Throw your ideas at me, please!

EmptyPockets

'(I presume you mean gas mark)'

Yep, I'm talking gas marks

ceridwen

No problem! Wondering if I would actually even "register" having a non-working oven unless I was doing HM bread.

Curry - 1 hotplate for sauce, 1 for rice (or use steamer if you have one)
HM soup - with bread and cheese (can add bulk type foods - like leftover pasta, beans etc to make it more substantial)
Spanish omelette (ie leftover cooked veg and fried onion base with some eggs/bit of milk/bit of flour thrown over top). When base cooked, put some grated cheese on and melt cheese under grill.
Ploughmans lunch (whoops not pc - okay ploughpersons lunch)
HM muesli
Porridge with various toppings - fruit and/or seeds and/or yogurt

(the above is just the options I would suggest to someone else - for myself I would have LOADS more - but then I sometimes eat raw food meals)

(Could be a thought to google for camping recipes - no-one has an oven when they are camping)

odds-n-sods

That bakers oven was very hot and very large. It would take a lot longer to cool down than a domestic oven. Wood -burning ovens start at 450'C as that is the temp wood burns at. A domestic oven can't get that hot - will only go to about half that. That is why when you use a wood-burning oven, you have to wait until the temp cools down - about 4 hours after lighting it. Throwing a stew in an oven, even one on as hot as the oven can go for 30 minutes is not on long enough. And it will probably cool down completely in 1 - 1 1/2 hours. so if you put it on at 8AM and come back at 6, the stew has been sitting in a tepid oven since 9:30AM - 8 1/2 hours. That stew may as well have been sitting on your counter for that time. Even reheating it wont' guarantee you've killed off all the bacteria.

But I bet you get the '24 hour flu' - of which there is no such thing, that is almost always food poisoning. The oven simply won't stay hot enough for long enough.

Newgirl_2

Am I missing something... does your oven only come on at gas mark 9? I understand your can't turn it down once on, but can you not put it on lower...?

Newgirl

EmptyPockets

Hmmm, it doesn't matter what gas mark I put it on to start with, whether it's 4,5 or 9 - the flame is one constant height, it doesn't lower as you turn the heat down or rise when you turn it up, like it used to. It's just like one constant temperature in there, and it burns everything in minutes...

jonthedog

Most gas Ovens (and electric ovens without a fan) have a range of temperatures inside the Oven, with it being hottest at the top, but cooler down the bottom. An Oven thermometer (which can be picked up from 99p store, or my local one at least) will tell you what you can cook at what level.

jonthedog

odds-n-sods wrote: »

doesn't matter if you've reheated the food or not - it still is a bad idea. Used to cook for a living as a chef - and have food hygiene certificates. If a restaurant did that I'm sure you'd expect it to be shut down and that would be right. You can't leave food at a middle-of-the-road temperature for more than 45 minutes or bacteria grows rapidly as you've given it exactly its best growing conditions. Thats why BY LAW food from a buffet/plane etc. has to be thrown out, not even staff are supposed to eat it - reheated or not. Its a very good way to get really sick.

Tell this to Heston Blumenthal...he recommends cooking steak for 24 hours at 50 degrees C (and then resting for 4 hours at room temperature)!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/heston_blumenthal/article624364.ece?token=null&offset=0

He seems to think that sterilizing the outside of the meat with a blow torch/hot pan is good enough...I'm sure he wouldn't be allowed to give this advice on national tv if it were scientifically dodgy.

krispyg76

I don't advocate leaving food out full stop, at best leave it to cool for 30 mins before refridgerating but nothing more than that

odds-n-sods

And Ramsey stated on one of his shows that his chefs work 8AM - Midnight - also against the law. Just because its on a TV show doesn't mean it should be done.

Blumenthal does weird things with food; you can't replicate what he does in his commercial kitchen at home - who uses dry ice to make icecream?? A piece of steak is a completely diferent kettle of fish than a stew. A stew has air pockets and lots of surface areas where the meat and veg have been chopped up. A steak doesn't by its very nature. ONce you have chopped something up it deteriorates much more rapidly due to the increased surface area where the bacterias can multiply.

Why dont' you call Blumenthal and ask him if he would cook a stew in the manner you have described?? I already know the answer - he wouldn't.

juliapenguin

When I was a student I lived in a bedsit in an Austrian mountain village for a year and only had two electric rings to cook on - I surprised myself by what nice food I managed to cook. I also had the scariest fridge in the world - it was literally half full of ice which had migrated like a glacier from the freezer compartment. As the weather warmed up it gradually melted (global warming?) and a revolting selection of trapped foods emerged - there was a monster sized jar of gherkins which took about two months to be released from its captivity. Gross.

More recently I moved into a house with a huge Smeg range cooker - but the grill doesn't work and the oven is big enough to cook three turkeys at once! Not very economical. Until I got my wonderful combination microwave (which has a great convection ie normal oven function) I managed entirely without grill and oven, unless there were enough people in the house to justify putting on the huge oven. I always seemed to cook good food, but it did require a bit more thought.

Does anyone remember a wonderful Katharine Whitehorn book called 'Cooking in a Bedsitter'? I had it in Austria but gave it away to someone who needed it and have regretted it ever since!

Sorry this is a bit off-topic. Just got reminiscing.

Julia xx