I'm not poor, i'm just not paying 24 bucks a pound for cheese... Even if I win the lottery, a ham and cheese omelet w/ Velveeta is friggin' golden. Cheap ham is awful, ya got me there. I like a Hormel Cure 81, not sure what was wrong with Cures 1 through 80, but they got it down, I think. What I'm getting at for some uses, more expensive isn't necessarily worth the money.

 

I won't be poor if I don't let myself run off the deep end in the deli section, that's for sure.
My 'Budwieser' expenses are steep enough!

Smithfield packs a good traditional ham, but I don't do ham often. I also don't see a huge difference in turkeys, what is on sale is a bird - and it's kind of hard to mess one up.
A plain old turkey or chicken from a farm is better I think, than one from a large commercial enterprise or corporation. I want the real thing...

I DO think avoiding GMO is a good idea, I don't want to myself be genetically modified, so why would I eat anything with the modifying agents potentially still in them?

GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) is a thing that big business is very much into, in order to maximize profits and (they suppose) quality. But what if for the sake of size and texture we find twenty or thirty years down the road that these products were harmful to us?

I am not a Guinea Pig, I am a human citizen over twenty one, eligible to vote, and not wanted by the law. I have a right to have safe food

Or so I imagine


I RESENT being experimented on...


DID YOU KNOW:
The term buccaneer derives from the Caribbean Arawak word buccan, a wooden frame for smoking meat, preferably manatee. From this derived the French word boucane and hence the name boucanier (pronounced: BOO-CAN-EE-AY) for French hunters who used such frames to smoke meat from feral cattle and pigs on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). English colonists anglicised the word boucanier to buccaneer

* Some also attribute it to the cooking of wild beef for at sea stores of food

"Tres bon, les boucaniers!"





Over the years of course - it came to refer to PIRATES who cooked over smoke fires in that region of the Carribean, but it was originally descriptive of the French hunters in those islands

~ a small bit of cooking history, for your entertainment and amusement

 

Do you know why those guys wore an eye patch?

It wasn't because they lost an eye, believe it or not. They kept one eye covered, so as not to lose their night vision. So when they stormed a ship and swashbuckled themself down below deck they'd flip up the patch and they would be able to see in the dim light.

 

If I'm "camping" in my trailer, I can cook pretty much anything I would be able to cook at home. Never use the oven though.

I actually camp with a coleman stove that I set up on the picnic table. I do most of my cooking out there unless it's terrible weather. I find that if I'm inside, the kids want to be inside with me. if I'm outside, they may hang around my feet, but they will probably get distracted and go play with some nature or something educational. Don't forget to bring a supply of beverages though. Sucks to be cooking away happily and to run out of beer. Walking the twenty feet to the trailer is an awful lot like work.

One of my favourites is sauteed shrimp. Littel butter, lot of garlic, and a splash of white wine (with the rest of the bottle(s) for the cook and his friends). Throw it over some pasta, eat it by itself, it's always a big win. Cooking this one outdoors is good, as you don't have to worry about making your trailer smell like garlic for days.

Just thinking about it, I do a lot of pasta when I'm camping.

 

RE: Tedster:
That makes as much sense as anything to me.

CLEVER - if it is true

 

Pasta is very portable, and has a lot of possibilities. It is also a high grade source of lasting complex carbohydrates - which is a prime energy source.

I have always felt that a downfall or shortcoming of RV refrigerators is that they take so long to cool back down when the door is opened. I have heard that it takes ten minutes to cool back for every second the door is open.

For this reason, I always thought that a SONY or other bookshelf fridge ought to be available for drinks at a campsite, because they maintain temperature faster.

RV fridges are for cooling food in transit, at a site, a faster refrigerator is better.

And we all know how often that "Cold Drink" door has the potential for swinging open - an RV fridge would never have a chance to cool back down. But a bookshelf fridge that could be tucked away in a corner in transit, and brought into play once shore power is restored can do the job well. It could even be stuck in a spare closet space, and turned on only when the camper is parked.

 

One trick that works good is to split up the groceries into different coolers. Frozen items are segregated into a dedicated cooler and cooled with dry ice. Stays frozen a long time.
And it's not being opened constantly. Beverages get their own cooler, etc.

 

It's probably because my trailer has a really small fridge, but I keep an ice chest full of beer and ice. I put on the ground outside my door, and it'll keep my beverages cold all weekend. I use the fridge inside for milk and meat and the like.

 

I have always thought that RV refrigerators were ridiculously inadequate things, honestly.

Certainly there is nothing about their performance that justifies the price of them -

If you had a reefer in your home that performed so poorly you would just buy blocks of ice, or SUE the manufacturer!

But those things cost around a thousand dollars, and cannot cool food effectively. Since that is true, I think that until an RV reefer that works as good as a home unit is devised, to support the manufacturers of such inadequate junk is stupid.


A HOUSE refrigerator that cools far more effectively of the same size is only one third the price, if not less...

What are you paying for?

If you can do the same thing less expensively it makes better sense.


Alternatively what you can do is this:
Pile all of your money on the floor of your trailer, and SHOVEL IT OUT THE DOOR whenever you go anywhere...


There must be a better way


QUESTION:
***He asks, despondently***

Is there such a thing as a top opening RV deep freezer?

I bet there isn't, because it would be energy conservative


What fools we are, to buy whatever someone else talks us into...


Many RV appliances are designed to resemble what we have at home.
But camping is a new and different situation.
Campers these days are designed and intended to make it possible for those who have no business camping to go out into the world and TAKE THEIR HOUSE WITH THEM.

With self guiding satellite TV and all the rest of the bullcrap.

I can't help thinking:

WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT IS CAMPING?

~ it isn't





Thousands of stars overhead, and a wood fire in a pit
An older guy reads from a book of Native American tales
Mothers wrap their children in blankets that have slipped
As the cold desert air surrounds....

Far away a coyote howls and yips
In the faint moonlight saguaro figures are seen
Firewood is added to the pile
The smell of burning mesquite fills the air

The moon rises in the east
A dog someone brought sighs and settles down next to a tent
An owl hoots somewhere out in the desert
And the smell of fresh cooked meat fascinates




THAT IS CAMPING

But the MONGOLS invented RV's thousands of years ago - they were called yurts


You build a big cart, have it pulled by oxen, and make a tent on top of it.

 

The refer in our fiver works very well. However, I do think that should it ever take a dump, I would quite likely consider an "upgrade" to a residential style.

 

You gotta figure - when do you actually use it?
If it is when you are hooked up to shore power at an RV camp, a residential unit makes sense.

For going down the road an ICE CHEST is plenty.


It has always seemed to me that RV refrigerators never really were good enough to do what a domestic one was expected to. And until the design is improved, they simply are not worth the money




But that is an OUTLAW perspective as far as the industry is concerned. I don't care about making money - I care about traveling in comfort.


If you have a generator with enough capacity - Atwood, Dometic, and all the rest can go to hell for all I care.

 

There has to be some huge trade-off for being able to operate on propane. I do see a lot of the bigger units have the ability to run a residential style fridge, which as you noted, is cheaper and better performing.

 

When I was kid we used to cook on the engine as the folks drove. Put a steak potatoes in tin foil seal well and place on engine, couple hundred miles later you had supper done. Mom used to cook with a white gas stove in the roadside rests, now this was wqhen we had a Nash Rambler station wagon and she packed the coolers inside and clothes out on top! For charcoal also used to make hobo dinners where you add everything together, (carrots, celery, potatoes hamburger etc) seal in tin foil and bury in coals for a while. I think these methods still have a following on the net, havent looked for them!

We have no issues with the rv fridges, they do as designed but suffer if over loaded with warm stuff. Cool/freeze 1st before putting in. Have ours on too high and it froze stuff in veg area!

Just searched for:

http://www.search.com/search?q=autom...e+cooking+tips

http://www.search.com/search?q=hobo+foil+cooking+tips

 

An RV fridge is designed to cool food on a long haul between stops, STIPULATED!

It is intended to be run on an economical amount of "SOMETHING" that powers the chill cycle - also STIPULATED.

SO why do they have front opening doors, when a top lid would prevent the cold from flowing out?

That is just stupid...


I could see an RV process reefer, if it were designed as a cooler chest, but at a camp site something else is called for. Plug into power and use something else that works better!

AS a food storage chest a top opening RV freezer makes good sense, but what we have now is just plain silly and ill advised. You design a thing to run on a marginal amount of propane (about like a bic lighter flame) that can only do so much heat removal, but set it up as a conventional fridge that when you open the door all of the benefits are lost. This was intended to make the stuff remain cold in transit.

But when you are in and out of it a lot, it does absolutely no good.

I think a revision in RV food storage is long overdue

There should be a freezer for travelling,and a better stand up unit for in camp.
Even if it is a cheap bookshelf refrigerator....


If I were to define the problem more precisely, it is that the classic vertical hydrogen and ammonia piping process needs to be adapted to a horizontal vice an upright insulated chest, so that cold can be retained in it given that the cooling effect is gradual.

That doesn't seem to me very difficult to achieve, but it would result in a radically different appearing appliance.

It would not resemble a standard refrigerator, nor very much a deep freeze - since there would have to be a cooling column running up through the RV walls at right angles to it.

Suppose you had a thing four feet tall, about three or four feet on a side, and it had a piping system that ran upwards to the ceiling. It would have a lid on top that swivelled up, and you only used it for long term storage of food stuffs that had to be kept at forty degrees fahrenheit or so.

It would fit against a wall in a small space, and the "PLUMBING" be in the wall or behind a false wall


THAT would do the job.

Given that a lot of RV people waste two thousands on a washer and drier that don't work nearly as well as a roadside laundromat, I think the space for such a thing is more than well available.

GET REAL!


Some people are just plain stupid...

You can sell them any damned thing.


To them an RV is a rolling playhouse



But so long as they want to spend their money, there will be those who gladly suck it up


HAPPILY, if it is their profession

 

How much propane do they require per day? A pound?