Inventive cooking methods. Not dishwasher salmon but what's your best cuisine in extermis triumph?

[KnopkaPixie]

Unless you have ever made dishwasher salmon, of course. I haven’t got an oven at the moment and I managed to make a proper layered lasagne with béchamel that went brown on top in a deep frying pan with a lid.

Camping? Holiday flat? That sort of thing.

Trail blazers! There's a Michelin starred farm-to-table restaurant that cooks some dishes in their compost heap

In the Pam video I put on further up the thread, Pam is indeed cooking eggs over candles.

Christmas dinner for 12 with no oven! About 20 years ago. We moved in December with two toddlers, the house was barely habitable and we discovered on Christmas Eve that the oven was kaput. My large, selfish and pugnacious family had invited themselves for Christmas and I had an 18lb turkey. I remember performing a double mastectomy on the fucker at 2am and cooking it in slices in the toaster. We had the hob and a mini grill. Managed a full Christmas dinner including mince pies, we were so proud of ourselves 😂

You can reheat samosas in a sandwich toaster - it crisps them up beautifully.

I think Christmas dinner inventive cooking in extremis could be a thread on its own.

Never, ever, say the words, "Guinea Fowl" in my hearing. A terrible experience.

I once sat behind a student on the bus who was talking about drying his jeans under the grill 😮

It’s a new fashioned ( expensive ) re brand of hay jox cooking.
yoh can make your own - all you need is a cast iron cooking pot or similar - heat it and contents very well then pop into a cardboard box full of insulation - hay yes but old towels / duvet / blankets / wood shavings etc etc.

then leave your stew for 6hrs or what ever like in a slow cooker - don’t peek 😄

@KnopkaPixie I need to know what happened with the guinea fowl!

my tastiest camper van “ hack “ recently (because cooking stuff fills the place with steam if it’s raining outside and you can’t open the door🤣) is that packets of mixed grains / lentils that are “ microwave ready “ will heat fast in a pan with a drop of water . They are also v tasty and not unhealthy.

microwave rice will also heat easily in a pan , but if we can open the door to properly cook it , the boil in a bag is great for the van.

You can cook bacon surprisingly well by wrapping it in tin foil and then ironing it. Boarding school as a teenager......

Are you serious?! I never heard of this! Thanks for explaining it!
My goodness, the marvels of the human resourcefulness 😅🙏

I told you not to talk about the guinea fowl!

I'm not going to ruin the ambiance here but my advice to you as a woman of experience, is never try to cook a fancy Christmas dinner for, or indeed form a meaningful relationship with, a supposedly aristocratic, financially ruined, languid, skinny French type with a multiply barrelled name like Bastard de Bourbon de Biscuit dit Pas de Pot de Pisse. (Not his real name but not far off.)

Who fancies himself as an artist, has never done a hand's turn in all his born natural and lives in a pile of stones hanging desperately to a mountainside only sticking together to form a dwelling from six centuries of accumulated dirt, grease and the dilligent efforts of woodland creatures to colonise it as their own.

He will be apt to wake on Christmas morn, unequal to the situation, get upset that you have moved things in his hoarder's paradise and turn funny.

I called a friend and absconded. I had to leave the guinea fowl behind. He probably turned the gas bottle off and threw them away. He was happiest living on 'les biscottes et confiture' anyway.

It was a pretty insane and punchy thrown row. I won't get into it here but he phoned me a week later and said, "The lock that you kicked off after I left you in grand-maman Napoléone's bedroom to calm down was 16th Century. You have destroyed the fabric of the building."

I like being common, me. Turkey all the way! Got meat on it. Like my DP now! Ha! Ha!

I'm a weirdo who likes cooking over campfires, and there's not much you can't do that way. My best was the Jack Monroe fruit cocktail cake in a dutch oven with charcoal top and bottom.

I'm on a roll now. His entire family were eccentric to say the least and so cheap. They had a flat in Paris, another house in the big provincial town and the 'Artistic' son lived in the country hovel. They really were hoarders. I mean, could be clinically diagnosed hoarders and lived on what my dad would have called, "Gin and fresh air."

I don't think he was really very well but y'know, I was very young and it seemed...nah, there's no excuse. I was being daft.

When I was a girl guide we did hay slow cooking at one camp. Make up a stew over a fire or camping gas hob in the morning. Get it to boiling, put lid on, wrap in foil to secure lid, put into a tea chest half filled with hay (or possibly straw I'm not exactly sure) top up with more hay and close the chest. Go out for the day and come back to lovely tender beef stew.

We also did a lot of cooking in the embers of a fire. Take a baking potato, cut in half and scoop out a bit of the middle, crack an egg into it, put the halves together and wrap in foil. Cook in the embers of the fire. Also quite a delicious banana dessert, cut a long slit in a banana with the peel still on. Push a Flake or Twirl into the slit, wrap in foil and cook in the embers.

Worth it for the anecdotes alone, I'd say.

Oh, I have very many! They were a nice family but just out of touch with the wider world somehow. As this is a thread about food and cooking I'll just you about this:

Whenever we were all together in one of the houses, to her credit, Maman insisted that we sat, as a family, at the dining table for meals. Not breakfast because nobody ever got up much before noon and only once a day because they did 24 hour fasting before it was fashionable and you never knew exactly when she would decide to fling something together and run around shouting, "À table! À table!" but eat at the dining table we did.

But you ate every course on the same plate, including dessert. Not at the same time, that would be too bizarre but when everyone had finished whatever main savoury dish we were having, usually a running reheated leftovers mishmash that just kept evolving like one of those perpetual soup affairs you find in Asia, Maman would open either a tin of rice pudding or more likely, tinned Danette or Mont Blanc style custard pudding in whatever flavour and give everybody a spoonful in the remains of the gravy.

She was absolutely distraught when I broke up with her son and probably spent the most money she'd ever parted with in her life sending me boxes of chocolates, (Real Lindt!) fancy notebooks (The struggling artist had told her I was a writer. I wasn't. I worked for the bus company.) all manner of stuff to try to get me back.

Maybe I made a mistake.

Ah no, the using the same plate is a legitimate French thing! Not in nice restaurants of course, but when I was leading student tours over there my poor bewildered charges would sometimes get barked at to keep their main course plates, and the staff would come round and serve dessert onto them. Mostly in old fashioned rural hotels, IIRC.

@KnopkaPixie he sounds completely and utterly batshit 😂

I hadn't thought about him and his family for years but in writing these posts, I've tried to think how to describe what my life with him was like.

Then it struck me. I was living in a real life remake of Withnail and I. Only in French. He was Withnail, obviously.

lives in a pile of stones hanging desperately to a mountainside only sticking together to form a dwelling from six centuries of accumulated dirt, grease and the dilligent efforts of woodland creatures to colonise it as their own.

I think I viewed this property while searching for a French home

I'm picturing Withnail but set in the chateau from A Discovery of Witches 😂

I love my Wonderbag .. use it all the time in winter.. brilliant for soup, chilli or curry .. even breakfast porridge if you put a pan of it in the night before.
No one's mentioned a Remoska? ( I have only skim read the whole thread though , maybe someone did but I didn't see ) I have one in the campervan. You can cook pretty much anything in it ... ( Obviously limited by size).. they are expensive though but you can get them 2nd hand

I once needed to thicken a stew, thought that stuffing would do the job, and add herbs.

It was disgusting.

In my experience, everyday French middle class food is one of the most boring cuisines imaginable.

Steak haché et haricots verts.
Having everything, 'Nature ' especially omelette 'Nature.'
Pâtes au beurre. (Overboiled.)
Slice of cold ham artistically rolled up in a cylinder with rice (nature) or instant potato purée, or the aforementioned Pâtes au beurre.
Purée vegetables. Especially courgette. Green slime.

And the cry of: "Trop épicé!"

It's changing now but when I first came here, and was a kind of au pair for the dentist's daughter one memorable dinner was frozen brussel sprouts, plain boiled rice and a tiny, tiny splash of sauce soja.

"Trop du sel!"

Oh grow up. You eat strong cheese, you can take a bit of seasoning! Try it, you might like it.