When we moved, we had to get rid of a great many things. Some of our kitchen gear was hardest to give up. We had a LOT of it! There were certain items we couldn’t bring ourselves to part with, however.
My rice cooker is perhaps my favorite electronic appliance. Some years ago, Lex bought me a Zojirushi fuzzy logic cooker with a 5.5 cup capcity, and I use it all the time. Yes, we eat a lot of rice, but we can make all sorts of things in it and do.
I’m glad I kept it, but I have found that it takes up an inordinate amount of counter space, so I recently purchased a used Sanyo cooker that holds 3.5 cups and has a significantly smaller footprint. It’s good though not quite as fancy as the Zojirushi. There’s no cute little tune that plays when it starts and stops, and there’s no cake setting. Ah, well…a tradeoff, but at least it fits on my countertop. If anyone is interested in buying my old Zojirushi, I’ve got it posted on Craigslist. Drop me a mail!
My favorite non-electric kitchen gadget is my Manttra nonstick pressure cooker. When I bought it online a few years ago, I discovered a whole new way to cook food faster. Apparently, the pressure cooker is the microwave oven of the third world. Americans don’t use them as much as they used to, probably because they got a bad reputation decades ago for blowing up, burning folks, making huge messes. There have been technological advances since then, and now they are very safe to use. I’ve had my Indian-made cooker for over two years and love it. I can make a pot of stew or chili in half an hour, a pot of beans in 45 minutes. I can even stick frozen meats in it and have them cook up in short order. Everything comes out tender and luscious. It’s sort of the opposite of owning a Crock Pot. It cooks everything to falling-of-the-bone tenderness, too, but it does it in minutes instead of hours.
Because I had to get rid of my large cooking pots, the pressure cooker also doubles as a regular stock pot when I remove the special pressurized lid and replace it with the regular glass lid that also came with it. I heartily recommend pressure cooking to everyone, whether or not they live in an RV. We have a propane stove, and the beauty of using one of these things that it cuts cooking times down to a third of what they usually are, thus saving significant quantities of fuel, something I don’t take for granted when I find myself wrestling those propane tanks out of their racks to carry them to the filling station.
A few years ago, on a lark, we bought a Soda Club Edition 1. The Soda Club allows the user to make his/her own club soda or seltzer. The company ships the CO2 cylinders to customers at about $30 each, and we find that we can use a single cylinder for 6 months or more. We no longer buy sugar-laden commercially-produced sodas. Six months’ worth of soda costs more than $30 given that a 12 pack of cans can cost $4.00. Instead, we make our own custom flavors with juices and syrups. Cranberry juice + seltzer + a squeeze of lime = refreshing! Grape Kool-Aid + seltzer = Grape Crush! The Soda Club is a tall, slender item that takes up very little space on the counter.
While Lex loves her badass Kitchen Aid mixer, it’s heavy as it can be and takes up a lot of room on the counter. Plus, there’s no cabinet big enough in which to store it, so when we move the RV, it would be difficult to protect the machine from bumps and falls. Lex couldn’t let go of it, though, since it’s what helps her make her award-winning poundcake, so instead of selling it, we asked a couple of friends to store it for us. Now Lex can go pick it up and “borrow” it back whenever she needs to use it, but we don’t have to make room for it.
Instead of keeping a stand mixer in the RV, we kept our Braun Multiquick Professional hand blender. This blender isn’t one of the wimpy ones, oh, no! It’s a tough customer. I’ve had it for a long time. I burned out the motor about two years ago and found a reconditioned one online for about $30, and it’s been going strong ever since. I can use it as a food processor, a mixer, an ice crusher, a smoothie maker, a spice/coffee grinder, you name it. It takes up very little room in the cabinet over my sink and weighs next to nothing. It can survive a beating and is easy to clean, too. I have to say that I’m a big fan.
I picked up this little battery-powered Handy Can Opener at Tuesday Morning for ten bucks. We haven’t owned a regular electric can opener for a long time and were using the manual-crank ones instead. Those work fine, but they only seem to last about six months before they wear out. I’ve had this opener for nearly a year, and it still works as well as the day I bought it, plus I haven’t had to change the batteries in all that time. The coolest thing about it is that it doesn’t leave a sharp edge when the lid is removed from the can. Plus, I don’t have to hold the can or the opener while it works. I just put the opener on top of the can, fit the lip of the can into the opener, press the button, and let it go. The opener rotates around the top of the can, removes the lid, and then stops on its own when it’s finished. The other great thing about it is that it is compact enough to fit in my kitchen utensil drawer just like my old manual crank one did.
The last appliance I kept was my Melitta Express Kettle. Sure, I could have kept a regular tea kettle or I could just heat water in the microwave, but nothing heats water faster than this electric kettle. This is one item I’m still debating the value of, despite the fact that we use it so much. On the upside, we don’t have to use our propane to heat water. On the downside, it draws down our power in a big way. I can’t use it and the microwave or the electric heater at the same time without tripping a breaker. But when Lex runs out of hot water while she’s washing dishes or when I want to make tea, nothing can beat it. If I trade it in for a traditional stovetop kettle, the regular kettle wouldn’t take up any less space or weigh any less than the electric one, though, so I’m not yet ready to get rid of the Melitta, especially not in the winter when hot cocoa or tea really hits the spot.
I’ve got everything I need in my tiny kitchen to make the same goodies that I did before we moved into the RV. The only things I can’t do here are can and dye, two things I miss very much. Even so, I’m enjoying learning how to be an inventive cook all over again like I used to be in the days when all I had to cook with were a hot plate, toaster oven, and microwave. Here I at least have a traditional cooktop and oven plus the microwave. I have to say that I wish I had a toaster, but we can’t afford the huge power draw or the counter space. Instead, we toast bread on the cast iron griddle that we use for making tortillas and other goodies. We kept the griddle in lieu of our three heavy cast-iron skillets. When we need a skillet, we have some lightweight aluminum ones that do the job just fine.
Tonight I’m making rice in the Sanyo cooker and beans in the pressure cooker. Maybe I can talk Alexis into making us some tortillas to go with it.
Happy RV cooking!