One of the reasons I have this blog is to remind me of things I have eaten, cooking, but also experiences of cooking outside the home, for example on holiday.
This year we went on holiday to France staying at an Eurocamp in Guines in Nord, Northern France. We were staying in a caravan and I used my previous blog posts on self-catering in France to prepare for the trip.
The caravan did not have an oven, just a microwave, but unlike last year there was a gas barbecue outside. Maybe I was just lucky with other sites, but the last three Eurocamp caravans I have stayed in did not have ovens.
Keeping things simple, I mainly cooked meat and sausages on the barbecue, salad, and then cooked pommes rissoles on the hob.
The barbecue needed cleaning before it’s use and this was quite a nasty job with lots of grease and old fat on it. The sink in the caravan was way too small for this job, so I took it to the (large) washing up sinks that the campers used.
We really enjoyed the French sausages we got from the local supermarket, they did have a relatively high fat content, so the barbecue needed a good clean after each use. One interesting thing I noticed when buying steaks from some supermarkets was that they came in covered packaging so you couldn’t see the steaks. Another nice meal we did was some chicken thighs, I really like barbecued chicken, and enjoyed eating it.
The salads were in the main lettuce, tomato, and cucumber. I really liked the variety of tomatoes we had and they were full of flavour. Some days we had avocado and we also had some olives as well.
Another key feature of our meals was fresh bread, and we bought bread daily from the campsite shop. The shop itself was a bit disappointing and I felt overpriced. However in Guines itself there was a Carrefour and a Lidl, and in the heart of the town were quite a few local shops. One of these was a Boulangerie and we had some delicious patisserie from there during the week.
I did take some tools with me, knives, chopping board and a pair of tongs. In the end the knives in the caravan weren’t half bad, I didn’t like the glass chopping board that was provided, however there was a set of barbecue tongs there, which made cooking on the barbecue much easier.
I didn’t have room to take my coffee machine, and I wish I had.