Cooking School for the Kitchenless

I love food. Since I was little, food has been one of my favorite activities. I grew up eating brie and pate from infancy. I learned how to mix martinis when I was eight. Every night my family would sit down to dinner. Both my parents are amazing cooks, and I’d watch them make sauces and marinate meat and make pie crusts. In high school, I started baking. I experimented with bread, cakes, cookies, biscuits, crumbles, and anything else I could think of. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because the whole family comes over and cooks together. Food makes community. Cooking is cooperation. It’s a beautiful thing.

When I was a teenager, I used to eat at this amazing, sadly departed restaurant called Bistro E. Europa. Julia owned the restaurant with her husband, Sdravko (I hope I spelled that right). This restaurant was different from any other restaurant. You would show up at 7pm and be there all night, drinking, dancing, laughing, eating, and drinking. At around 4am, you would pour yourself into a taxi and go pass out at home, where you’d wake up the next morning sore all over and with a wicked hangover. But it was all worth it. My sister and I took a cooking lesson with Julia once, learning to make her flatbread and paprikash, delicious staples of her menu. She taught us some key steps to cooking success.

When you are going to start cooking,

1. Open a bottle of wine and pour yourself a glass.

2. Start frying some onions so it smells like something is cooking, for anyone who is waiting for food.

It is with these two tenements of cooking that I started last night to tackle a new challenge: cooking without a kitchen.

This is the sole drawback to our new place. There is no stove, no sink, no cabinet full of dishes, and until last night, no knife. My amazing mother sent us home with some steaks, potatoes, mushrooms and onions, and I was determined to make a feast. So I started out, opening the cheap bottle of chardonnay, bracing myself for the task before me, armed with wine, a microwave, and a george foreman grill. This won’t be hard, I thought. My mom said you can make baked potatoes in the microwave, just stab ‘em a few times with a fork, cover them in butter, and nuke for 15 minutes. Everything else would go on the grill.

I started with the onions, slicing them into rings to be easily manageable on a grill that is sloped downwards, and using a cake tin shoved underneath the front of it to keep the juices from dripping all over the top of the mini-fridge. I sliced the onions, then ran to the bathroom crying to wash out my eyes. Put the onions on the grill. So far so good. Then I stabbed the potatoes and stuck them in the microwave. After trying to figure out how to set the time instead of having the automatic express 5 minutes go on, I gave up and pressed “Add 30 secs” until I got to 15 minutes. After 10 secs, the whole thing shut off.

T: “The surge protector tripped off. It’s pulling too much juice.”

Me: “Can we just plug it into the wall?”

T: “That might blow a fuze. No potatoes.”

What? Steak and potatoes without the potatoes? I would not be thwarted. I took out the potatoes, and cut them in slices. I pulled the onions, mushrooms, and garlic off the grill and stuck them on.

It worked well. After a few minutes the potatoes were crispy on the outside and soft on  the inside. I took them off, slapped some steaks on the grill. They were cooked in just 3 minutes. I put the onions and mushrooms on top to heat them up again, slid them onto the plate with the potatoes, and poured the drippings from the cake pan over all of it.

It was delicious, if I do say so myself. I think I could get the hang of this. One grill, dinner for two. Faced with obstacles, wine is key. Dinner #2? Bring it on.

P.S. If you don’t have a wine opener, don’t use a drill. I just gets cork everywhere.

Tagged as: cooking, dinner, fun times, haphazard cooking, microwaves, mishaps, no kitchen, potatoes, steak, wine