Gear: The Kitchen

Kitchen? Yeah right, you’re thinking, he’s joking. No, I’m quite serious. We were able to fix breakfast, make coffee and cook our own dinners while we were on the road. There’s two different philosophies: (1) camp only and eat at restaurants or (2) camp and cook for yourself. We followed (mostly) #2 since we are ‘picky’ eaters and like to start the day with our oatmeal/TVP/banana breakfast and coffee. We prefer this approach since we don’t have to worry about having to find a place to eat once we get on the road. It takes a bit longer in the morning to get ready but is less stressful for us, besides introducing a certain amount of continuity and familiarity.

The same holds for dinner. I’ll spare you our recipes ;-), but we don’t really like to eat at restaurants and cooking for ourselves worked out really well for us. A couple of times we even had both stoves going simultaneously! Why two stoves? For one, backup, in case one broke but also this allowed us to make espresso coffee and boil water to dilute the strong extract – in parallel. Plus, I get to play with two fires in the morning, doesn’t get much better than that :-D.

Here’s a list and links to some of the equipment we used.

* MSR classic Alpine cookware – MSR discontinued this particular configuration
* Optimus Nova+ stove
* Primus Omnifuel stove
* Espresso maker (from IKEA) Here’s another maker but same concept.
* 10 liter collapsable kitchen sink and camp soap
* cutting boards
* two coffee mugs
* plates and cutlery
* spices

All the kitchen items in the album were in my right pannier.