Caravan Chef cooks up a page-turner

Cooking yummy, easy to prepare meals is never a simple task in a caravan or tent, but ‘Caravan Chef’, Eva Stovern, is making it easier to tickle your taste buds when limited by time, space and limited ingredients during your road travels.

Comprising recipes from her first two Caravan Chef books, plus 30 new recipes including a new section on desserts, the new Complete Caravan Chef by Stovern is a useful guide for all types of camp cooks, from novices to experienced grey nomads.

Like her previous books, all 100 or so recipes (except desserts) in the Complete Caravan Chef are made using just 30 basic ingredients, ranging from staples like salt and olive oil to pasta, rice, meat and vegetables.  

A keen caravanner, Stovern said the ingredients were "selected for their versatility, easy preparation, availability, light weight and long storage life."

"It happened over a period of time as I was travelling," explained Stovern about how the original idea came about. "I found myself travelling with too many utensils, and I even travelled with some cookbooks at one stage, but I found as soon as I picked a recipe and chose the ingredients I would find I’d cook that meal and for the rest of the trip I’d be stuck with those ingredients so then I would choose another recipe and do the same."

"So after a while a pattern formed where I started packing very similar ingredients which I found to be very reliable on the road and then I would basically work backwards; whatever I had in my caravan or tent at the time, I would basically invent a recipe based on those ingredients. And that’s how the (original) cookbook came about."

Her latest cookbook includes recipes for thermal cooking pots, ovens and grillers, and provides useful advice on what to pack.

"I deliberately wrote all my recipes so that you need no more than two saucepans and one frying pan, and only two on the stove at a time, because a lot of camping stoves are just double burners," she said.

The book has a light-hearted, user-friendly appeal, with easy-to-follow recipes including large colour photos, while each recipe is named after a tourist town or place in Australia. A vinyl wipe-down cover and large spiral binding add to the book’s practicality.

Asked about her top five ingredients if she had to choose, Stovern nominated "tinned fish, tinned tomatoes, pasta or rice, and oil and onion".

"With tinned fish, you can have for breakfast in a frittata, put them in a soup chowder, make a salad or serve them warm. The same with tinned tomatoes, they’re very versatile," she said.

It’s not all about pre-packaged ingredients, though, with nine vegetables included in the list, and Stovern encourages the use of fresh, local produce wherever possible.

"For older people who think cooking on the road is a chore, I can’t think of anything nicer than cooking outdoors, and buying something local," she says. "I’ve bought my freshest, nicest lettuce from a lady who grew her own near Mount Warning, and it was just a salad I will always remember, it was just brilliant."

Although she doesn’t have a favourite recipe, Stovern really enjoys rice-based risottos, of which there are seven to choose from in the book. "I think they’re easy to make and very tasty," she says.

Her husband Thom, who took the photographs for the book and is chief dishwasher, "is very partial to the Mitta Mitta osso buco".

The Complete Caravan Chef: Around Australia with 30 Ingredients (RRP$29.95) is available from good bookshops or visit the Caravan Chef website.