The smell of last night’s onions is still in the curtains. It’s in the mattress. Probably in my jacket too. I cooked for twenty minutes and the van reminded me about it for three days straight. That’s not a one-off. That’s what a small enclosed living space does to cooking smells, and if you’re new … Read more
The first set of collapsible bowls I bought lasted about three weeks before the silicone started peeling at the rim. They’d been stored in the cabinet above the hob, and the ambient heat from cooking worked at the edge seal slowly, until one day I picked one up and it just came apart in my … Read more
Every few months, someone posts in a van life group asking for kitchen setup advice. The shopping list they end up with reads like a small appliance store: a mini rice cooker, a collapsible colander, a hand blender, two different pan sizes, a four-piece silicone utensil set, a mandoline they bought for a dinner party … Read more
The first van I converted had a kitchen I was genuinely proud of. Solid countertops, a spice rack mounted neatly on the wall, storage bins lined up in a row. It looked great in the build photos. About three months in, parked outside Toulouse and trying to make a proper pasta from scratch, I realised … Read more
The number of people who’ve messaged me asking whether they need solar panels before they can cook in their van is genuinely surprising. It comes up constantly. And I understand why. The van life community talks about solar non-stop. Amps, watts, lithium battery banks, inverters. It starts to sound like you need an electrical engineering … Read more
Six months in, I opened my cumin and it smelled like wet cardboard. Not rancid. Not gone. Just empty. Like the jar had retained the shape of a spice but nothing else. The aroma was there for about half a second, and then it was just dusty air and mild disappointment. That was somewhere in … Read more
A standard 10-inch cast iron skillet weighs 2.4kg. My full cooking kit, including the hob, two pans, a lid, and a spatula, comes to just over 4kg. For a long time I refused to do that maths, because the answer was uncomfortable and I liked having the cast iron. Eventually the van I was building … Read more
Most van kitchens carry at least one pan too many. Usually two. The third one was bought for a specific recipe, used twice at most, and now lives at the back of the cabinet behind the cooking spray and a corkscrew that’s been there since the first trip. Every time you actually need a pan, … Read more
The non-stick pan you’re planning to bring into your van will be dead in eighteen months. Probably less. That’s not pessimism. That’s what happens when a coating that degrades around 260°C meets a gas burner that comfortably exceeds that temperature on medium, used daily, cleaned in whatever water you have access to, stored in a … Read more
I built my first van with a cooler. A decent one, a 45-quart Igloo with good insulation, bought specifically because several van life forums said it was “good enough to start.” It lasted three weeks before I accepted it was making my life harder, not simpler. This is not a post about which option looks … Read more