Cooking, part 1: An overview of our kitchen gear

Cooking in a van is often a topic of high interest among vanlifers and people interested in vanlife. Here we share some of our cooking gear! Check back for future posts about our cooking tips, dish cleaning process, and reviews of our cooking gear.

Obviously we have a limited set up in terms of our kitchen appliances. Everything serves multiple purposes and there is nothing extra, except maybe our beer koozies … arguably those are are not a necessary item. Besides our basic silverware, plates, bowls, water bottles, and cups, we have the following items:

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KitchenAid Cordless Hand Blender

The KitchenAid cordless, USB-chargeable hand blender was a 2020 Christmas gift that we never knew we needed. And maybe we don't actually need it, but it has come in handy over the last month and a half already. We've used it to make many smoothies, something we couldn't do before having our blender. Madi has made hummus, one of my favorite special foods to make when we lived in our apartment before vanlife. We think homemade hummus is so much better than store-bought hummus and it's nice to be back in that practice. We have even ground coffee beans with it! Now, we do have a hand crank bean grinder, but we made the mistake of leaving that back at one of our parent's houses over the holidays (@ moms and dads, if you see it, want to UPS it our way? ;) ).

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Tea and Coffee setup

Here's our basic hot drink set up. We have a special thermometer to measure water temperature for our tea and coffee. We have a small french press for our rare morning coffees. We drink a lot more tea than we do coffee, something I've been working hard at. We also have a fancy pour-over that I got Adam for his birthday a few years ago. It's big and made of glass so we don't bring it out often. It lives packed in the trunk of our car for the special times, or for days we might have family and friends camp out with us.

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Eureka! Stove

We have the Eureka! single burner butane stove. It is simple to use and has an ignition button, so no burning your fingers with a lighter (Madi does this when lighting our PocketRocket and it's not fun)! We cook almost all of our meals on this stove. It fits our pots and pans perfectly and it runs on butane, which is a lot cheaper than propane or iso-butane. We cook most of our meals on this 2.5 L MSR ceramic cooking pot. It's big enough for soups, pasta, and stir fry.

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MSR PocketRocket and small pots

We boil water for tea, coffee, and sometimes rice on our MSR PocketRocket. We've had these (one stays packed in our backpacking gear, one stays out for cooking) for a few years now. They've been on trails, in campgrounds, and in our apartment with us so they kind of feel like family. Vanlife wouldn't be complete without our PocketRocket. But in all honesty, we love this tool for a quick boil in our MSR Titan Kettle or this older model of the GSI Halulite pot. We can make breakfast quickly and boil water for a warm morning cup of tea at the same time.

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Omnia Oven

This. Is. Our. New. Favorite. Cooking. Item. We got this for Christmas from my grandparents and it has changed our cooking game. The Omnia Oven is a Swedish-made stove-top convection oven. It has three parts which fit together nicely, a small carrying bag, and it looks really neat on our stove. The science is similar to that of a regular convection oven, except it works over any heated surface with the exception of an induction stove. We use this on our Eureka! stove, but we could also cook over a campfire or our PocketRocket. We're going to make a whole post reviewing our experience with the Omnia Oven, but, for now, know that we love it!

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That's about it for our cooking set up. It's nice a simple but it's more than enough. We can make anything from tea to pancakes to fish to taco bowls. It fits out needs and wants, the ultimate mindset of #vanlife.