DailyDirt: Additional Challenges To Making Dinner

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Jan 10th 2014 5:00pm — Michael Ho

For some folks, boiling water isn't a simple task. Others can whip up a delicious meal before a pot of water can boil. Cooking skills can be amazingly good or mind-bogglingly bad, but there are some people who just don't want to do things simply, and they turn cooking into a kind of obstacle challenge. Sure, there are reality TV shows that put ridiculous time pressures on cooking a 7-course meal or restrict ingredients to rare delicacies. For pure fun (or sometimes necessity...), though, some cooks are forgoing a stove or conventional cooking devices to make their meals. Here are just a few examples.

A coffee maker can double as a steamer, cooking dishes like poached salmon with steamed broccoli. When you're only allowed to have a coffee maker in your dorm, that Mr. Coffee machine can start to look more interesting after your 50th bowl of ramen noodles. [url]
Okay, there are some fancy rice cookers that come with pretty lengthy recipe books, but even no-frills rice cookers can make stuff beyond plain rice. Banana bread, chocolate lava cake... and maybe someone should try making coffee in a rice cooker? [url]
The concept of cooking in a dishwasher has been around for a while, but some chefs are starting to really refine dishwasher techniques. Aluminum foil wraps for dishwasher cooking are being replaced by ziplock bags and mason jars -- so you can actually add soap and wash some dishes at the same time you cook your next meal. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: coffee maker, cooking, dishwasher, food, poaching, recipes, rice cooker, steamer

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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2014 @ 5:57pm

"maybe someone should try making coffee in a rice cooker"
I'm confused... Making coffee with a rice cooker is a wide spread thing in my uni.
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Merp, 10 Jan 2014 @ 7:55pm

Hm
Interesting about the rice cooker, but for people who want to avoid nonstick (it's toxic) I wonder if there is a better solution.
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- allengarvin (profile), 10 Jan 2014 @ 9:05pm
  
  Re: Hm
  "people who want to avoid nonstick (it's toxic)"
  
  There are no dangers associated with non-stick until the temperature gets very high (450F or higher, if you have birds as pets; up around 650F when they start getting dangerous for people). You can reach those temps relatively easy with high heat on a burner, but a rice cooker isn't ever going to be a danger.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2014 @ 8:56pm

I was looking at how to build a water heating element and how to power it either with the plug on the wall or by a hand crank, I think all those marvelous things in the kitchen could use a divorce from the motor and the machine, making them still usable if a disaster or blackout happens.

This lead me to look at how things are done elsewhere.

Thermodynamic Cell Phone Charger (I found a pot and a stove that do that)
Rapid Solar cellphone Charger
Hand Crank Emergency Cell Phone Charger

The handcrank is nice, but I was thinking more in the line of a foot powered thing, like those old sewing machines that used a flying wheel to operate, it also reminded me that the first modern dental drill was powered by a flying wheel that produced the compressed air in the 19th century

Wikipedia: >historic foot-powered dental dril. Picture taken at the Wabeno Logging Museum

Wouldn't be nice to have something that could work with electricity, foot or hand? you just change the motor.

NCBI: Biological conversion of hydrogen sulphide to elemental sulphur in a fixed-film continuous flow photo-reactor.

Wikipedia: Hydrodesulfurization

Reacting hidrogen sulfide with iron oxide(III).
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Jan 2014 @ 9:01pm

oops sorry, I was thinking about how to use everything, excess heat to power devices, steam from coocking to generate drive a steam turbine, recirculating kitchen sinks that captured organic compounds and produced them in useful forms(methane, sulphur etc) and produced compost, you never ever would have to take out smelly trash again yay!

To bad I am not a chemist by any means, so it is hard for me to do all the research and come up with visions of what can be done, still I like to fool around with concepts and build little prototypes to see how things work.
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Andrew D. Todd, 12 Jan 2014 @ 4:50am

Cooking with Explosives
One of the things I came across in reading Vietnam-era military memoirs was that soldiers in the jungle used to use plastic explosive (C-4) to cook their dinners. If you light C-4 with a match, it doesn't explode, but it burns, with approximately the intensity of gasoline. So, what the troops would do was to place a pinch of C-4 under a metal cup filled with water and dry ingredients (rice, jerky, etc.). They would apply a match, and the C-4 would burn itself out in a minute or so, leaving the water (or soup or stew) hot. The was before MRE's, of course. The system of dry stuff employed by soldiers in the jungle was an unofficial predecessor of the MRE, though C-4 was also used to heat tin cans and their contents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal,_Ready-to-Eat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal,_Combat,_I ndividual_ration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-ration
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