RV Cooking Tips

RVing is an adventure, and any good adventure requires a lot of fuel. You want to be able to share delicious food with your family and friends while you travel, but cooking on your RV can sometimes be a challenge. The kitchen is small, with compact appliances that may not be as efficient as the ones at home, and you’re limited in what you can carry with you. If it’s summer, you also risk heating up your camper to intolerable temperatures when you turn on the stove and oven. 

So how do you prepare great meals in your RV without suffering? Try this list of cooking tips by Scott’s Recreation, for starters! As your local Maine RV dealer, we serve all of Maine with our locations in the cities of Turner and Manchester. Don’t hesitate to come to us with any questions you might have about cooking in your RV.

Use Your Slow Cooker

Slow cookers are underrated kitchen tools, often relegated to the corner of the counter or a dark cabinet. If you’ve got one in storage, it’s time to pull it out and plug it in on your RV because this little device can save you a ton of work when it comes to making a hot meal! Soups and stews and large cuts of meat are typical slow cooker fare, but you can make chilis, dips, pasta dishes and even desserts in your slow cooker. Look up some recipes -- you’ll be surprised at the versatility of this tool!

Cook & Freeze Meals In Advance

Since you already know your way around your residential kitchen and it’s fully stocked with utensils, spices and ingredients, why not take a day before your trip to cook and freeze batches of dinners for camping? You can enlist the family’s help in preparing favorite recipes like lasagna or tuna casserole, then portion out food into Tupperware containers that stack neatly in your RV freezer. This can save you up to a third of the cooking you’ll need to do on the road.

Try The Microwave

Microwaves are not simply for nuking frozen burritos and Hot Pockets and popcorn, although those are all perfectly acceptable uses when you’re feeling snacky. But you may not realize how much great food you can prepare in a microwave to spare yourself the trouble of boiling water, which sucks up power and generates a great deal of heat. Use your microwave to steam vegetables, cook eggs, bake potatoes and prepare a hot plate of nachos. If you take our above tip to cook in advance, then your microwave is the key to making those frozen meals hot and delicious for immediate consumption. 

Clean As You Go

Because you’re working within a limited space, you’ll want to make sure that you’re cleaning up after yourself as you cook in your RV kitchen. Compost vegetable cuttings, put away ingredients right after using them, rinse down cutting boards and knives, put pans aside to soak and clear up the counter space so you always have a place to work. This will help to cut down on your postprandial clean-up time, too. 

Cook Less

Finally, another option for cooking in your RV is simply to cook less or not at all. This could mean eating more cold or raw foods, but that doesn’t have to be unenjoyable. Breakfast could be granola and yogurt parfaits with chopped fresh fruit, lunch could be a sandwich buffet with pickles, chips and sodas, and dinner could be a giant tossed salad with leftover grilled fish or other protein. Your family will still be able to enjoy nutritious and tasty food without you spending much time in the kitchen at all.

If you’re looking to upgrade your current camper, come down to one of our showrooms to see our full inventory of new and used RVs by the hottest brands. As your premier Maine camper dealer, Scott’s Recreation proudly serves all of Maine with our dealerships in Turner and Manchester. This includes the cities of Portland, Lewiston and Augusta, too!