Food Appliance Anarchy - part 4 of many

This article, lets get to grips with "dormitory/share-house cooking." The true origin of so many great (and a few, um ... not so great) food and cooking hacks.

If  you ever shared housing or were in a dormitory / "roomies" kind of situation you know how it goes. You go to make a cup of coffee and someone says "mind my eggs!" and you know that you'll have to wait until someone's snack is cooked and then have to rinse the kettle out and fill it with fresh, non-chicken-butt-fruit-flavoured water. *sigh* that's the third time this week...

But the fact remains - electric kettles are good to make your daily cuppa, but can also cook eggs or even (not recommended though) pasta. We don't need to scrimp and use ours for a cooking vessel any more, we're all growed up - but I would use it if I was short of a saucepan (or burner to put it on) to boil an egg or three. (I don't really recommend cooking pasta in an electric jug or kettle because after a while the element gets coated with minerals from the water and those aren't the nicest things to find crumbles of in your spaghetti...

Use it as a quick way to get boiling water to dissolve sugar, salt, butter, or whatever for adding to meals where water's part of the recipe, or to pour a bath to sit a dish in to soften butter or what-have-you. I've also used hot water from it to soften diced onions in a glass before frying, that sort of thing. dissolve and premix a bouillon cube and a few spices and herbs before adding to cooking, saves wondering if anyone is going to get a glob of half-dissolved stock cube in their moutful...

Here's a thing you can do to decide whether to use the electric kettle, a saucepan or stove-top kettle, or the hot water tap: Does it need to be boiling? If not then the tap would probably do. Except. How much water would you need to waste to get hot water? You probably think that I over-think things, and maybe I do. But bear with me. 

I tried this experiment once. The hot water system was at the other side of the house to the kitchen. It took a little while for hot water to get there and I wanted to know how much I wasted every morning. I used a clean 3litre milk jug, and ran the tap (one morning before any water had been run) until the water was warm. Two point two litres. 2.2L. Every time anyone runs the tap haf an hour after it was last used. In this house we're in now, it's two point seven litres. Almost three litres.

So now we do the dishes every two days, we rinse everything in cold water before stacking, and when I want to do the dishes, I collect the cold water. Sincee also filter our drinking water, the solution's easy - collect the cold water in a plastic milk jugs, put it through our water filter jug and then into a cleanwater dispenser we use for making drinks and food. We save literally thousands of litres every year from just flushing uselessly away.

And that's why the electric kettle\jug is an important part of my kitchen.

But back to the conumdrum

So it's probably going to be easier to boil a small amount of water on the stove or in the kettle. If you have a gas stove, there are emissions from burning. If you use the electric stove or kettle, there are still greenhouse gas emissions from burning fuel at the power station, but a power station is far more effective than our gas stoves so boiling that small amount of water is better done in the electric kettle. And as more coal, gas, and diesel oil power stations being closed in favour of solar and wind energy, it's becoming a no-brainer. Use the force! 

The kettle has had decades of design gone into it to make it efficient at turning electricity into heat, although induction cooktops may be catching up to that efficiency - I may do some testing on this, but will need to buy a decent accurate power meter. For now, I take it as read that boiling half a litre of water in the kettle is less wasteful than wasting over three litres of water, and then the hot water system having to heat over three litres of water just for my cupful of hot water.

So for me it's the kettle. And if I know I'll need to use it multiple times in the next half hour, filling it up and then just re-heating each time I need boiling water uses less energy than heating each quantity of water separately. Help me buy that power meter and a decent quality induction cooktop to test with and I'll do an article on it. (I do have an induction cooktop but it's of unknown origin because I bought it at a thrift shop, and it's pretty ancient and most likely not indicative of state of the art ICTs. And a good power meter can be had for not too much if you know where to look, and I do.) So yes please - go to the footer, to that snazzy graphic I made, and support my blogs and tests and research. 

Now For The Toasters

Electric toasters too have gone from a brick with a power cord to computeriesed things that promise to make fifty shades of burnt on your choice of eleventy different varieties of baked cereal doughs, but instead of becoming more useful they've basically become a brick with a power cord that toasts bread to as much browning as you can handle.

Back in the day, we had wooden countertops and the toasters had a single element in the middle and you had to flip the toast over by hand to toast the other side. They could also be easily cleaned. And they could be laid on their side without overheating the electronics (they didn't have any) or melting casings. And thus a legend was born, of making cheese toasties by laying a toaster on its side. But these days none of those apply. 

I've seen the odd viral Tiktok or Youtube video that suggests that people have cooked steaks and made meals in their toaster but I suggest you put those right along the troll videos of perpetual motion electricity generators and magic potions that guarantee you a longer stronger donger. 

When I make dipping triangles of Lebanese bread or tortillas I've found I can drop them into many toasters  to turn them into crisp dipping chips, but have to be careful because they can slip down beside the lift bar if I'm not careful. Not a pretty smell when they catch fire. 

The toaster can only do four to six triangles at a time, also, and the average round of Lebanese bread or khobz or tortilla makes between six to twelve chips. By the time I've processed two or three rounds by toaster, it proves more convenient, quicker, and less wasteful of energy to make the whole  batch in an air fryer or tabletop convection oven. And it comes with the added convenience of being able to see when they're dry and crisp because the convection fan starts lifting them around 

When it's cold I sometimes hold the butter dish above the toaster while waiting for the toast. Having my fingers so near ensures I don't overheat the dish and end up with a heat-cracked butter dish but with the butter warm enough on a cold morning to allow the butter to be spreadable. 

Toasted Sandwich Makers / Panini Presses

I'm going to emphasize here - anything with a flat heat iron on the bottom (and preferably a flat heat iron on top like the panini press - although I've owned one with searing ribs on top that wasn't too bad) is okay, those ones that are divided into sections or have any kind of pattern on the bottom will end in burnt-on mess. Also non-stick, and always be careful of the surface and only use plastic and wooden implements and a wet cloth with detergent for cleaning, no harsh scrubbers or chemicals. 

But now you're firmly in "cook my steak' territory - although that's not something I recommend. I've also fried eggs on them (not the best unless you just want a flat mess) and made nice flat bacon but they don't get hot enough to make those things crispy. 

You can also place a nice thin layer of seasoned hamburger or sausage mince between two slices of bread or tortilla/khobz/pita and then the meat cooks in the time it takes the bread to brown up properly, but it is a bit of a hit or miss affair until you get to know how hot your device gets.

With steak I have oiled, salted, and seasoned "minute steaks" which are just thin (5mm) slices of steak cuts and they do cook well but the frypan on an electric or induction cooker seem better. But you can in theory make a steak and eggs on a flat toaster.

Once the non-stick coating gets a scratch or two they stop working quite so well, so one of ours is now a plastics processing press and the new one has been working fine for around ten years because I only ever wipe it out with paper towel while it's still hot to avoid having to use excessive pressure or friction to clean it. 

Nice touches to add to a toastie are to butter the outsides of the bread slices and dip them in a mix of fine cheddar and parmesan cheeses before toasting, or doing that to both sides of a single thicker slice of bread and making steakhouse cheese toast. (A la Sizzler's restaurants, if you know of them.)

Toastie presses also make great pikelets, and I tried making crumpets but either my recipe was off or the plate didn't get hot enough. But I still think it should be possible. Let me know. 

Waffle Irons 

Waffle irons get a bit hotter than a sandwich press I think. If you look for "Webspoon World" on Youtube and search his videos he has innovative uses for almost every kind of kitchen appliance and tool, and is worth a follow. Oh look! I've made the link above go straight to that video! How convenient!

Out Of The Left Field

I found that our local ALDI was selling a vertical kebab maker, and also found that if you make pretzel dough, roll it out into 5mm - 7mm thin worms and wrap them around the skewers, you can make some great "twistie pretzels" on them. You can of course also make great kebab sticks fairly quickly, and if you make a firm mix of appropriately spiced ground meat and mold it around the skewers, you can make meat similar to gyros. 

Anyway - please share this, donate. 

Cooking 3.5 Of Many - The Flare-Up

So aside from the trite references to contestant slips (everyone needs to add a distraction from their main point, right?) there are a number of points in this article that we should address.

How much gas-cutting is enough?

Of course the sheer quantity of gas being burned daily is a climate-frying disaster. But industry chews through the majority of that. Energy generating with gas generators is a load-balancing technique that's still used worldwide. And when I say "Industry" back there, think the huge industries that churn out potato chips and similar. 

Home uses of gas would come somewhere after that. And I haven't gotten to the topic of "cooking" yet. We use gas to heat homes, heat water, those are still large-scale uses of gas in domestic settings. The gas cookers and ovens in homes are down the list a bit, but not far. 

Time For The Activism

Taking all homes off gas for energy would be a significant saving, but it's only making more room for corporations to argue that they NEED to use gas still, they NEED to keep polluting and IT'S ONLY A LITTLE BITTY TEENY WEENY bit now that all those scurrilous criminal domestic users have come to their senses... 

Don't let them get away with that. We're being sold how much more convenient, how much more economical our changeover to electric will be, so don't let them raise the price of chips and pretzels  because suddenly it's "less economical now..." I can't stress this enough. Don't let's let us always be the fall guys for both situations. Bring the fight to the corporations, the government. 

For changing to all-electric households, fight for a Government "ecological rebate" on our electric bills - we did what you asked, now do your bit for us! Industry hasn't changed to all-electric? Charge THEM an "ecological damage tax" and use that to fund our rebate!

Now Let's Find The Balance

The major harm that comes from our reliance on gas in the home are carbon monoxide (CO) and CO2, and particulates emitted. These are the things that should drive our decision. As we've seen, being the climate villains for not switching is a pretty weak claim, and as usual it's just a corporate ploy to offload their responsibilities onto us.

I have COPD/emphysema. I also totally LOVED cooking with gas. (And remember that the slogan "Now you're cooking with gas!!" was a corporate bit of propaganda designed to sell fossil fuel in the first place so don't give the bastards a single inch!.) But I suspect that had I not been cooking with gas for 50 years, I might still have all my respiratory capacity...

So base your decision on that. It's a far more human reason than to do it because some effing corporation has skimped o forward planning shift to electric. Tine for my 'stolen slogan' -- 

KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST! 

The situation this slogan was created for was different and now somewhat dated, but the spirit of it never gets old. 

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Here's a CO balance: CO vs COnvenience. Yes gas is convenient but - is it? I have two induction cooktops and an air fryer and an electric stove now. I've used electric blenders and mixers and slow cooker and rice cookers and steamers for decades over hand beaters, wooden spoons, and more pots and pans using up space on the stove. 

And actually, the electric appliances are more convenient. Aside from the stove, everything else has timers that turn them off. I can set a timer, then get distracted by a delivery or emergency and not come back to a burned-down house. You won't get away with this on a gas stove...

My one major reason for not using electrical appliances in the past was electricity costs relative to other costs back then, and most homes not being wired for more than one appliance in the kitchen because everyone was "cooking with gas..."

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Now here's another piece: Restaurants are being hit hard on a variety of fronts. 

Before we go further I can say this - it's sad that we're going back to individual kitchens (gas or electric) where one stove cooks meals for two, maybe four people a day, from a situation where one stove cooks meals for several hundred people a day, along with the economies of scale which that signifies. But also, people are more wary of social interaction since COVID and restaurants are being fleeced by larger corporations as surely as we are so prices go up and people start looking at their budget balance sheets. 

The restaurant lifestyle is ingrained in many cultures and in some cases, for millennia. As I said in the sidebar above, economies of scale. Why have a kitchen at all? It increases the size and cost of the home manyfold. Having middle class having our own kitchens has been a fairly recent development, designed mainly to sell kitchen goods and - fuels. Of course, the costs relative to income of cooking at home and buying from a street stall vendor have also balanced out, but we're seeing a worsening of the swing now because the restaurants that replaced the street vendors are closing.

Here's the CO balance of this: If more people went out for meals, that means homes could become smaller, without bulky fridges or cookers or appliances, or even two separate rooms (a kitchen and a dining room) for something we only do for a few hours a week in many cases. 

In a typical two-bedroom house, that's almost one third of the floor space, but - once fitted with whitegoods and appliances - will probably be a significant portion of the costs. 

Plus the individual wastage of food, the energy cost, and the reduced socialisation.

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Oh Yeah - About Gas Again

CIRCLING BACK.... I seem to have gone everywhere with this, don't I? Almost all of these developing issues and (im)balances I wrote of come down to the greed of three distinct groups: Food corporations such as the currently out-of-control supermarkets inflating food prices; energy companies inflating energy prices; And Landlords and Real Estate inflating land, housing, and rental prices. Conspiracy New World Order theorists would say they just constitute parts of ONE group, but I can just as easily see an "Oh look - THEY'RE price-gouging and none of the grown-ups are punishing them! We need to keep up or soon they'll have all the marbles!" pure avarice at work here.

We need for restaurants to be rewarded by rebates for upgrading their cooking facilities - but also their anti-pandemic measures, such as effective ventilation and air filtering and UV sanitising so that people can feel secure eating there. 

What can I say? 300 years ago the cost of a barrow and some kind of cooking facility was a major part of the expense of running street food stall, giving up 90% of your home was part of the expense of running an inn. Then equipping a leased building was your major expense, well, that and staffing it.

Making food for a large patronage has always been expensive, but making good, healthy, food in an atmosphere of conviviality and respect was usually the way a restaurateur made a fortune at it. (Or making really dodgy food and a lot of hype , then beating a retreat before your patrons roasted you, was also a way, but didn't last as long or make as much profit...) We either need to jump straight ahead to "food replicator" scenario as in Star Trek and living in isolation, or get to the stage where eating out is once again safe and desirable. 

One other thing we need to do is to maybe start local appliance libraries and maybe community kitchens if we wanted to have the best of both worlds. 

But just throwing out gas cookers and hot water systems and furnaces isn't the whole answer... Get Activated! Get involved! And get out there!

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The Chips Go Down

Food can be medicine - but it can also be toxic. And not always for the obvious reasons...

Harris was a victim of the usual corporate manipulation. He ate a snack food that was advertised and promoted as a "challenge" which in this case was to tolerate concentrated doses of the capsaicin from two of the hottest chillies in the world. 

In Harris' case it was a combination of the capsaicin and an undetected heart condition that caused the death. But Pacqui (parent company being Hershey) took the product off the market, but seriously, WTFSM?

Firstly, what do peppers use capsaicin for? A defensive weapon. Something that will deter or even kill that insect or other pest that's trying to eat the pepper. Toxic? Check.

Second, presenting the chip as a "challenge." We've gotten used to "challenges" that are presented in such a social-based setting as being mildly inconveniencing activities or things like ice water, and definitely not in the sense of "challenges that could result in your death." But of course even ice water can kill someone that has a heart condition.

Lastly, who is going to jail for what amounts to this negligent manslaughter, negligent in that warnings about the toxicity of capsaicin appear not to have been prominent. Negligent in that, like so many dangerous products, it's marketed to teenagers and those with as yet undeveloped brains (proven fact BTW) and impulse control. 

Look at tobacco. I was caught up in that "Marlboro Man" hype, and I have COPD emphysema as a result. Look at What Tobacco Did Next: vaping. Look at all the executives - those responsible for those marketing decisions, responsible for hiding the deadly effects and even inventing studies to deny the deadly effects - went to jail or were sentenced to be executed. None. 

And it's all done in the name of "profit."

I feel for the plight of Harris' mother who sent her son off to school just like any other day, and find his life had been made terrifying and painful and finally ended, by a bunch of people in a boardroom discussing how they could increase profits by presenting their product in a way that guaranteed that people would push people into consuming the whole of something that commonsense would dictate they should nibble in small quantities.

And I urge every one of you reading this to become activated. Become someone that calls out these sorts of dangerous profit-driven exploits. Help stamp out that kind of cold callous greed that ruins lives.

Share this article, please. 

Food Appliances - part 3 of many

The Air Fryer. (And my oh so many mistakes already - a mere 24hrs in...)

I've been anti-fryer for a long time. I saw one - once - in a friend's kitchen. right alongside another identical air fryer. They said they used them both together quite often and their children loved anything crispy-fried in air... I thought I'd never have a use for one. Well, maybe. One day. In a distant future when I found one for ten bucks at the opp shop. After I'd found an induction cooker for a tenner. Maybe then.

But things change. Life moves in mysterious ways. And the landlord replaces the old gas cooker with an electric one, and that started me looking at - going back to an electric cooker... Not even kidding, one of my favourite places where I cooked up many many storms had an electric stove. 

Also luckily, I'd found a single induction cooker at an opp shop for ten bucks about a year earlier... 

Induction Cooking

That cooker opened my eyes, it did. I started using it for simple stuff at first, cooking spuds and vegetables, that sort of stuff. Then suddenly it became my main cooking appliance and the gas cooker did the simple stuff. Then the gas cooker went away and the new electric stove seemed like a dinosaur, with elements that took longer to heat than the induction cooker did to fry an egg... 

And the old ten buck induction cooker had apparently been at the opp shop for a reason, one of the switches had been dodgy from the start and suddenly the most important switch on it - the mode switch - only worked if you held your mouth in a curse word shape, crossed your eyes, and tapped it twenty times spelling out "SOS U SOB" in Morse code and by now these things cost just a few bucks over fifty and - we bought a new one. 

The old one is in my workshop and I'll replace the tac switch and use it as a second cooker. Oh and air fryers are down at the same price range and the only thing the electric cooker has is good grille and a fantastic  oven for larger roasts and bakes and - a day ago an air fryer rocked up at the door...

Both from K-Mart in case you were wondering. 

Air Fryers

In just a bit over 24hrs I've noticed a few things already - ... Hang on. Here - have a picture:

We had some hash brown shapes from ALDI in the freezer, and around eight at a time fitted in the silicone tray liners we'd bought with it, and the machine made spectacular hash browns. We sort of tasted one or two and said goodbye to our waistlines. 

No - maybe not quite, but we decided the machine was going to be dangerous. And my wife gave me that "told you we should have gotten one two years ago when I said" look and - I didn't care. I have a new cooking technique to learn! 

This is written the next evening, and dinner ALL came out of that machine. I tested a recipe for potato chips made with baby spuds but they recommended an  oil/flour/spice dredge and honestly - next time I'll skip the flour altogether and just add salt, pepper, paprika, and garlic powder directly to lightly oiled sliced potato.  Dry the potato slices first though. Fry in small batches (layers of a few chips deep only, stop every ten minutes and shake them to make sure they all cook evenly) for around 20 - 30 minutes at 200C and there's the recipe I'll be using next time, Air Fryer Potato Crisps.

Second were some Aldi crumbed chicken tenders that I always found will go slightly soggy and often lose their coating if I fried them so I've always made them in the oven. The air fryer we bought has a 3.75 litre capacity and the actual basket is a bit smaller, so only seven of the eight fit into it. It sucks because you need to do these in a single layer just like the hash brown stars. ( Oooh, more air fryer tips!)

I noted with some interest that the packet included air fryer cooking instructions so I didn't have to guess, 180C for 10 minutes turning once - you know what? Let me cut to the chase for you. Like every other packet instruction for microvwave/oven/and-now-air-fryer, it's crap. Like wife says: "ten degrees more, ten minutes longer and that's closer."

In this case, next time I'll be cooking them at 190C, for seven minutes, then turn them, check progress, and go for another five to eight. Because I *know* these can be more crisp than they turned out with the packet instructions.

Last thing was an experiment to make a frittata-style dish, beat four eggs with three tablespoons of self-raising flour, mix in a pinch of salt, some paprika, and half a cup of shredded cheese, now use one of the silicone liners as a form, air fry at 180C for six minutes, then do the old "invert to flip" into the second one (What? You didn't get two of them when you bought the machine?) and do it same temperature for five more, turn out onto a plate and allow to set, then slice and serve. Actually better when served cold. Egg and Cheese Bake. 

So, Ted - Never In A Million Years, Eh?

yeah. My wife is the best. When she edges me out of my comfort zone, she expands my horizons, and now you can expect a few more AF recipes as well. (There are thee - sort of - hidden somewhere in this article, can you spot them? 😹)

The Alternative Appliances Show, part 3.

Yeap. This is part of the series, I have two more in draft and then see where it takes us. The thing I meant to demonstrate here is that when you find a new appliance, don't be afraid to mess up, think outside the supplied recipe booklet, and be prepared for some bad potato crisp slices... I'm already wondering how low I can get this one to run in order to dehydrate something like tomato puree to make tomato powder, because that's how you get BBQ flavour... I'll fail a few more times before I figure it out, but it's part of the process. 

Anyhow - please share this, hit one of the donation buttons and support my research, and see you on the next article!