Cooking in our van 🥘🚐: Our favorite van life meal!

Today we have a delicious little adventure planned. We're gonna cook you guys a meal. So one of the most requested videos we have gotten is to show how we cook in our van and we've been living in our van full-time for about seven months now and we've gotten into a good groove with cooking in a very small space and with very limited appliances. So today we're going to show you our kitchen setup and cook one of our favorite van meals. It's easy, delicious, whether you live in a van or not. Welcome to our kitchen. So we did a poor job showing our cooking setup during our van tour but our setup is super simple. We just have an induction stove top and a fridge. We typically eat two large meals a day, mostly meat and veggie, so about 90% of our food goes in our fridge and it's pretty empty right now because we've been staying in my parents' house so we're not using it at the moment but this thing can hold a ton of food. I think we can probably store about a week's worth of food and since most of our food is refrigerated that's pretty dang impressive. We also got the fridge with the smallest freezer possible because we don't use it that much but very important to note you can shove a full pint of ice cream in here which we have done very often or sometimes we just eat it in one sitting. One of the most frequently asked questions on our van tour is where do we keep our dry goods or our pantry goods or whatever you want to call them and we keep them up in here. So we have our control panels for like our solar and our batteries but in this space in between we keep anything like rice or canned goods or things like that. As we said we typically eat a lot of refrigerated food so this smaller space works fine for us but if any of you out there are converting a van and you eat a lot of food that might need to be stored up here you might want a slightly bigger space. So as you can see we do not have a built-in stovetop on either of our counters. We wanted to keep them nice and open so what we went with is the induction stove and we actually used to have two of them but we quickly learned that it takes up way too much power. Even just using one it takes about 10% of our battery to cook just one meal so it's still a power hog. So what we do to conserve some of our batteries when we're out boondocking out on the road is we have a camping stove or we'll just make meals that don't require any cooking like salads or something. And that's our setup it's super simple it's just pots pans and an induction stove and it does take longer to make things because we only have one burner but we've gotten used to it. The only thing we're really missing is some nice delicious roasted veggies but we appreciate them even more when we do get to have them. So if you're new around here we did want to mention that we do have a van tour where we walk through the entire van show you our shower and how we make our table into our bed and all that fun stuff and we do have a blog post that links to every product we use in the van so if you have not seen those we'll link to them below so you can check them out but we are hungry so let's get cooking. So we're gonna make not only one of our favorite van meals but one of our favorite meals we've ever made up all time a red curry dish. So disclaimer we have never been to Asia so we cannot say how authentic this recipe is but we think it tastes pretty dang good. We want to eat this meal every single day of our lives and there have been weeks that we've had it quite a few days in a row. It's not the most unhealthy but it's maybe not the most healthiest either but man we love it. So what makes this dish so awesome is that it's super customizable and easy so what we do we start off with some veggies so we get a couple bell peppers and a zucchini you can do any veggies you want then we move on we have we throw in some ground beef but you can do chicken pork you don't even have to do any meat it's great for vegans vegetarians meat eaters everybody I like the next part this is super easy we just get a parboiled rice you just tear it open dump it in boom and then what makes it extra special so we have coconut cream this gives it that yummy creaminess and then the red curry paste and then we just have a couple spices that we throw in and then top it off with some cilantro. We kind of morphed recipes we found online and just made our own version of it so originally we used to put chicken broth in with the coconut cream but we just found it was too liquidy it wasn't creamy enough for us so we just cut that out and then some recipes online call for I believe fish sauce or sugar to go in with it but we just put salt in instead of fish sauce fish sauce because we don't have any on hand and then we didn't really feel the need for sugar but that's just something to consider if you do try to make this dish. So your first step you're going to cut up all your beautiful veggies so the first thing I like to do is just cook the veggies first just to soften them up a bit so our next step is we add our meat if you don't eat meat you just skip this step so in it goes yeah ground beef's not the most attractive thing to show on camera so as we mentioned earlier you can try different kinds of meat in here we've tried chicken I think we've tried pork but for some reason we just love the ground beef the best I think it's because the meat is just so crumbled up that with every single spoonful you get like the perfect oh it's fatty and good you like the perfect proportion of meat to like the soupiness when you do ground beef so that's why we love it but the chicken was good too I think we did pork and that was good and for anyone who likes tofu I bet you could put that in here we've never tried it but it might be good I don't know let us know if it is Adam is our resident chef in the van he cooks all of the meals chop chop I love cooking so it's it's just fun for me and I'm a really good taste tester now's the time you're gonna add your curry powder and your red curry paste we've seen some recipes where it just calls for half of this bottle but we like the flavor so we dump the whole thing in there I don't measure it or anything I just do a few bing bang booms we also don't drain the grease as you can see but that's your preference you can do it either way but we like it fatty yeah now you're just gonna mix it up get it all nice and incorporated so as we were cooking we kind of realized that we made too many veggies we usually normally do just one bell pepper and one zucchini so this is a bit too much and it might throw the ratio off a little bit so we're not gonna add all this in we'll save some for later so this is the time that you throw in your veggies we like to go with the rice and tasty sometimes it might be easier if you get the parboiled rice in the bag because as you can see this is kind of like a brick and so if you have it in the bag you can mush it up with your hand and break it up it just makes it a little easier once you dump it in but next step boom and then you're just gonna break her down break it up best you can try not to let any jump out there's a lost soldier there now it's time for the magic to happen now you can see the creaminess getting in there oh my goodness put the oil mixing in it'll look more and more red as it mixes together instead of pink or orange it also depends on how much curry powder you put in yeah orange it gets yeah but here now you're just gonna kind of let it all sit together a minute or two get this rice broken down it's kind of easier when there's more liquid for it to kind of break the rice apart and then you just kind of want to get it to simmer just for a couple minutes and let the coconut cream warm up all the veggies warm up the rice everything just all married together as you can see it's not the most liquidy dish ever so you could put less rice or less meat or less of anything really whatever consistency you like yeah to make it a little bit more soupy if you like adam's over here taste testing the sign of a good chef is chef always taste the food yeah that's right it kind of looks a little bit like slop but we promise it's really good if you want soupier like we said you can definitely put in less rice or less meat to give it just more of a soupier appearance but let's dig in good job so excited about this we're hungry we haven't eaten yet it's like noon it's just so creamy and there's different textures like the meat and the crunchy veggies the rice is kind of softer than just the oh the flavor is bomb it just has so much flavor oh my goodness this this is definitely my favorite meal we've ever made so yeah apologies if it looks a little weird i don't know we didn't realize until we started till we filmed it for you guys we're like oh maybe this doesn't look as appetizing as we we think it is but promise you it's delicious all right it's my turn so you can season it however you want i'm gonna throw a little sriracha on there i don't normally do it but doing it today sounded good i like it a little spicy because it's not spicy on its own already so oh i'm so excited so good we haven't had it in a few weeks i've missed it so much we hope you guys enjoyed our little van cooking show if you guys end up making this recipe definitely let us know especially if you loved it and if you didn't love it let us know what you changed about it to make it good for you we really want to know yeah so if you make any changes if you have something you make that's similar definitely tell us we're always excited to try new things especially while we're here in austin at my parents house we're trying to cook as much as we can and if you guys have any recipes that you think would be good to make in a van comment below and let us know that as well so we can maybe have some more variety in our lives but we're gonna devour this so we'll see you next time and there have been weeks that we have eaten it every single day welcome to our kitchen ah so we're gonna make not not only cut up all your beautiful veggies veggies veggies