Hi there, chef Meg here and I wanted to welcome you to the galley of the Van Damme
in this tiny small space,
we designed everything to have a purpose.
Nothing is really here that shouldn't be here.
My favorite feature of the galley is probably the pop-up bench top here.
It extends my space.
It allows me room to move around to have a large cutting board to have
ingredients out and everything's within arms reaching distance so I don't really
have to walk away or move. That includes the fridge.
It even opens up underneath my bench top.
We designed it that way so that while I'm working,
if I forgot an ingredient or I decide I want to add something else to it,
I don't have to put everything back down. I can just open it up,
get what I need, close it up. Even with our garbage, I don't want it out.
I don't want people to see it. We don't want to smell it,
but I want to be able to access it while I'm cooking and working so easily.
I can just reach down.
We can pull out our trash and I can throw what I need in there. Pop it back in.
A few of the other features of this Scally van that I really love and I didn't
want to compromise on was having a nice deep sink.
Originally I wanted a farmhouse style sink but it was a little bit hard to find
exactly what I was looking for. Plus they're quite heavy so I'm happy though.
It was a sink that we chose. It's nice and deep. I can um,
store some things in there if I need to wash some nice big bowls and I don't
make a big mess of things.
I knew that I didn't want to compromise on as many burners as I could possibly
get in here. So I have three burners.
It has a quick start on here to ignite and it's got a great flame and nice high
flame on there so I can get good sear, um,
and char on any food that I'm going to be making.
The oven itself is really large.
I can fit a couple of chickens in there so we can do our Sunday roast.
You have to really think about how you eat day to day and how you want to use
your space or how much space you want to give to an oven or a stove top.
You could opt for not having an oven altogether focus on the stove top.
Then maybe you need two burners or maybe just one is enough for you if you are
so low traveler. Lots of options out there,
but things that you gotta really think about and hone in on.
Another great feature of our setup here in the van is that we put our max air
fan right in our galley space here, so I'm going to turn that on.
That's gonna suck some of that smoke out so that we don't fill up our galley
here and we do have a nice big window that opens up net screen.
If it's cold outside and we want to have the door closed while I'm cooking,
we can still get all of that smoke out of here.
The other feature that might be my other favorite besides the benchtop is the
pullout pantry. I saw another van that had one and I thought I love it.
I love that it's a space saver,
but I also liked that I could access things while I'm working in cooking.
For those of you that are curious as to what a chef might put into a tiny home,
it looks like quite a bit. I do love all of my herbs and spices here,
but when it comes to baking, I kind of went pretty simple.
I have a gluten free flour blend because Aaron is gluten intolerant,
so we cook gluten free for a sugar. I use a coconut sugar mostly.
I had that cassava flour that we use for the flat bread recipe. Um,
and then just, you know, my baking and soda powders here. That's it.
In terms of my dry pantry, in storage here.
You can go online and check out what I would recommend for tiny home living and
a starter kit for a pantry.
I have everything set up to make a really nice lunch today.
And I'm going to show you a few recipes as well.
For those of you that are already living the van life or those of you that are
interested in getting into it and you're curious about how can you cook a very
good meal, a healthy meal, on a budget,
in a tiny space and have it be gourmet and delicious.
What we're going to be making is a flatbread cassava recipe.
It has limited ingredients. They're pretty easy to find in most local stores.
It's a quick recipe. It's healthy.
Our flatbread recipe today is going to go with our lamb Greek gyros
So let me introduce the few ingredients that we are going to use for this
cassava flatbread recipe. It starts with the cassava itself.
So casaba flour is high end carbohydrates.
It's Yuca, um, flour and it's gluten free.
For those of you that have an intolerance, um, and this recipes also,
for those of you that are vegan, even if you are not gluten intolerant or vegan,
it's a delicious recipe that can be used for many different dishes.
We also have some avocado oil,
whether you want to use olive oil or any other type of oil, coconut, um,
is fine as well. Um,
you're certainly free to use a different oil and change it up.
I use coconut milk myself, but if you wanted to use a dairy product,
you're welcome to do that.
I have some black cumin seeds that can be harder to find,
but if you can't find the black cumin seeds,
then just use regular cumin or you can change it up and just add some spice or
leave it out altogether. Some salt. I like to use a nice sea salt.
I have a pepper blend here. I like a lot of pepper in my, uh,
flatbread recipe. But if you don't like pepper, then leave the pepper out.
The essentials here though are going to be the oil, the milk,
the flower itself, and then we have just a little bit of water and that's it.
Those are the only ingredients for this flatbread recipe.
So let's get started with adding our ingredients together.
I'm actually going to eyeball because I've been working in the industry for
years.
I am confident that I'm at the point with a lot of baking items,
especially a quick flatbread recipe that I don't need to measure everything out.
Um, but for if a cake or a more complex dish then yes,
that's probably the wisest idea would be to actually properly measure.
Since baking is definitely more a science and chemistry.
If you want to learn how to eyeball things more and not have a million measuring
spoons and cups, especially if in your tiny space,
then I encourage you to try it out.
So for the cassava flour,
I'm going to start with a cup of cassava in my mind when you're eyeballing how
much a cup of flour might be,
especially with cassava cause it's a little more light and airy than a
traditional um, wheat flour. That's going to be a bit heavier.
So for the cassava it's going to look almost like a baseball size amount.
So some sea salt, I'm going to take
probably about two to three teaspoons and of the sea salt and I grind it up a
little bit in my hands, let it fall into the bowl. Me,
I like a lot of pepper in my flat bread.
So I'm going to take again probably two to three teaspoons of the black pepper.
You can omit this or use less.
It's not going to really change how the consistency of your dough when you make
it. Okay, next are we're going to add the black cumin seed.
I'm going to add a tablespoon.
You cut out a little bit more if you'd like. Eyeballing that,
I'd say if you cup your Palm,
however much would fit in that Palm. There was probably about a tablespoon.
Next we're going to add our coconut milk, shake it up.
So for this recipe, however much cassava you use,
in this case it was one cup.
We're going to use half that amount for the coconut,
so we need a half a cup of our coconut milk.
I'm going to pour it direct into the bowl. If you'd like to measure it again,
please do so.
So what we have left is just the oil and the water.
For this recipe we use the cup of cassava,
a half a cup of the coconut,
and now for each of these ingredients we need half as much of them from the
coconut.
So meaning a quarter cup of our oil and a quarter cup of water.
I already have that kind of measured out the water.
So I'm gonna pour that in our bowl.
And then we need a quarter cup of oil.
So I'm going to pour that direct in here. That's all of our ingredients.
So at this point we just need to kind of mix it up as you're mixing the
ingredients. If it seems like it is still too wet,
then you can add some more cassava. If it seems like it's too dry, then we,
I would add more coconut. I wouldn't add more water necessarily or more oil.
It's going to be a very sticky dough,
which is why for this recipe I recommend using some saran wrap when you roll it
out or hand roll it out.
That way it doesn't stick to your board where you can use parchment paper if you
don't have this ramp up as well. All right, so let's roll
these out, little piece of parchment. I'm going to fold it over
and however large you want to make your flatbreads,
if you wanna make them small,
like little for tacos or you want to make them larger. So for this one,
I'm going to take that much
parchment and I'm just going to use my hands.
Flatten it out as thick or as thin as you'd like.
I'm going to keep this one a little bit thicker since we're going to have lamb
and some heavier, um, food that's going to go in it.
Our skillets already heated up.
It's nice and hot and add just a little bit of oil in the pan.
Smoke in there. Nice. Spread that around.
Here we go.
And the easiest way I find to get these in the pan, I take one side, lift it up,
put my hand underneath,
drop it down,
and we flatten it out. Takes about a minute on each side.
I like to get a little smoke and char on
Get our lamb on our grill pan there.
That's mine. Lunch is not ready yet.
All right, we're ready to play it up. Our lamb here.
Let's check our lamb. Looks really nice.
What I'm adding to this dish is little bit of eggplant hummus.
We'll put that on our cassava bread that we just made earlier,
and then I'm going to cut this lamb off the bone.
We'll add that in right there.
I tossed together a little bit of raw asparagus
some pomegranate with a little bit of lemon juice and olive oil.
So we'll top that up.
We have our here that we made that's vegan,
used a vegan yogurt for that, and I'm going to throw just a little bit
mint on there.
Yeah, I'm a little sauce
and that's it.
Thanks Meg for sharing an in depth tour of your chef style tiny kitchen.
If you want to see a full tour of this Van
make sure to check it out on my channel and tune in this Easter Sunday on the
Van Damme Instagram at 9:00 AM Pacific to see Chef Meg cook Easter brunch live.