After getting the trailer ready and hooked up, the next most important thing for us is to make sure WE are ready to go. That includes stocking certain items inside the cab of the truck within easy reach of the passenger seat.

Here's what we do...

If you’re like me, when it comes to shopping for groceries and cooking meals, you want to spend as little time as possible doing either one. Being able to stock up so that I can shop less is important to me.

So, one of my biggest worries when I was getting ready to move into an RV and kiss my house goodbye (along with my huge residential refrigerator) was how I was going to cope with that teensy tiny refrigerator, because RV refrigerators aren't known for holding a lot of stuff.

When you look at all those RVs, you soon find out that the kitchens all have something in common. No matter if the kitchen is the front, the middle, or the rear of the unit, it is SMALL.

Even the largest of motor homes usually have a much smaller refrigerator than ones you will find in a regular house, and the ovens are all just about the same.

My first uh-oh moment came not long after we moved in. I wanted to cook a baked ham and the dang thing wouldn't fit in my oven! After 8 years of living fulltime in an RV though, I have learned how to shop for food, how to prepare it for storing, and how to cook it in the confines of my small kitchen.

One of the things my husband and I like to do on our days off from working at the campground is to visit the local farms and farm markets to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.

There are many ways to find these places if you are new to an area.

Before we sold our house and hit the road in our RV, we liked to have dinner parties. You know, where you invite several couples over, cook a delicious meal, maybe serve hors d'oeuvres, then linger over a cup of coffee and dessert laughing and talking.

After we moved into our small space, I wondered to myself how I could ever do that sort of thing again.

Sure, there are potluck dinners at just about every seasonal campground you go to, but I wanted something a little more intimate. I wanted to be able to cook some of my favorite "big" dishes, the ones that are good and yummy but you can't cook just a little bit of it. And I wanted to invite some of the interesting people we had met.

So, one day when we were working at a large resort in south Texas, I decided I was just going to do it and figure out how as I went along.