Because We Can - Fulltime RV'ing

I Smell Fish

One of the great things about reading the RV forums is that you never know what you might stumble upon. Because I focus most my writing efforts on our website, I tend to be much more of a forum reader than a forum poster. Given all this leisure time to idly peruse the boards as they say, I came across an intriguing question the other day. One that broached a stinky subject, and one that was also filled with far more pungency than merely lingered on the surface of the question.

The question was actually quite simple; do you cook fish in RV? Which was further broadened by the original poster with the added inquiry; does it stink up the place? What followed was a series of responses which proved enlightening, especially when looked at from the perspective of how people view the role of an RV in their lives. The more I read, the farther afield my mind wandered, until at last I decided this was a good topic for our home page.

Quick now, could you answer the question in just two words? How about, "eat out." I believe whomever posted that answer may have told it like is, but I also believe they missed answering the real question that was posed. Another response that I believe missed the real question was: ...Carry a small gas grill and a electric hot plate. Cook everything outside as much as possible....

Getting somewhat closer to the mark was this one: ...Spray some air freshener around, or make some air freshener yourself.... At least they were no longer talking about the extremities, i.e., the arms and legs, they were at least dealing with the main part of the body, with the vital organs in sight. Homing in closer we find that someone states they: ...Cook everything in their RV as they did in their "sticks and bricks" house... while adding, ...just make sure you have plenty of ventilation.... I do believe we have struck a vital organ with that last one. Then at last someone gets to what I consider the very heart of the matter: ...My RV is my home, and if I can not cook the things I like in it, then I am doing something wrong....

Understand that I've edited and condensed the originals to fit our purpose, and that none of the answers are wrong because we have to recognize that every ones perspective is different. Sometimes the perspective that one has on a simple matter like this depends on some factors that impact only a very few people. Take a person who is very sensitive to certain smells. If that is the case, the first answer may be the only viable solution, but what about the rest of us, the ones who don't have special needs.

Since I've already staked my claim to the last answer, that our RV is our home and we should feel free to cook whatever we want in it, let me elaborate on where I am coming from. When we lived in our stick home we seldom ate fish, but we sure did cook a lot of shrimp, especially in the summer, and then always on the outdoor grill in the backyard. Was it because we didn't like the smell? No, it was because we loved the flavor and taste of barbecued shrimp. And, as long time Daily Journal readers know, we still enjoy our shrimp cooked this way.

But let's again return to the time before, meaning those days of yesteryear when we had jobs and lived like most everyone else. Then we also cooked a dish we called Big Easy Shrimp, a dish that, when you went out shopping after cooking and eating it for dinner, caused the house to smell like it was still on the stove when you returned three or more hours later. We had it because we liked it, the smell that lingered only serving to remind us just how much we truly enjoyed it. Guess what, we still cook Big Easy shrimp even though we live in this small space, and for the same reasons we love the stuff.

Does our house still smell after it has been cooked? It sure does. Can we still smell it hours later? You bet? Does it bother us that our house is only 38 feet long and 9 feet wide and sometimes smells like what we just cooked? It does not. After all it's our home and it's the way we live, which gets us back to my original point. Is your RV something that you feel like a stranger in, a place that you are only visiting, or does it feel like home? We can both still point to the day in the summer of 2006, when parked out in the middle of Illinois surrounded by corn and soybeans, we returning from buying some groceries and the magic moment occurred when we both realized we weren't stepping into our RV, instead we were stepping into our home.

Eat out, sure. Cook outside, sure. Use air freshener, certainly. But best of all, when the day is done, once again we know we are home, and so what if it smells like fish, after all it's the place we live and the place where we enjoy living Life.

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