Cooking and Food Storage Ideas
Pressure Cooker - Our Outdoor Microwave
	We grew to love our pressure cooker.  Our friends talked us into it, and this device is a great help when you are on the road.  At the end of a long day, nothing is better than to sit down to a good meal.  With a pressure cooker, you can cook in one pot and in one quarter the time.  Not only do you save time but you save fuel, doesn't use nearly as much fuel.  You just add everything in one pot and fire it off.  We would use plastic oven bags in it an it would minimize cleanup.  I even had a birthday cake made in one.     The first time we tried the cooker, we hid around the corner.  We had thoughts of old pressure cookers that make a lot of noise and would blow up.  The new ones have a few safety improvements.     We love to entertain new friends.  We had a dinner party in the Champagne district of France for some newly made friends.  My French is bad and I didn't realize I had invited nine for dinner.  No problem, we just added a couple more sausages and things to the mix and everyone was happy.  The wine cellar never recovered though.
Refrigeration
	My wife always likes to go to the open air food markets or farmer's markets.  It is a great way to try out new foods but you need to have some way to preserve all this bounty.  We don't like electric refrigeration because they all seem to draw too much electricity.  An efficient one draws 2 to 6 amps per hour, that works out to a lot more than our 15 amp electricity budget per day.  We opted for a small propane fridge.  About the size of a large cooler, with the lid on top.  It is a simple and rugged device that uses ammonia as the refrigerant.  You would set the flame to how much cooling you want.  It uses about as much as a pilot light.  It would cool about 40 to 50 degrees below ambient temperature, good enough to make ice on the cold plate.  The only problem we had was the size, they don't hold that much.
Food Preservation
	Many foods you have in the refrigerator do not need to be in there.   We would always look for different packaging.  Tetra bricks are great for milk and even tomato paste.  Single serving packs of mustard and mayo would save more space.  We kept our cheese in the little refrigerator and we couldn't figure out why it always smelled in there.  We were in France then, they never refrigerate their cheese, in fact they have special cupboards that vent outdoors for cheese.  If you buy non refrigerated eggs and coat them with cooking oil, they will last a long time.  You get the idea.
Cookbooks and Food Sources
	We had the great fortune of spending a summer at a "hurricane hole" in Florida with a bunch of blue water sailors.  They are a group of independent people.  One even taught my wife how to preserve food and shop in regular shops for food that will keep for a long time.  We also found cookbooks that are directed toward sailors to be a great source for ideas.  Simple meals that are tasty and easy to prepare and clean up.  Another good source are cookbooks directed for pressure cooking, again simple one pot meals.     If you don't have the time for all the shopping, find an outfitter for ocean voyages, camping or even ocean races.  The crews like to eat well and not have to clean up.  One place that comes to mind is Black Fly Provisioners in Annapolis MD.  They outfit many racing crews, it is expensive but they really have some innovative menus.