one month with no stove or oven

[sanguine_speed]

Could you please give me ideas? I have 5 of us to feed, including 3 kids ages 9, 6 and 3 and 2 adults. We only buy organic meat, and so it's only on our menu 2-3 times a week for budgetary reasons.
We have a slow cooker.

What would you make for a month?

[dachshundqueen]

Have you contemplated buying a hot plate or toaster oven?

Liz

[Arduinna]

Do you have anything you can cook outside with? We have a variety of bbq's, smokers, hibachi, multi gas burner stoves ect. I'd use those along with the crockpot. I could make everything I cook in my home oven and stovetop using those, including baking bread and cakes.

[sanguine_speed]

Originally Posted by Arduinna

Do you have anything you can cook outside with? We have a variety of bbq's, smokers, hibachi, multi gas burner stoves ect. I'd use those along with the crockpot. I could make everything I cook in my home oven and stovetop using those, including baking bread and cakes.

I have one small barbecue. I do not have a toaster oven, though I'd consider buying one. I strongly prefer not to buy anything else.

Can I bake bread on my barbecue? Do share!

We have barbecued the last several days. I just find it hard to cook the foods our family is used to and keep variety. The adults can make do with cold canned beans; it's the kids that I'm struggling to find variety as well as familiarity for.

[sanguine_speed]

Originally Posted by dachshundqueen

Have you contemplated buying a hot plate or toaster oven?

Liz

I actually have had to rely on a hot plate before. I found it really slow and small. Though I guess it's better than not having a cook top. For pastas, sauces, soups...perhaps I'll have to buy one of these too.

I was hoping not to have to buy more stuff in order to feed us for the month .

[Arduinna]

Well I bake in our big green egg, which is a ceramic cooker. So it's kind of like baking in an adobe oven or brick oven. Alterntively you can bake bread in a cast iron dutch oven.

[nicky85]

If you have a hot plate you could cook dishes like pasta or rice and beans. I found recipes for Indian food online and started making lots of them. They're mostly stovetop, vegetarian dishes that you could probably do with a hot plate. One of my absolute favorite slow cooker recipes is taco soup. http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/simple...up/Detail.aspx I don't use the ranch seasoning though. Beef stew is another slow cooker favorite for me as well.

[Malva]

You should check garage sales or your thrift store for an electric frying pan, a toaster oven, maybe a rice cooker/steamer?
Having the frying pan would make things easier.

[paxye]

I went for a month without an oven, though I did have a stove...

I bought a toaster oven to use and that worked out very well...

If I would not have had a stove I would have gotten a hot plate also... I do have a burner on my BBQ but it was cold and too dark to cook outside in the evening...

[aramat]

Well, you'll get to experiment with all kinds of salads, at least! Some thoughts... With the grill or a toaster oven, you can make all kinds of hot sandwiches (my favorite is a nice bread toasted with spinach leaves, tomatoes, cheese, minced garlic, and olive oil). I also eat a little differently than most...I don't often do big, special dishes--just easy stuff because I can never guarantee the kids will eat my efforts! Dinner is usually a simple beef or chicken (varying the herbs) with something easy on the side. You could do corn on the cob, salad, baked potatoes... What about pioneer/cowboy food -- there must be a way to do beans, cornbread, etc. And then fruit and yogurt for dessert. You can make cold dinners...we like to do "sushi salad" (although not sure how you'd do the rice)--tuna, crumbled seaweed, rice, and avocado and/or shredded carrot. You can probably cook pumpkin and squash on the grill (in foil?) and run them through the blender to make a soup that is good warm or cold...

[beanma]

We've just gotten our stove back! We've been doing a whole remodel of the kitchen and gutted the whole thing. We relied heavily on our toaster oven (DH got a model that's big enough to cook an Amy's frozen pizza), a one burner hot plate, micro (though I know some people don't like them) and DH also got an induction hot plate (which he likes, but I'm not that thrilled with). We also have a grill. We ended up eating out quite a bit because we didn't have a kitchen sink, either, and washing dishes was a royal pain. That said, you can do a lot of stuff in a crock-pot, and a grill, and there's always salads and cold sandwiches. Of all those gadgets, I'd say the toaster oven was the best. We had a smaller toaster oven before. Toaster ovens really are a great small appliance. They use less energy than heating up the whole oven and you can bake in them and do all sorts of things in them that you can't do in a regular toaster (like melt cheese for an open-face sandwich). If you have a cast iron pan you can also cook with that on your grill (stir fry, etc), but I really preferred the toaster oven.

What kinds of stuff do you usually like to eat?

[sanguine_speed]

Originally Posted by Arduinna

Well I bake in our big green egg, which is a ceramic cooker. So it's kind of like baking in an adobe oven or brick oven. Alterntively you can bake bread in a cast iron dutch oven.

???
I don't have a big green egg or an adobe oven or a brick oven or a cast iron dutch oven.

[sanguine_speed]

Thanks for the ideas. I think a hot plate is going to be important. I have come up with a lot of slow cooker meals, but I've always found that especially vegetarian recipes call for pre-sauteeing onions and other ingredients in oil to enhance flavour and texture. And a lot of slow cooker things could use an accompaniment of rice or pasta that needs to be cooked on a cook top.

We were thinking of investing in a toaster oven, so maybe now is the time.

Thanks mamas!

[madskye]

Do you have a friend or family member that would let you use their stove? If you're already without one, I'd ask someone else if I could sautee some onions and then put them in small ziplock bags. You could freeze them and just dump them into your crock pot for certain recipes.

If you have a kitchen now, and this is coming, I'd make a lot of soups and stews in advance and just use the crockpot to reheat.

[lucyem]

We have to turn our stove off in the summer months. Each year I seem to add an appliance. The first time was 3 weeks when our stove was broken and I picked up a crock pot. Between the crock pot and grill we were fine for that short period of time. A lot of salads and grilled foods and veggies and stews.

Then the first summer (4 months with no stove) I picked up a larger toaster oven with a 20% off bed and bath coupon that seems to show up monthly in the mail or in the newspaper. This allowed me to really bake and toast. Love the toaster and we use it daily. I think a toaster oven would be a good idea and I always love having the extra oven for baking/cooking especially during the holidays.

The following summer I bought a hot plate since I was trying to blanch all my garden veggies. That was a disaster since mine did not work so well. It just cannot keep the heat up high enough and long enough. Hot plate is now going into the yard sale. It would be fine for basic stuff but I can always throw a pot of water on the grill to boil pasta or similar. So personally I would not bother with a hot plate.

[Plaid Leopard]

I would invest in a hot plate or camping stove, and a pressure cooker.
I love my pressure cooker - you can throw anything in there - beans, rice, veggies, meat - and it cooks really quickly!

[Princess ConsuelaB]

Oh gosh, I could manage with a toaster oven, crockpot and an electric frying pan or griddle(I'd prefer the last to a hot plate... I hate hotplates!) With these three I think you can manage most "normal" meals except for baked goods...you could make tortillas or turkish bread though. Oh, and you can barbecue pizza Personally we'd be relying on a lot of sandwiches and salads

[JElaineB]

I agree an electric skillet (frying pan) would be a good idea. You can cook pretty much anything in there you would cook in a skillet on the stove. They aren't too expensive usually.

[mamadelbosque]

I cooked on nothing but a double-burner hot plate & a microwave for the first oh, 5 or 6 months of being married w/ dh while pregant w/ ds1... Some of them work quite well - definetly check around goodwill/salvation army/hospice stores/etc.

As for stuff on the barbeque... you can grill corn (just peel back the outside, strip out the hairy white bits and then pull the leafs back around it), and other veggies too (think peppers, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, etc). Shishka bobs are great - a few pieces of meat and lots of veggies on skewers. Mmmm

I just found 'fresh from the vegetarian slow cooker' at the goodwill a week or so ago, and while I haven't had a chance to make anything from it theres a ton of veggie recipes most of which don't require stove-top prep and sound wonderful!!

[sanguine_speed]

Thanks for the ideas. A skillet sounds brilliant. I hadn't thought of that.

I own Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker and the vast, vast majority of recipes actually do call for stove-top prep, and those that don't tend to require 8 hours of veggie softening before you add the rest of the ingredients and cook another 8 hours. Others also call for precooking ingredients or baking even.

But an electric skillet would resolve that. Great idea!

I think the challenge really is the kids. For instance, last night I made top sirloin skewers with veggies as well as cooked up some sausages we had in the fridge. They didn't want any of it. A chunk of red pepper and a chunk of beef doesn't exactly a supper make for young kids, at least not mine. If I had a stove, I would have made a side pasta salad, or rice, or steamed some carrots (I could have done on the bbq but they take a while and aren't the same--again which only matters if you're 9, 6 or 3). I suppose I could buy commercial bread and give that to them on the side, but bread for supper every day isn't fabulous.