Cooking In The RV

As I have mentioned before, we are not camping. No wienies or marshmallows roasting over a campfire. We're not opposed to that, but it's not dinner.

We don't even have paper plates (Sometimes I wish we did. Washing dishes in a small sink is a big pain. Thankfully Chris does most of the dish washing.)

But cooking real food is a challenge, mostly due to space issues.

We have a gas stove with three burners, but that's a bit of a fallacy since there's no way three pots would ever fit at the same time. Sometimes the stove tilts a bit (see my prior posts about the jacks and leveling) toward the cook. It's not necessarily dangerous, but worrisome.

The oven is a combo microwave/convection. I made the mistake once of putting something in to bake without pushing the convection button. Fortunately I caught my oversight before the microwave went nuts over the metal baking dish.

If you put some chicken in to bake...you can't microwave anything for an hour or so. 

 It took us a few tries to get used to the convection oven. We tend to set the temp a little higher and cooking times a little longer.

The crockpot gets lots of use, particularly when we were in New Mexico because it doesn't heat up the room like an oven does.

Don't worry. We're resilient and hungry, so we've adapted.

If we're having eggs and bacon for breakfast, the bacon is cooked in the convection oven to free up space on the stove and also because it's less messy.

The convection oven has a turntable, but if we use a rectangular pan (like a cookie sheet) we have to turn it off since there's not enough room for it to turn. Hence, we bake cookies on a pizza pan.

Last night I made oatmeal cookies. Here's the new recipe I tried. Highly recommended if you're a fan of oatmeal raisin cookies. I'd never considered soaking the raisins but it made them juicy and delish.

So, how does making cookies in the MH differ from a regular kitchen?

First, the counter space is very limited. Since I was using the oven and not the stove, I put the cover down on the stove and that was my primary workspace.

The pizza pan/cookie sheet holds about as many cookies as a regular cookie sheet, but with the longer bake time, finishing up an entire batch of cookies seems like an all night event. No double rack in the oven to bake two pans at once. I suppose we could get another pizza pan so I'd have one ready to go in when the other came out, but then that's another pan to be stored.

I started out making the teaspoon sized scoops of dough as the recipe called for. Each tray took about 20 mins to cook, cool and reload. That got tiresome and after about three rounds the cookies became much larger. We have no objections to large cookies, and the end result was certainly worth the effort, it's just a matter of making some adjustments.

Size variation in the cookies. Chris helped toward the end, making golf ball sized balls of dough.