Hosting Thanksgiving from an RV Resort or Campground
Celebrate with an RV Thanksgiving this year at your favorite motorhome resort! Why leave your snowbird vacation when you can host a beautiful family dinner in your motorhome or fifth wheel? From essential prep to the best advice other RVers have to offer, here’s everything you’ll need to consider when hosting an RV Thanksgiving dinner.
Clean Up & Prep for Hosting Thanksgiving
RV or traditional home, cleaning up is essential before having guests over for Thanksgiving dinner. Make sure you give your RV a good scrub down and all your fall decorations are in order! One important consideration in your RV is space. This means, before you go on your Thanksgiving shopping trip, you should clean out your fridge and pantry. Get rid of all the expired food and make room for a three course Thanksgiving feast. You’ll need to store lots of ingredients and plenty of leftovers in your RV fridge.
Consider RV Thanksgiving Cooking Methods
We already covered all the essential cooking supplies you need in your RV. Now, we encourage you to take another look and think about what you’ll need to host Thanksgiving. There are tons of creative ways to cook Thanksgiving dinner, especially the turkey. If you’ve got a Dutch oven, KOA has a great recipe for campfire roasted turkey.
Take Advantage of the Outdoor Space
Even the biggest RVs only offer a limited amount of space. When you’ve got the grandkids coming to your RV Thanksgiving, there likely isn’t a ton of space for everyone to unbuckle their belts at the booth dinette. There are two ways to take advantage of outdoor space – as a prep station or as dinner table.
Spending the winter at a southern campground means comfortable weather all season long. When hosting Thanksgiving at a campground, we recommend setting up work and prep stations outside. This can mean using an outdoor kitchen, or a simple foldable table, as space to prepare your favorite pies and casseroles.
If you need more seating than the dinette offers, we recommend holding your RV Thanksgiving dinner outdoors. Enjoy fresh air and cool weather with your warm turkey and stuffing. Setting up tables outside means there will be more than enough room for everyone in the family to spread out and dig in.
Cook Thanksgiving Dinner in Advance
Even if you don’t completely cook your dishes, we recommend preparing everything in advance. This way, you’ll have less work on Thanksgiving Day and can spend more time with your family. Pies, casserole and stuffing are all great options to start preparing in advance. These can be safely stored in your freshly cleaned-out fridge, ready to pop in the oven on Thanksgiving.
Share the Work
Hosting an RV Thanksgiving is stressful! One way to lighten the workload is asking your guests to contribute. This might mean asking your guests to come early and help with prep. Or, it could mean asking your family and friends to bring fully prepared dishes. Assign you family members different casseroles and desserts. This way, you can focus on deep frying a delicious turkey!
If asking friends and family to contribute won’t work, you can always have your RV Thanksgiving dinner catered! Some restaurants and grocery stores offer Thanksgiving dinners to go, so all you have to do is heat up your meal.
Make Just Enough Food
Sure, we all love a leftover Thanksgiving meal, but in an RV too many leftovers can quickly become overwhelming. Think about how many people you plan to have at your RV Thanksgiving dinner and make just enough food. Most recipes online will tell you how many the meal serves, and some can be automatically adjusted when you enter the number of people you plan to feed. If there’s no automatic adjustment, make some quick cooking conversions and you should be good to go!
Smaller portions and limiting leftovers will help you save space both before and after Thanksgiving dinner. Even after you’ve cleaned out your fridge and pantry in preparation, space is sure to be limited if you plan to cook all or most of the meal yourself. If you’re a full timer, or a seasonal RV resort resident, Bradd and Hall can help you make the most of your space with our residential fridge installation services. Call us or contact us online to see how we can help you make space for all the food you need to feed the family!
Hosting Thanksgiving dinner in an RV doesn’t have to be overwhelming! Plan your dinner in advance, take advantage of all the space your campground offers and ask friends and family for help. And make sure, whatever you do, to leave room for dessert!