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Camper café is a place where we want to share our food pictures, ideas, opinions and recipes with all of you beautiful people. It can become an online inspiration or even better a place where people come together to share their food & stories. The ideal would be that everybody can follow our travels and can join us, somewhere in the middle of the nature, for a lovely home cooked dinner or snack with view and conversation. We just love meeting people while sharing a meal. Sharing is the key.

 

 

Food has always been central in our lives. From cooking, to eating out, to watching documentaries, we love it all. Food is a very social activity. It’s a way of getting to know a culture, a person or even your own body. The Dutch kitchen in general is not that exciting, even though our grandma’s rocked the traditional dishes. We grew up in a multicultural country with a lot of diversity in food. Plus Europe isn’t a big continent, so travelling to other countries and tasting the culture is easy. Wow, we are lucky eh?

 

 

In our 8 ( and something) years together, we’ve shared our greatest dishes (and worst ones), we’ve discussed the western food culture, the worlds food problems, we’ve seen a lot of documentaries and films, went to food festivals, cooked together and cooked with friends, we’ve got to know our bodies, we’ve created new recipes, got into organic and local food , and tried to get back to the basics. Overall we’ve taught each other a lot and became an awesome team! You know, Dirk cooking dinner 5 evenings in a row kind of awesome teamwork hahah. No seriously, we actually are a great team with both different qualities. Food connects us as a couple and also with the rest of the world. We all need to eat, even tho we can’t always understand each other because of a language barrier, we still can communicate through food. It brings people together.

 

 

We call our way of creating dishes  MORE/LESS FOOD. Food that happens… it means that we are working with the stuff we have at home and not buying specific ingredients every time we prep food. We get our food from supermarkets, farmers markets, friends, dumpster diving and when we were still living in the Netherlands, we would order a weekly surprise bag of local and seasonal veggies & fruits for a decent price. All of it makes us creative and forces us to think outside the box. Whether it’s running out of groceries and you aren’t able to buy new things, working with produce that you’ve never seen before, or you are having two boxes full of one product at home cos you found it next to the dumpster. Of course we also get inspired by recipes in books or online, but we rarely follow the whole recipe or use the exact ingredients.

 

 

This is one of the reasons why the RECIPES we will share with you aren’t super detailed. They are there to inspire you and let your own imagination do it’s work. Everyone has an own style and taste, so we love it if you make the recipes your own! Give it a twist and please do share it with us.  Another reason is that we quite often forget the amounts of ingredients we throw in a dish… haha so we don’t exactly know how many spoons or cups we used…oops! Nowadays we do try to write down recipes of what we think are great meals. It seems to kind of work. We make other people happy with it and for us it functions as a food diary.

 

 

Travelling is one of our biggest inspirations. We divide it in two sections. One side of traveling is getting to know a culture and it’s eating habits. It’s incredible to discover that every country or state has a couple of unbelievable dishes and many ways to prepare food. A culture can approach food from a historic, religious, philosophical, political etc perspective. Coming from a western world, we are in some way privileged like not living in poverty, but on the other hand we aren’t really connected with food and its source anymore. Being a part of a culture for a little while teaches you a lot and definitely makes you a wiser better person! At least that’s what we believe : )

 

 

The other side of traveling, is the way we travel. Living in a camper means dealing with a tiny space, lots of time and a tiny budget for food ( at least for us). This can be very challenging but also exciting! Limited space forces you to come up with different solutions, like cooking on a fire outside or making one pot dishes. We are living with less comfort than people in an apartment, but we are much closer to nature and are understanding the importance of water and electricity. Going back to basics it is!

 

 

With having such a freedom and time, we are able to make everything ourselves and also prep food that’s time consuming like sourdough bread. It slows you down, and it’s simply fulfilling to make everything from scratch. Right now, we came up with the rule that whatever we’re craving, we have to make ourselves ( from cinnamon buns to lasagne) instead of going to the supermarket and buy it for cheap. In that way you know which ingredients are used, how much time it takes to make it and let’s be honest, everything that’s homemade, is made with love and effort,  so it taste waaaaaaaaay better than processed food.

 

 

Also a tight budget makes us very creative. We are kinda forced to think about our basics needs, the food that we really want to be organic and the stuff that we can grow ourselves or find. It’s all about finding that balance and knowing your priorities. Less money doesn’t mean lousy food and dishes. If you are creative enough ( which I believe everyone on this planet is), you can make the most wonderful meals out of a few ingredients. Less is more right?

 

 

Anyways, the section CAFE  is meant to share our camp lifestyle and talk about our point of view on different topics like food waste, keep it local, eat clean, vegetarian food etc. We hope you are just as excited as we are to share and talk about food!

 

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Love food

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Care for nature

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Embrace life

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Be free

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Stay wild

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