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Cooking without an oven
Alpine
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm living in residence, and I'm looking for some good recipes to cook up in my dorm room. We have a kitchen in our suite, but all it has is a stove - no oven.
I'm not very experienced in the kitchen - I'm really just doing this to spice up the daily meal schedule we have here, and to make myself less helpless when I'm living in a house next year - so the quicker and easier it is to make, the better.
I'm loaded with grocery store gift cards, so I'm able to go out and get any ingredients I'd need. I have a selection of pots and pans available, but I'd have to buy a skillet. How much does a mid-range skillet go for, or should I spring for a good one?
I'm not very experienced in the kitchen - I'm really just doing this to spice up the daily meal schedule we have here, and to make myself less helpless when I'm living in a house next year - so the quicker and easier it is to make, the better.
I'm loaded with grocery store gift cards, so I'm able to go out and get any ingredients I'd need. I have a selection of pots and pans available, but I'd have to buy a skillet. How much does a mid-range skillet go for, or should I spring for a good one?
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My favourite all-purpose cooking tool though is a rice cooker. Rice, stews, soups, porridge, does it all with minimal mess and care, and is an easy cleanup.
Any manner of stir fry things work, as do many italian style dishes. My typical "what you need" for cooking on a range are a pot and a skillet. The pot lets you boil water, the skillet lets you fry things. You don't have to use oil to fry, although you usually want to apply some sort of fat to a skillet so things don't stick (which can be omitted if you're cooking fatty things like meat).
One thing that's really easy to make but looks (and tastes) pretty classy is to make up a quick italian thing.
what you need:
about 2 cups pasta
2 regular sized boneless skinless chicken breasts
cup of peas
2 tomatoes, diced
tomato sauce
parmesan/romano cheese
.5 tbsp olive oil
(optional veggies (pick one if you want more veggies): 4 oz mushrooms, half or whole head of broccoli, quarter head of cauliflower, full jar of artichoke hearts/crowns, rinsed and diced)
Boil water and do the noodles (you know how to do this, right?) while doing the rest of this stuff, should take about 10 minutes. Cube chicken breast, dice 2 tomatoes. Heat olive oil on med-hi heat, add chicken breast and a little salt -- stir until no pink, or only very light pink. Toss in optional veggies, stir for about a minute or so, add diced tomato. Stir about 2-3 minutes, your pasta should be done. Set skillet to med-low, drain pasta and toss into skillet. Add about 1 cup of pasta sauce on top of this whole mess, maybe a little more depending on how much you want it to be coated.
Serve with some of the cheese stuff sprinkled on top.
You can kick it up a notch by adding in garlic and a small amount of onion -- you cook these things prior to adding the chicken. When I say noodle, I mean a penne or spiral or something, not spaghetti or other "long" pasta. Something you stab w/ a fork, not spin w/ one.
I came up with that recipe after seeing what those "Skillet Sensation" things were doing. There are many, many dishes that are just "heat up ingredients in the right order, add a sauce, voila."
Since you're in college, you shouldn't spring for any really good kitchenware, as it's likely someone else may use it and/or wreck it. Not that you can't get nice things for people you know, but when you spend $80 on a pan you feel a little possessive about it.
Finally, to get started, shop around at the grocery store just to see what everything is. There's tons of quick meal options in the frozen food aisles that are more than "put this in the microwave for 5 minutes, peel back film," but a lot of college people don't know about them because they've never really looked at the grocery store when they're with their parents.
That was my main meal when I was in the same situation as you.
Once you have done that, set up a hottub in your buddies dorm room.
If you have a good friend who's mom is a good cook and probably has alot of recipies or something, maybe ask him to ask his mom? And if he happens to live across the street from you, thats just a bonus
Yum.
The best part is that you don't really have to pay attention to the thing.
Instead, you are going to go into your yellow pages and find a local restaurant supply wholesaler. You are then going to find their warehouse/showroom and purchase individual items at massive savings. A knife that is $150 at, say, The Happy Chef, is $50 and comes with a much more useful, textured plastic handle. Real stainless steel pans are $10 a piece, and you can buy restaurant style (big and bulky and forever-lasting) plates, utensils and glasses for under a dollar a pop. I hope this helps!
Don't be afraid to go buy a cookbook either. The Better Homes and Gardens one is a classic, and the ingredients are very easy to find (I know most people want to spring for something by a Food Network chef, but a lot of their ingredients are regional [can you buy squab at YOUR grocery store?!]).
You clearly haven't read Alton's books. "I'm Just Here For The Food" isn't a cookbook, it is a book about cooking.
It also happens to have recipes in it.
Make some rice.
Toss it in a frying pan.
Find other random stuff around the kichen.
Toss it in the frying pan.
Eat up!
poor thing
you make your grilled cheeese in an oven?
I am intrigued.
Wouldn't that be an oven cheese sandwich?
You can get separate grill ovens, although from what I've heard it's a peculiarly British thing, at least in Europe (probably being as we're a nation of horrendously bad home cooks who tend to just fry and grill everything). Personally, I always opt for a large oven that can also grill if I need to.
As for the OPs request, I second, third, fifth etc. stir frys. It's a great way to get a lot of good nutrition easily and cheaply when your at university. Top tip is that while fresh veg is best, frozen veg works surprisingly well in stir frys, especially green beans. Also just buy whatever meat you like best and/or is cheapest. A friend of mine at university used to just bulk buy Turkey breast because it was so cheap but the cheapest meats tend to vary from country to country.
At it's most basic level, stir frying just involves frying up some ginger, garlic and spring onions in some oil, tossing in some diced meat, browning it, add a dash of soy sauce then throw in some chopped veg. But you can get a recipe book of chinese food and get more adventurous with it.
AB and I go way back. He is the exception, not the rule.
I speak of Flay, Batali, et al.
put cheese in bread, butter the outside, put frypan on medium. Once hot, put bread in pan, sit for about 4-5 minutes, lift edge with a flipper. If it's golden, flip. Other side takes less time, so check in about 2-3 minutes.
Ta da. My wife and I also do this with a slice or two of ham in it. Hot ham & cheese ftw. That's the "cheap" way of making grilled sandwiches.
Otherwise, stir fry is really easy and pretty good for you. Just toss some chicken and veggies in a wok or pan on a little bit of olive oil.
Pastas are generally easy on a stovetop.
Everyone who has a toaster instead of a toaster oven fails at life.
What do you eat?!
Also, you can get loads of student cookery books. They tend to be rather less pretentious and over-the-top than most cook books, so I'd go for them. Easy to make stuff that doesn't need six weeks and a $50k oven to cook? Yay!
Screw the toaster oven, just do them on the stove top
http://www.y2kkitchen.com/html/brownies.html
Note: I have not tried this recipe... it's just the first one I came across while looking for non-oven brownie recipes
I do the same thing, but call it "cheese toast" or a "toasted cheese sandwich." Same principle, though.
http://www.y2kkitchen.com/html/brownies.html
Dude... look up like 3 posts :P