Cover image by @belafish.
Question: What is one of your favorite meals that you cook regularly in your tiny house?
Next up on the list—FOOD! We hope you didn't come too hungry, otherwise you'll be reaching for some snacks mid-read!
Everything from homemade sushi to pizza to burrito bowls, the #DreamTeam has your tiny (or not so tiny) taste buds covered!
Answers:
Lauren & Christian | adventureabode.blogspot.com
Ashlee | girlinatinyhouse.com
Shannon & Tim | instagram.com/shannonsoine
We recently switched out our large island (which was also a dog crate) for a table that adjusts up to bar height. We like to move the table and set it up as an island with bar stools and enjoy some cocktails and charcuterie on Fridays.
We also love to grill out on the deck year-round (Tim even grills in the snow). Unfortunately, onions and curry are banned from being cooked indoors (when your closet is basically in the kitchen, your entire wardrobe will stink for weeks), so those are cooked outside.
Tricia & Andy | instagram.com/threetinyhams
We love to cook tacos—both for ourselves and as a meal when hosting. And we have the counterspace to pull it off!
We usually pull out an InstantPot (which lives under the peninsula counter) and pressure cook either chicken or pork butt/shoulder, and then cook beans, rice, and tortillas on our gas-powered range. We generally incorporate some fresh citrus from the garden (behind our tiny house) in some way, as well as some fresh homegrown herbs and peppers. A new favorite twist when hosting is to have a bunch of mixed greens and bowls out, so that people can make killer burrito bowls. It’s fun and easy, and crazy delicious.
The one thing about hosting a dinner party in a tiny house is that you may have to reject friends’ offers to help clean up afterwards! It’s just so much easier if we tag-team it, as we know exactly where everything goes, what can go down the drain, etc. Gotta be ready to do that cleanup dance in a tight space!
Nicolette & Michael | nicolettenotes.squarespace.com
Oh gosh such a hard question! We love food! Lol. But I would probably have to say this pasta dish that is our go to! It’s vegan of course, and I use up a lot of the kitchen to make it. Cooking the pasta on one stove top while making the sauce on the other. Chopping up all the veggies on the kitchenette counter and adding in beyond meat sausage to top it all off <3
Annie | pocketmanor.com
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about living tiny is that you have to cook on a tiny kitchenette and that you’ll never have room to make anything except one-pot meals. Granted, I still go for one-pot meals all the time. But one of my favorite things to make in my tiny house are maki, or sushi rolls! I make them probably once every other week. Like most of my favorite meals, I enjoy making it because it can be so versatile. As long as you have rice and nori (sheets of dried seaweed), you can put almost anything inside!
If you’ve never made sushi rolls before, you can follow this super informative video tutorial + recipe to give you all the basics!
Pro Tips:
- Cook the rice earlier rather than later, to let it fully cool off. When you put hot rice on nori, it will make it slimy and smell super fishy - definitely not as tasty.
- Don’t skip seasoning the rice! The seasoning should be a mixture of rice vinegar, sugar, oil, and salt, and you pour it over the cooked rice.
- Keep your hands wet while spreading the rice out on the seaweed and it won’t stick to your fingers!
- Leave a short strip of the seaweed at the end of your roll without rice, and dampen it with a bit of water or soy sauce. That will help you ‘seal’ your roll so it holds it’s shape.
- Keep the fillings interesting! Prep them while you are waiting for your rice to cool. Cut everything into long thin strips to make it easier to roll. Some of my fave fillings are: avocado, baked or fried tofu, carrots, steamed sweet potato, mango, bell pepper, and cucumber.
- I stick to a mostly plant-based diet, but if you want, some crab, shrimp, or cured/smoked salmon would be easy additions to your rolls! I don’t recommend trying to go with fully raw seafood unless you have a reliable place where you can sushi-grade fish.
- A bamboo rolling mat is helpful for making your rolls, but certainly isn’t necessary. You can either lay a piece of saran wrap over a dish towel, or make hand rolls instead!
Enjoy!
Sam & Tim | tiffanythetinyhome.com
This is an easy one—I love to cook! This is such a form of therapy for me. I love putting love and care into the meals I cook for others.
Among our household, staples are Korean beef, fried pickles in the air fryer, and most recently, mulberry jam. I love our kitchen. We have a HUGE farmhouse-style sink, which is awesome for preparing food. We also have a gas stove and oven, and just enough space for the cutting board. We just got an air fryer, so we’ve been using it like crazy. It just cooks things so quickly!
We usually do a huge breakfast on Sundays with all the works—eggs, bacon, toast, sometimes pancakes or fancy bagels. We do a lot of salads to get our greens in (greens make the world go round!). I love cooking and absolutely adore my kitchen.
Small kitchens can still produce big flavors!
Bela & Spencer | tinymigrations.com
We call it a Keto Bowl and we've written a little about it in our blog.
The specific ingredients are always different, but the essential composition is always same: a big bowl of salad (mixed greens, avocado, cilantro, lime, macadamia nuts, lots of olive oil) + 1-2 roasted green veggies (asparagus, zucchini, brussels, etc.) + protein (grass-fed beef or fish) + an egg or two. A lot of the time we'll also add some fermented veggies, seaweed, or other yummy stuff on top.
We usually follow that up with a sugar-free "dessert" of coconut butter or Bulgarian yogurt, nut butter, cacao nibs, and cinnamon. We finish that off with collagen peptides mixed with just water or whatever else we’re feeling like (spirulina, chlorella, turmeric, yada yada).
Basically, we keep to a low-carb, high-fat diet and only eat one meal a day (dinner). Outside of that, we just have coffee or tea. This is the backbone of our approach to performance and longevity and it also frees up tons of time every day. We’ve been eating like this 5-7 days a week for about a year now and it’s been incredible.
Dolly | tinymissdollyonwheels.com
I love goat meat. I go to the local farmers market every weekend to buy fresh goat meat. I cover the meat with spices (I like using garam masala!) and sear both sides of the meat in a pressure cooker, throw in vegetables, spices and water or broth. I pressure cook it for 45 mins to an hour. I freeze some of the broth for later use. Then I make a sauce with the remaining liquid, add the melt-in-the-mouth meat and more vegetables. The process is the same but the ingredients may differ depending on what I have in the pantry.
I make the best tasting healthy brownies, too! If you DM me, I’ll share the recipe with you =)
Marnie & Dan | tinyhaus.com.au
We love to entertain, our favorite meals are when we cook for family and friends—this is a pretty regular occurrence for us, at least once a week.
We use the BBQ to do a whole fish or chicken, crispy baked potatoes and a fresh picked salad from our garden. After our meal we head to the fire pit for a glass of wine while the kids toast marshmallows. We use our outdoor area as much, if not more, than inside our home for our meals.
Jess & Todd | tinyhouseofny.com
We eat A LOT around here, and have had the time to cook and bake more from scratch since moving into our tiny home (now that the build is almost complete!). We bake a lot of bread, have learned to make our own yogurt, and granola, and have been able to experiment with new recipes.
We really believe that having less house to clean and maintain has given us more time to be creative in the kitchen. We’re also fortunate to work from home so we can multi-task—work and cooking/baking.
I don’t know if we have one favorite meal, but we did find that using our wood stove (which is our only heat source) doubled as a way to cook food this past winter, and we were able to cook soups, chili, and stews atop our wood stove as we were heating the house. We love multi-use, especially in such a small space. Also, one of our tiny living goals was to be more aware of our environmental impact, and using the wood stove saved on propane use—a win/win!
Melissa & Scott | instagram.com/thatgrackle
Tacos win by a landslide! It's by far our favorite meal to make in our tiny house (or anywhere else we find ourselves for that matter!)
We sauté up a large pan of veggies herbs and seasonings on our propane cooktop, heat up some tortillas in our toaster oven, whip up some guac and all is right. We never cooked with propane before living tiny and we absolutely love it!
For extra counter space in our kitchen we incorporated a slide out kitchen island and it is perfect when we are chopping up lots of vegetables for this dish. Everyday can be Taco Tuesday if you believe in yourself.
Alexis & Brian | instagram.com/living_the_tiny_dream
We love to cook breakfast! It is the meal that rules them all. We often have breakfast for dinner during the week, and of course splurge and make more involved breakfast meals on the weekends.
Having three laying hens, and a craving for delicious breakfast foods, we end up cooking quite a bit in our tiny home. Our favorite weekend go-to is Finnish oven pancake. There are only 4-5 ingredients, and it takes 45 minutes to cook, so it’s perfect to throw together and then crawl back in bed while you wait for it to cook.
My personal favorite quick weeknight meal is the classic eggy-in-a-basket. It can’t be beat. Who needs vegetables when you have things like pancakes? And waffles. And eggs.
Joshua & Shelley | tinyhousebasics.com
We really enjoy cooking, especially breakfast, but for 6 days of the week we eat 5-6 smaller meals each day about 3 hours between, so during the week we will usually do something simple for breakfast like 6 egg whites and 2 whole eggs split between us and cooked in our cast iron finex pans. Topped with fresh cilantro and feta. We add in some fresh veggies or blistered tomatoes, or a side of avocado. For a carb we will usually do some corn tortillas with some fresh salsa or instead of tortillas we will cook some naked shredded potatoes in our waffle iron to get them nice and crispy without the oil. This is an easy healthy filling start to our day.
For Saturday which is our “free day” we will have something extra tasty like biscuits & sausage, gravy, eggs and mimosas, or we will smoke some meats over the night before like corned beef for a delicious hash that's ready in the morning. It honestly gets us up as the aroma fills the air in the early mornings hours from our tiny outdoor smoker.
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+Hi There!
My name is Alan—founder at Dream Big Live Tiny Co! A few years ago, I quit my consulting job to pursue a life full of adventure. After traveling around the world for a year, I sold most of my stuff and moved into an 160-sqft tiny house. Now I spend most of my time showcasing incredible people living with less in pursuit of more freedom, as well as incredible tiny houses around the world!