Thursday, January 13, 2011

Primitive Cooking

For those of you who know me well, you know that Primitive Cooking has nothing to do with an open fire, and quite frankly, nothing to do with even an old wood stove. No, for the girl (and guy!) who outsourced cooking for the first several years of our relationship, it doesn't take much to reach "primitive" in my mind. This week, primitive means making do without the cooktop. Don't ask why--it's complicated and we're crossing our fingers it will solve itself sometime soon.

Now, as overachievers, once we decided to cook for ourselves, we overdid it a little. We have an oven, a microwave oven, a convection oven, a toaster--really, the options for heating food in our kitchen are pretty much unneccesarily broad. That said, we really like to use the cooktop. Even when something will eventually make its way to the oven, we usually start with some part of it on the cooktop. So living without, and still being committed to reducing our restuarant budget, means creativity in the kitchen.

Lucky for me, my husband rocks at that. Tonight, he baked some bacon in the convection oven, used the fat and other ingredients to make a bacon vinaigrette, then threw together a taco salad with the dressing. Yum!

Where do you do your cooking? What are you favorite non-cooktop recipes?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When I was in scouts, we cooked a number of things in relatively primative conditions. Over only a campfire or such. A real dutch oven - with legs etc - allows you to do many things which are amazing. For example, pizza on a campfire. Cherry cobbler. Or a favorite of mine was a chicken casserole we made. That on basically was just rice, a can of campbell's cream of mushroom soup, a can of mushrooms, a packet of onion soup mix, four chicken breasts. Mix the rice, soup, mushrooms and soup mix (and I think some water). We would put it all in the dutch over, put it over the coals from the campfire and in about 70 min, a wonderful casserole.