Our Favourite Quick, Easy and Cheap Van Life Meals

Cooking in a van has its perks, but it can also be rather hard. You have less room for a start and less cooking methods to utilise. Given we have a motor home, our kitchen is bigger than most, but it’s still difficult to cook some of our favourite meals from before our van life adventures.

Van life meals are, let’s face it, not super fancy, and we really want them to be cheap. We are on a budget and don’t want to waste precious travel dollars on the food we are cooking ourselves. We have a few go to meals that are quick, easy and super cheap to make in a van.

Bonus, they are a lot more healthy than just eating 2-minute noodles and packet ramen. Whilst we do eat the occasional packet ramen to keep our costs down, we try to avoid these kinds of meals out of an eco stance. There is a lot of plastic packaging that goes into the cheaper meal options and the more you can avoid this, the better your impact on the places you are visiting will be.

Hopefully these options will spice up your van life cooking and help you avoid using plastic covered cheap meals a bit too.

Be sure to check out our Instagram to follow along on our adventures!

Veggie Nachos

Our very first go to, super cheap and easy meal. We’ve been making this long before living in a van. Grab a tin of black beans, a tin of corn and throw them in a pot with some Mexican spice mix. You can make your own or buy a big jar of it from the shops, think spices like cumin, coriander, chilli, dried onion and garlic. Throw in some salt and pepper and heat it all up. Toss it on-top of your corn chips with some cheese and then some form of salad.

We like to make our own slaw and Tiff loves having avo and tomato on there too. The trick for this one is to drain your corn, but not the beans. Use all the yummy bean juice to help mix in your spices and cook it until it thickens. You can add mince to this mix as well, but that does jump the price up unless you can find the discounted stuff at the shops.

Bratkartoffeln

We both have German backgrounds and grew up eating Bratkartoffeln cooked by our Oma’s (German for grandmother). However, both our family recipes (let’s be real our Oma’s don’t write recipes down, they show you how to cook it) are very different. The potatoes are cut differently and Nathan puts egg and bacon in his Bratkartoffeln! We’ve compromised here and taken parts of the recipe from each of our backgrounds to make our own delicious version of Bratkartoffeln.

Ingredients:

Potatoes
Eggs
Bacon
Sauerkraut (easily found in the jar food aisle of most supermarkets)

Method:

Chop the potatoes into cubes (Don’t peal them as this wastes the skins and the less food waste you have in a van the better!) steam them in a pan so they are partially cooked, and you can almost slide a fork in them.

Whilst the potatoes steam, cook your diced bacon until it’s crispy, then take it off the pan. Leave the oil in the pan for your potatoes.

Once almost cooked, transfer the potatoes into the bacon pan and mix them around a bit to rough them up, add some butter to really coat them and cook until they turn golden and crispy. We often add more butter as we go to really crisp them up. Add the bacon in at the last minute to warm it up again.

Whilst your potatoes are cooking in the pan, scramble some eggs in a smaller fry pan and transfer them to your plates just before the potatoes are done. We then heat up some Sauerkraut in the egg pan before putting it all on the plate and enjoying our dinner.

Bowls

We love making a variety of rice and noodle bowls. It’s a great way to use up leftover veggies or meat. Fry an egg up to put on top and you have a great meal! Our favourite types of bowls at the moment are a take on Bibimbap, salad noodle bowls and a vego version of a poke bowl.

Bimbimbap is eaten warm, whereas the other two are better cold. Just put your cooked rice/noodles in the fridge whilst you prepare the toppings for the bowl. We aren’t great at writing down or even using recipes when we make bowls, but we have written some suggestions here along with links to some proper recipes if you don’t like to wing it in the kitchen.

Warm Bowl

Base: Rice

Sauce: Mix together some Gochujang paste, mirin, soy sauce and sesame oil. We don’t really do measurements, we just spoon stuff together until it tastes good! If you are a recipe person, then check out this link for a great Bibimbap recipe.

Veggies: Cook whatever veggies you have at hand in separate stages in the pan. We generally julienne carrots, cook some spinach (or whatever leafy green we have like bok choy) with some crushed garlic. We like to add Zucchini, but it’s so expensive at times that we often leave this out and add more leafy greens instead. Cook some mushrooms to round it out.

Meat: Any meat works fine, and we use what we have leftovers of, or we use tofu as a substitute when we want a vego meal.

Fry an egg to go on top, and you have a bowl of deliciousness.

Vego Poke bowl

Base: Rice, cooked then refrigerated to cool down

Sauce: Kecap Manis cooked with sautéed onions. Put this straight on top of your cooled cooked rice

Toppings: Grated carrot, peeled cucumber, edamame beans, pickled ginger, marinated tofu (cooked to a crispy cube), kimchi, avocado, sliced radishes, julienned capsicum. Basically pick what fresh ingredients you like and mix them through your rice!

Once you’ve made a few bowls, you’ll get the idea that you can do this with any sauce, veggie and carb combination. Mix up your base by using quinoa, cauliflower rice or soba noodles instead of rice. Throw in whatever veggies you have that need eating and add Protein in the form of eggs, tofu or leftover roast meat. The main thing to remember is to have a base, a sauce and some vegetables and protein.

Japanese curry

Grab yourself the packet Japanese curry (this one!) from the shops and follow the instructions to make this delicious and super easy dinner. We add onion, carrot and potato with the occasional kūmara (sweet potato), to the curry. Cook a side of crumbed chicken or any meat really (in a pan as the curry cooks in a pot) to accompany your curry and a side of rice, and you have a well-balanced meal to enjoy in your van. We like to get the Medium for a little extra kick in the curry, but all the spice levels are delicious.

Pasta

Nathan will often make hand made pasta for us so we can avoid getting it in plastic packaging. If you aren’t so keen on spending a few hours making pasta and waiting for dough to rest, then check out a bulk store to get your pasta plastic free! Once you’ve found your pasta, it’s as simple as adding a sauce, and you have an easy and healthy meal.

We enjoy a good veggie pasta by cooking leftover veggies like capsicum, cherry tomatoes and eggplant in the pan and adding a jar of pasta for the sauce. Another easy favourite is using a jar of pesto (or making your own if you have a stick blender in the van) and some fresh cherry tomatoes and tossing it all through your pasta.

Beans on Toast

This simple recipe came from Bonnie Wright and her Go Gently emails. Check out Go Gently on Instagram or grab a copy of the book from your library for more simple, healthy and environmentally friendly meals. We’ve adapted this slightly to make it a more filling dinner.