Mar 1st, 2024

Author: donich_admin

Cooking without a cooker

So following last week’s cooker explosion, we are currently “cookerless”. Many people would have given up and lived on ready meals and sandwiches. but not me.

We have a microwave, an air fryer and a slow cooker, so I have been experimenting with making full meals without an oven, hob or grill. A complication is that the food I have in the house was bought in the expectation that I would have a cooker – so the recipes are made from general ingredients, not stuff I had bought in specially.

Day one. I made jerk chicken with green beans, potato wedges and cornbread.
This one was actually very easy. I made a quick jerk marinade and put a couple of chicken breast in it for a few hours. Then I turned my hostess trolly (great gadget – no idea why they fell out of use) because our air fryer is not huge and the idea was to cook the chicken first, and then keep it warm in the hostess while the chips cooked. The cornbread I had made a few weeks ago and frozen, so I then defrosted it in the microwave wrapped in a piece of damp greaseproof paper. I put the cornbread in the hostess. Forty-five minutes before lunch time, I cooked the chips. I washed the potatoes and then cut them into small wedges and soaked them in water for about 20 minutes. Then I drained the potatoes, put back in the bowl and tossed them in a little oil and salt. I then put a piece of tin foil in the air fryer and added the marinaded chicken to it – it took about 20 minutes in my fryer, turning once in the middle of cooking. Then I did the wedges in the air fryer – these took about half an hour with a good shake half way through. While these were cooking I microwaved the green beans (in a microwave steamer but you could also use a bowl covered in cling film. It made a very nice meal which I unfortunately did not take a picture of.

Day two. I made teriyaki salmon with rice and broccoli. Our slow cooker is actually also a rice cooker – it makes perfect rice by sticking the rice in it, adding the requisite amount of water (I use 200g of white rice to 480ml water). The teriyaki salmon – I cooked the marinaded salmon first on low power in the microwave, then covered it with what was left of the sauce and heated briefly on full power. The broccoli also cooked in the microwave.

So far so good.