This Companion version is well-made and only cost me around $Au 20.00 . It uses standard butane canisters and has inbuilt piezo ignition. The burner is fairly powerful and is the equivalent of the main burner on a household gas stove.

The safety systems are pretty foolproof as you need to lock the butane canister in place before lighting the burner and to put the stove away, you need to invert the pot holder which creates a safety lock preventing leakage. It would however be helpful to have some way of sheltering the stove for windy locations but you’ll just need to be a bit inventive to get around this problem.

We used one of these stoves during a three week trip in Tasmania recently. The stove was light enough to carry in our baggage and we had little difficulty finding butane canisters as we moved around.  A bonus feature we discovered was that the plastic case could be used as a shallow sink to wash our dishes.

In its most basic form, the Trangia gives you a metholated spirits burner, two aluminium bowls and a small frying pan which all fit within the stove itself for convenience. A small kettle can be added and will also fit within the packed appliance.

Depending on your need for lightness, you can opt for aluminium or titanium cookware. The aluminium may be lined with stainless steel on its internal surfaces. Last time I checked, there were three sizes of Trangia stove available.

This stove is quite capable of working in windy conditions and by using metho, is fairly safe. Metho can be easily purchased from a wide range of stores. Other fuel options can be explored including butane and multi-fuel burners. A major camping gear shop will generally have some of these on hand. The stove will cook faster with butane but the downside is that you have to carry and dispose of butane canisters.

A useful accessory that you can make yourself is a toaster. All you need is some strong wire (eg a clothes hanger or fencing wire) and some stiff wire mesh such as a repacement mesh for one of those simple stove top toasters. Bend and secure the stiff wire into a circle of a size suitable to drop onto the pot holders when they are at their lowest position. Leave enough wire to curl back over the top of the mesh to make a platform for your piece of bread. Now bend the mesh to fit over the circle. It’s easy and works well but try not to burn your fingers!

This kind of cooker has been around for over 50 years. You can still replace individual components if you lose or damage them.

Ours has been used extensively on motorcycle trips and on long and short camping trips. It is often the first thing unpacked when we reach our campsite so that we can boil a kettle for tea while we get our site organised. We generally try to pitch our tent close to a free outdoor table and use this as our base for cooking our meals.

From a safety point of view, always wait until the brass burner is cool enough to handle before adding more fuel. The flame may be difficult to see and you risk a serious accident if you inadvertently pour metho onto an active flame.

The Easy Cook is one of those gadgets that you often see advertised on the TV with heaps of hype and you just know that it’s never going to be as good as they say and you’ll have one more pile of junk wasting precious space in the kitchen cupboards. Not so. In fact if I was heading off tomorrow with the intention of using powered sites, the Easy Cook would be the first appliance I would pack.

What you get is a large round safety glass bowl with a heating element on top and a fan to create a turbo effect within the bowl. The food sits on wire stands and you can place food on three levels. Naturally the food on top cooks quickest and the food on the bottom is noticeably slower.

So, for example, you can have chips or wedges cooking on the top level, meat in the middle and vegetables down low. Yes a complete meal cooked all at once.

What is even better is that you can basically set the timer and walk away. I often (well not that often) set the timer and walk the dog or take a turn on the treadmill. There’s no need to turn the food as the fan ensures that the heat circulates on all sides.

The great thing is that there is no spatter. The food is completely contained within the bowl and no fat escapes. Food that you may normally fry such as wedges can be shaken in a little oil and just dropped on to the top rack. It’s a fairly healthy style of cooking as most of the oil or grease ends up at the bottom of the bowl.

Cleaning is easy. Instead of having to wipe over half the van, you simply need to rinse the Luminarc bowl and wipe over the lid. The Easy Cook can also wash itself if you partially fill the bowl with water and a little detergent. You’ll want to do this at least once just to admire the turbo effect.

This gadget is very flexible and the recipes are only limited by your imagination. It can cook cakes and there is no easier way to cook a perfect roast. On a nice day, you could even use it outside your van on a handy table.

Two bowl sizes are available: 11 and 13 litre. The smaller size is perfect for 2-3 people. The other choices include 3 speed fans and 24 hour digital timers. We have the basic manual unit with a single fan speed. You can also run the unit on a 1.5Kva generator.

Back up is excellent. There is a website at: www.easycook.com.au . We were able to replace the lid and heating elements of our ancient and very well-used unit recently at a very fair price.

If I was building a camper from scratch, I would build one of these in and leave out the oven. At home, we haven’t used our oven for more than three years.

You can find more details online and the units can be purchased through many large electrical stores. Pricing: $199 to $299. They sometimes come up on Ebay too but I don’t understand why.