RV Meal Planning Tips and Tricks | Ep. 25

We’ve got a really great episode in store, because it’s all about food!

More specifically, we’ve taken all the questions we’ve received from listeners who’ve reached out to ask about how we handle meal prep, planning and food storage while camping in our trailer. If you haven’t connected on social media, we’d love you to join us on facebook and Instagram @rvcanucks. If you’re loving the show, we’d love it if you gave us a rating and review on apple podcasts, as it helps us be more visible to other people like you, and if there’s an episode that really resonated with you (or two) go ahead and share it from the blog to your own social media.

And with that shameless plug aside, let’s dig in. We’ve rounded up 10 questions that cover most aspects of how we plan, store, prep and cook our meals while on the road and hopefully you’ll find some of these tips helpful. Also, if you do something different than what we’ve shared here, reach out and let us know! We’ll mention it on a future episode because we’re always looking for new hacks to make life easy.

Question #1 – Do you have a standard grocery list? If so, what’s on it?

While we have staple items we bring on every trip – like eggs, bacon, cheese, milk and margarine our grocery list changes based on what meals we’ve planned for the trip, but everything begins and ends with the meal plan and we’ve created a pretty efficient system to make sure nothing gets left behind.

First, we sit down and list the days we’ll be away and break those down into breakfast, lunch and dinner and we’ll cross off certain meals we don’t need depending on how we’re traveling. For instance, on episode 8, we talked about how to cover more miles on your roadtrip, and one of the tips was if you’re leaving after work, call ahead a town or two ahead and pick up a pizza along the way to eat while driving. Or, on the day we drive home we don’t plan a breakfast or lunch, because that tends to be a free for all for whatever’s in the fridge. Someone might have toast, someone might have leftover fruit and yogurt, or whatever is left.  Stating out the trip by crossing meals off we don’t need has really helped us from overpacking. We also make a habit of not scheduling a lot of lunches. We often don’t eat them, or we’re out and about and just grab some snacks for lunch like crackers, cheese and fruit which we always tend to have anyway.

Once our meal list is complete, we draw a column down the middle of a piece of paper and list all the ingredients we need to make our chosen meals – on one side we write down items we need from the store, and on the other side we write down items we need but we can bring from home. Then we do our shopping. We keep plastic grocery bins out and keep all the non-perishables we need and check them off the list, and the cold items, we keep in grocery bags in the fridge, and check them off as we bag them so we know everything is in there and we just have to grab the bag and put it in the RV fridge. So this all ties in with the next question which is:

#2 – Do you just raid your own fridge?

The answer to this is: sometimes.

As a general rule, if we’re going out for a weekend trip, or if we’re going for a week or two in Canada, we’ll generally take condiments from home. Things like ketchup, mustard, pickles, and important things like bailey’s etc. You know – important stuff. If we have a bag of marshmallows or a big container of hot chocolate or a container of Jif peanut butter I tend to pack those so we don’t end up with double of everything when we get home. There are a few exceptions however:

A good example of that is butter. At home we love butter. We prefer it over margarine, but keeping butter on an RV counter in the middle off summer is not really safe and trying to spread cold butter on anything makes me ragey, so we get a tub of margarine because it’s easier.  

Some things like milk, we don’t take with us and drink it all up before we leave home. The reason is, and for our American listeners (and those elsewhere in Canada who have far surpassed Ontario in this regard) feel free to laugh, but in Ontario we still have bagged milk which is not great for an RV fridge, because if a bag is in the container open, it’s going to jostle around and spill and I don’t want to deal with that or trying to fill up a larger container with a lid that takes up way to much space.

In this case, we buy a 2L carton of milk (or in the US ½ gallon jugs) because it fits nicely in our fridge and doesn’t spill. We also drink a ton of milk, so it’s easy to replace than refilling a container each time.

We do have seasonal staples that I buy doubles of and keep in the RV, however because we use them a lot and they are versatile. They are:

• Olive oil
• Pam cooking spray
• Salt & pepper
• Paprika
• Garlic powder
• Onion Powder
• Epicure chicken broth mix
• Balsamic vinegar
• Chili Powder
• Red Pepper Flakes
• Quacamole seasoning
• Cinnamon

Question #3 – Is it different for weekend vs. 1-2 week trips?

Definitely, and that’s because we bring so much less for a weekend trip that it all fits into the fridge nicely. For a week long or more trip, we tend to freeze meat and pack it in the freezer to allow for more room for fresh fruit and veg, only taking the meat we need for the next day out and dealing with it one by one. The meal planning principles stay the same though, except that we use box lunches when traveling, and if you want to know exactly how I put box lunches together, have a listen to Episode 8.

Question #4 Do you have go-to meals you always make?

Great question! Yes, we have all kinds of family favourites, but the trick is to have a small enough selection that is becomes tradition to eat some of them, and a large enough selection that you can rotate through each trip without becoming bored. Since Dan and I were tenting canned Stagg Chili and garlic toast was our go-to arrival night meal because it was easy to heat over the fire once the tent was set up so that is still on rotation – though Dan tends to make his own famous chili now. Other favourites which you may have heard us talking about and some of which you can find recipes for on the blog are:

• Steak and potatoes
• Any packet meals (sausage, chicken, veg and potatoes in foil packs over the fire)
• Burgers or Turkey Burgers
• Dan’s goat cheese pizza
• Tortellini soup
• Nachos or Pierogi Nachos
• Tuna Sandwiches and chips
• Hot dogs
• Pie Irons
• Classic bacon and eggs
• Muffins (this is a camping tradition) – which brings us to question 5
• Pasta Salad

#5 – Do you prep any food before you go?

Yes, but only selectively. One of the things we like about RVing is that we have the time to make cooking an event. We kind of feel like camping over the fire is a time honoured tradition, and taking the time to do that at the site is relaxing and allows us all kinds of time to just hang out and talk while doing it.

That said, there are a few things which are much easier to prep at home.

Lettuce being one. We generally eat salad a lot when camping, and use lettuce for a lot of other meals. I don’t love bagged salad, though we’ll get it in a pinch, so I’ll usually buy a pack of romaine lettuce, wash and spin it at home and put it in a large Ziploc with a sheet of paper towel put in to help control the moisture. This keeps the lettuce crisp and usable for the whole trip and it’s easy to grab some to top off a burger, put in a wrap or make a salad with.

Watermelon is another one, only because they are huge and messy and I’ve had more than my share of ant problems when I cut the watermelon at the site. I dice it at home and stick it in a rectangular container that fits perfectly in the RV fridge.

Pasta Salad is a huge tradition for us while camping, and I use every vegetable imaginable when making mine, so I just don’t want all of that time cutting washing and chopping, so I make it the night before we leave. It actually works out well because if we have a long trip, it’s so much easier to pull into a rest stop and dish out some pasta salad and fruit picnic style than it is to eat truck stop food or find a place to stop. Same goes for chopping vegetables to snack on.

Finally – muffins. It has been a tradition to bake muffins before we leave and take them with us. They are a perfect breakfast or snack.

Question #6 – What prep goes into the fridge before each meal

Not much – I tend to prep as we need it, but for things like onions, peppers, carrots, etc. If I know I’m going to need something for more than one meal – for example onions for chili and onions a few days later for nachos, I’ll just dice it all and put it in a container to make it easier.

Same with bacon – we’ll cook an entire pack (or two) during the first breakfast and heat it up through the week for BLT’s, Caesar salad or future breakfasts.

Which is kind of on the same topic as question 7, which is:

Questions #7 – What do you do with leftovers?

Well the RV Canucks food rule is this: Every meal made needs to feed us more than once. But – the second meal must take a different form than the first. This rule does two things. Conserves storage space, and keeps us from getting bored with our meals.

A good example would be chili. We might have a hearty bowl of chili one night and the nest, we use the leftovers to make chili dogs, or chili nachos.

Packet meals are a great one too. If we roast up some potatoes, onions, peppers and sausage over the fire for dinner, then we throw all those leftovers in the skillet the next morning, scramble some eggs and we’ve got a beautiful breakfast hash.

The makings of chicken wraps, become chicken quesadillas. Pasta salad can be heated up and made into a warm pasta meal just by adding some protein and goat cheese or something like that and the list goes on and on and keeps things interesting.

Question #8 – Do you have RV food storage hacks for making a small space work?

Definitely! One of the things our trailer lacks is a dedicated pantry, so we have to be pretty creative about food storage. Also, unless you have an A Class with the benefit of a full sized fridge, your cold storage is scant at best. The best tips I can give you are:

• Get rid of the random old reusable containers you moved from your house to your trailer when you bought it, and get some reusable containers that actually fit your fridge. I love the rectangular reusable containers that you would get at a Chinese food restaurant. You can buy them at Costco in a multi-pack and so far, I haven’t even gone through the whole pack that we bought partway through 2018. They are good because they are stackable and all the right size for the fridge fitting both length and width wise.
• Stay away from round storage containers if you can. Everything in your trailer is meant to store cubed shapes. Honour that.
• Get either a hanging fruit basket or a multi-tier fruit basket. Saves a ton of space for all the fruits and veg that don’t absolutely have to be in your fridge.
• Eggs take up a lot of room. There are 2 ways to handle that. 1, crack your eggs into a large bottle with lid and put in your fridge. Pour out as needed to cook or scramble. 2. And we mostly do this is use the really old, really cheap coughlans brand camping egg container from our tenting days. It’s yellow and hard plastic with a little handle and you can stand it up in your fridge like a suitcase.
• Use the inside of your oven for storage. We talk on this show a lot about how I’ve used the oven inside the RV once. But even if you use it a lot you can store stuff inside while traveling. I put our tray of muffins inside it, but you can store anything that fits. Just don’t turn it on before removing it.
• Be creative with your space and don’t worry about making it work for you. We use the “entertainment unit” in our RV for food storage. For us, it’s a shallow cupboard under the TV. Some people may have a fireplace there, but it’s the perfect size for cereal boxes, cracker boxes, bags of chips, canned goods etc. We even stand our loaves of bread on end under there.
  • We recently had to order a replacement microwave for our trailer, as one of the kids put metal in it when they were small, and when we went to replace it, we realized the trim we have that holds the microwave in the wall, no longer works, so that trip, we put the microwave ontop of the wardrobe in the girls bunk house and we actually found that it works better for us. We rarely ever use our microwave anyway so to have that open storage space above the stove now, is more helpful to the way we camp.

Question #9 – How do you keep everything cold while travelling?

Well we’ve briefly touched on this before and it’s a bit of a hot button item in the RV community. Generally we tend to travel with the fridge running on propane especially if we’re on a cross continental journey in the middle of July for obvious reasons. That said there are a number of provinces and states where this isn’t legal. In addition, you are required to stop and turn off any propane before entering a fueling station, tunnel or ferry, also for obvious reasons.

That said, I’m not advocating that everyone travel with their propane on because there are a lot of factors involved including how far you are going, ambient temperature, how old your rig is, etc.

What I will point out is that RV fridges are mostly absorption fridges, meaning they don’t have a fan to circulate cold air, so it takes some time for them to cool down enough to safely store food.

When we’re heading out on a trip, we turn on the fridge at least 12 hours before we’re due to pack up and pre-cool the food that’s going into the trailer. That includes pre-freezing meat to a solid state before putting in the freezer. This allows the fridge to just maintain its temperature instead of seeing the temperature rise if it has to work to cool warm or room temperature food.

Even if you are traveling with your fridge off, RV fridges are pretty good at keeping cold while on the move. Regardless, we sometimes put ice packs in the freezer as well as freeze a few bottles of water and lay them down in the fridge to help keep it cool while traveling. The ice water will melt and you can drink it, and the ice packs are perfect for throwing in a small cooler or backpack for a hike or a day at the beach.

Finally, Question #10 – Do you have any must-have gadgets or appliances for your trailer.

This is a GREAT question because there are so many things you can bring with you to make your trips neat and exciting in the food department. Some popular ones are countertop ice makers, air fryers and insta-pots or slow cookers. Now, do we have any of those in our trailer? No – and here’s why.

We are severely hampered by both counter space and weight restrictions in our rig. My teeny, tiny counterspace is reserved for the gadget I don’t want to live without and that is my coffee maker. Dan and I drink coffee like a baby drinks milk and you will pry that luxury out of my cold, dead hands. That said, we also have a vintage coffee percolator that makes the BEST cowboy coffee and we keep that in the rig for times when we are boondocking and don’t have shore power.

Other than that we have our cast iron set – if you listened to our episode on the best holiday gifts for rvers you’ll remember we picked out set because the lid of the Dutch oven also acts as a second skillet so it cuts down on the number of pots we need and between this set and the griddle that goes on our camp stove this is how we cook 99% of our meals.

We have a tripod grill which we use every trip, a collapsible colander and a small cookie sheet that fits in the oven for the rare time I want to use it to roast veggies and that’s about it for the bells and whistles. We do have a soup pot set, but it’s a legit backpackers pot set with the collapsible handles that nest and get stored in a drawstring bag. That’s the great thing about the RV life though – you can make it as basic or glam as you want!

I really don’t get the ice maker thing though. Maybe it’s because we’re more beer than cocktail people, but we don’t use a ton of ice. If there’s a listener who uses one out there, reach out and let us know why you can’t live without it in your rig. Maybe there’s something big we’re missing out on and we’d love to hear your perspective.