Eggs McGiver
I don’t have an oven or stove at home right now. The story behind this situation is very long and will end soon, so I won’t bore you with it here. There is no boiling of water, cooking under the broiler or baking going on at my house. However, this has meant that I have discovered some unique uses for some standard kitchen appliances, should you ever find yourself, like me, with a entire collection of gourmet copper cookware and nothing to heat its bottom.
What fuels this drive to discover new ways to cook is that my food urges are so powerful, they demand to be, er, fed. Like waking up in the morning needing Eggs Benedict. Or coming home from work tired and grumpy and knowing what you want more than anything is a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. Successfully managing to placate these cravings only makes the monster more demanding.
First of all, anything that heats up enough to burn you, will cook food. Before I found my famous four dollar George Foreman Grille at the East Earl Goodwill, I often made grilled sandwiches with my iron. Simply wrap your sandwich stuff in a piece of foil and press it with an iron set on HIGH - or SCORCHED LINEN. It takes about five minutes to make a nice, toasty taste treat.
Someone once told me that their father used to wrap potatoes in foil and attach them to the manifold of his car on his one hour commute, and when he got to work, they were baked. I have not tried this, simply because I don’t know what a manifold is and I worry I would do this and the potato would get sucked into the air cleaner and then I would have some explaining to do.
Let your imagination take over here, though, and consider what you might do with your curling iron and curly fries, or rice noodles….
This week, I made spaghetti with meat sauce. I browned the hamburger in the George Foreman and that worked so well, I may never brown hamburger any other way. I just took it out of the package and dumped it just as it was on to the plates in the grill. Closed the lid. In less than eight minutes I had browned, drained hamburger which I broke up in chunks, covered with sauce and brought up to temperature in the microwave. I poured it over pasta I brought home and froze from a restaurant meal. It was delish and ready really quickly.
How do you make Eggs Benedict with no stove or oven? I made poached eggs in the microwave by bringing water almost up to boiling in a microwave safe bowl, cracking the eggs in and covering the bowl with a plate and letting it sit for ten minutes. They were perfect. I cooked a freezer bisquit in a stand alone roaster I bought for cooking Thanksgiving Turkeys (this took four minutes less than the oven time on the package). I cooked the bacon in the George Foreman taking less than five minutes. The hollandaise was reheated in the microwave from a frozen state. VOILA! It looks pretty good in that picture, right? The fruit salad is peaches, mangos, strawberries, a little honey and coconut.
Other than calling for takeout, how have you cooked food during a time when your oven or stove wasn’t working?
