Cooking is something you do a lot when we’re travelling as we limit our eating out to a maximum of once a week, often less. As a tent camper I’m used to feeding a family on 2 ring camping gas, so cooking in the van can seem like a luxury. However compared to our fixed kitchen at home it’s a little cramped. You can see from the photo that we don’t have much workspace. We have a sink but no fixed draining board. We have a 3 ring hob and, not in the photo, we have a small oven. We do not have a microwave or a dishwasher, however when on electric we have a toaster, hand blender and an electric kettle.

I cook a lot of one pan items, curry, chillies, lemon and ginger chickpeas etc. In Italy, cooking is easy as fresh pasta is normal and takes minutes to throw together. I’m finding gnocchi is a good quick alternative to potatoes but it worries me that this is processed food with the added salt, sugar and other bad elements that I’m sure are added. Sometimes I have to use 2 pans if the carbohydrate needs to be done separately but normally just the one so we do have things mixed together. So far this is as you’d expect really. I only cook vegetarian, meat is a treat for me and I try to use fresh products rather than ready made stuff so sauces etc are made from scratch. This year with more time I have extended the repertoire, and done home made burgers, bean pie, apple crumble and regularly make hummus. The pie was interesting as I didn’t have a roller pin and “rolling” pastry with a tupperware box is not possible, it was a thick pie and only been attempted once, the rest all worked quite nicely. To be honest I don’t do much different from what I’d do at home. However I’m careful on the amount of washing up I create for 2 reasons, we don’t have a dishwasher and you don’t have room to have lots of pans all over the place.

So cooking not much different from home, just more items done in one pan.