healthy way to cook. A little thing to remember is last night’s fish pie isn’t quite so appealing the next day, so leaving the washing up till the morning isn’t always a good idea.
Also do be careful what you put down the sink. As the waste water can sit for a few days it can easily smell if there’s a few bits of food down there. These are small things that you might not think about at home but will make your motorhome experience much more pleasant.
BBQs
If you’ve run out of cooking inspiration a great option for any motorhome holiday is a BBQ and as we provide camping chairs and a table cooking and eating outdoors is easy. A disposable BBQ is a good option and most campsites will provide bricks to keep them off the grass. We often do this when we’re away and have got really creative about what to cook on ours to avoid creating any dreaded washing up!
Our favourite dishes
Stir fry
One of our go-to’s in the motorhome is a stir fry. Not only is this quick, it’s simple, healthy, and if you use ready cooked noodles or rice in bags it’s even easier!
Some of our favourite recipes include the following:
This Jamie Oliver recipe
This chilli veg stir fry
This 10-minute stir fry
Casseroles
On colder days, you can’t beat a good casserole (in your motorhome or not!). These are great for the motorhome because they're one dish wonders and can easily use up leftovers.
We particularly like this lentil sausage casserole, either veggie or non-veggie and you can use packets of ready cooked lentils to speed up the cooking time/make your life easier.
We also like the following recipes:
This tagine (if you cover the tray with foil to bake the veg it saves on trying to scrub it clean)
Mexican Dishes
Mexican dishes are surprisingly straight-forward (well, the way we cook them are!)
The following are great:
We hope this has given you a few ideas but if not remember to ask at reception if any local takeaways deliver to your campsite….it is a holiday after all!