Sunday, February 19, 2012

You Don?t Need a Kitchen To Be a Chef

The key to guerilla cooking is preparation. I recommend doing all of your knife work at home. A couscous pilaf is a great dish for beginners, because it requires no heat control. At home, dice onions, carrots, celery, and cauliflower in some combination to make two cups of vegetables, and put them in a zip-top bag. Store one cup of couscous and a tablespoon of paprika in a separate bag. In a third bag, put three-quarters of a cup of toasted and chopped almonds, walnuts, or cashews. The on-site preparation is easy. Saut? the vegetables. Add the couscous and paprika and cook for a minute or so, stirring. Add one-and-a-half cups of water, plus salt and one of your handy bouillon cubes, and bring to a boil. Cover, remove the pan from the heat, and let it sit for five minutes. Mix in the nuts. Voila. A fresh lunch in the privacy of your own office.

You can take it from here. Stir-fries, soups, frittatas, and quesadillas are obvious choices, but be creative. This is all about breaking rules. You don?t need an oven to make bread, cookies, or pizzas, if you get good at controlling the delivery of heat from stove to food. Scour the Internet for intriguing recipes, and adapt them to your minimalist set-up. Or look to camping cookbooks, and then adorn them with luxuries like white wine or fresh cheeses that you couldn?t take on a backpacking trip.

Once your culinary skills are off the leash, you can take your portable kitchen anywhere. Get a commercial camping stove and start cooking your lunch in the park across the street, or on the rooftop deck. If cost is an issue you can go totally rogue and jury-rig an alcohol burner from scratch. There are plenty of templates out there, but the most basic version consists of a tuna fish can filled with perlite rocks and denatured alcohol, then covered with an aluminum screen. (All those items are available for purchase at any hardware store.) Keep in mind that these burners produce an open flame, so you'll need to be prepared for mishaps. If you?re cooking indoors, open a window for ventilation or get a carbon monoxide monitor.

All this may sound like a hassle, but it's not. My entire alcohol stove set up fits inside a lightweight pot and weighs less than 6 ounces. And don?t worry about judgmental co-workers. They just don?t understand what cooking is all about. Food plus heat; it's that simple.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=a2f9c03f41082aa01b27fa41e834a669

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