Full-time kitchen questions

When we bought our Class A in 2008, we had the 2nd couch taken out to buy 'euro' type chairs with ottoman. Never got to it and in 2009 went to Alaska. After filling the 'downstairs' freezer with salmon, went to a Lowes and bought a 7 cubic fy freezer that is where old couch was. Came home with @300 lbs of salmon, halibut, clams etc.
Now it serves us well as we boon dock or are away from stores quite a bit!
Sink is large on 1 side, veggie sink on other. I wash dishes, but there is ONLY 2 of us!!? Use paper if lazy, or if water hooks not available.
Sometimes I miss our beautiful house,(sold it all in 2007 to get ready for this) but then I wake up in some beautiful place and all is well!
This is a beautiful and wonderful country, enjoy it.
Nancy

Yes. I know that Kroger and Publix does carry some organic, so we can survive....but even those may be hard to find if we want to be in the boonies.

I'm sure that we will manage, if we plan for it and stock up. So, it looks like we will need a double fridge and a pantry for certain.

But really...we do not use much dry goods. Only thing would be quinoa and the occasional rice pasta, rice paper, dried seaweed...

I had thought of laying out everything that we currently use in a two week period to see how much space we really need.

I had thought of dividing up our fridge in half to see how long we can last with that space.

I'd do a websearch for yellow page ads for organic stores in each area you plan to visit. This is the hard part if you wish to wander at will everywhere!

Some major chain grocery stores now carry at least some organic produce and sections of organic dry goods. Larger organic food stores, in some areas, are few and far between. You may find an online source for organic dry goods that you could mail order in to a location you are staying at but the cost might be prohibitive.

If you choose to limit yourself to "only" organic--my opinion is you may have to find it where you can, yes maybe increase your storage capacity, but it may limit where you can travel and the amount of time you stay in more remote regions.

Good luck!

MookieKat -- We are in a 2000 Monaco Monarch motorhome 36' 2 slides.

Not so easy for groceries if you want organic.

We're not FT, but we did spend a month at the lake not far from our S&B. It was our first extended trip. Our sinks are small, our freezer is small, and our dishwasher is ME. I found, in that limited time, that prep does make a huge difference. The diced onions and bell peppers are all cut up before any meat hits the pan, otherwise there's just not enough room to do both. After the first couple of days, we discovered the dinner napkin wiping trick and were very pleased with ourselves. It definitely makes a difference in how long it takes to wash those dishes. I bought a large dishpan for the RV so that we could do the majority of our dishwashing outside and bring inside for the rinse, but we haven't used it at all. The inside sink, even though it's tiny, has been large enough to get even my frying skillet sparkling clean. I just can't put it in there with my Corell dinner platters at the same time, which I don't do at home anyway. It's also MUCH easier to wash as you go. Wash your prep knife and cutting board when you put it in the pan, wash your plates as soon as you're done, wash your cooking pans as soon as you wash the plates. As for the freezer, we found that we usually had 2 days worth of unfrozen meats in the fridge and 2 days in the freezer. We found that it was pretty easy to stop in the grocery every few days and just grab a few things that we needed and we hit the produce stands that were along the roadside. Those won't be there this winter, so I guess we'll have to rely on the grocery for that, but it will be easy when we run in.

The one thing I realized in our fulltiming years was that I packed TOO MUCH FOOD. Our rig has a four door frig and the freezer holds an unbelievable amount of food - more than a months worth.

With stores plentiful and roadside fruit and veggie stands, you will find that you need to keep less in the pantry.

Just about any sink size is available, bar size or smaller and there are more sizes available special order. I'd not let the sink size, shape or material be a deciding factor when buying a MH...since everything can be changed.

JimM68 wrote:
We do a lot of our cooking and prep outside. We use a weber babyQ and a coleman roadtrip, both hookup to the rigs propane tank.

Sink is a standard size big/little, plenty of room, tho the DW hates the little side. Personally, when I can, I wash in the big side and put them in the little side, then put the dish drainer in the big side, rinse and then put the dishes in there to drip dry. Then I don't end up with a soggy towel under the drainer on the counter.

Our fridge is a z door side by side dometic, it is plenty big to hold 2 weeks worth of food for 3.

A great idea...but the ones that we are liking...the new ones...have two equal-sized small sinks. I think that the really old ones had larger sinks.

sljkansas wrote:
Most of the sinks I have seen in RV's lately are under counter mounted, if yours is this way, you may be able to find a new sink at Lowes, HD etc. and replace your double sink with a single sink. Same over all size with out the divider.

That is a good idea.

I don't know how anyone in an RV has a residential size sink when the RV counters look like they are only 18" deep. House counter tops are 24".