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Cooking with an iron

Callistemon

Callistemon

Part-Time Space Alien
V.I.P Member
Years ago, when pocket books on positivity and light were all the rage and around every bookshop counter, Kaz Cooke published a delightful little thing called something like The Pocket Book Of Negatives (out of print now and I can't find it anywhere). It was a negative thought for every circumstance.
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I thought to myself: What would I write about, were I to write a pocket book? And essentially, it's this:


COOKING WITH AN IRON

...emergency cookery when you have no other means of cooking available, say in a motel room. Here's a verbal sketch - if there's any able illustrators reading, I could be persuaded to do a collaboration!
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Toast

Cotton setting, 2 minutes each side - more depending on bread type and desired amount of caramelisation.


Eggs Sunny Side Up

Use medium setting. Hold iron upside down and perfectly level. Crack up to two eggs onto the iron's surface (you may require an assistant, or a bench vise and spirit level). Cook 3 minutes. Extend time for less runny yolks. Slide eggs onto toast for low-mess eating.


Toasted Cheesies

Open sandwiches are not recommended here, as it would necessitate tedious post-cooking cleaning of the iron or the opposing surface. Use two thin slices of bread, sandwich them around the cheese, and apply the iron (cotton setting) to first one side, then the other, until the cheese is melted and the bread surface has caramelised to your liking. The process can be accelerated by the simultaneous use of two irons.


Steaks

Cotton setting, 5 minutes each side, for medium rare. Decrease time accordingly for rare, increase time for well done; 30 minutes each side will give you good shoe leather.


Roast Chicken

Insert iron, wrap chicken in alfoil, cotton setting with steam, 4 hours. (Time may vary depending on size of chicken. Roast turkey can be accomplished with this method but takes a little longer.)


Vegetables

Cook using steam setting.


Notes for Lamb or Mutton

Brett says it's very important to use the wool setting when cooking lamb or mutton.


...additional ideas welcome. How would you cook your favourite dish using an iron?
 
It's funny you mention this. I recently watched the documentary "Jane", the story of primatologist Jane Goodall. There's a scene where she is in a hotel room, making toast on an electric clothes iron. Jane
 
Jane was (and presumably still is) a very lateral thinker, so it doesn't surprise me that she made toast like this! :) Thanks for the link, @Neonatal RRT. I will treasure that bit of information about her for the rest of my days!
 
Callistemon said:
...additional ideas welcome. How would you cook your favourite dish using an iron?
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Heat iron sufficiently. Unplug and take upstairs. Place rent check on table, lower iron to a few inches above it, and if no permission is granted to install a small electric hot-plate or stove, iron rent check into plastic countertop surface on cotton setting and walk away. Garnish with small coins, pebbles, and other irregularly shaped objects.

Seriously though it would be nice to be allowed to own a stove.
 
What do you mean, you can't own a stove where you live, @Gerontius? I thought it was a basic right that people had access to cooking facilities. (I haven't lived in America but it caused some consternation in Australia when we heard that some houses and apartments in America no longer even have kitchens in them...seriously???)
 
Callistemon said:
What do you mean, you can't own a stove where you live, @Gerontius? I thought it was a basic right that people had access to cooking facilities. (I haven't lived in America but it caused some consternation in Australia when we heard that some houses and apartments in America no longer even have kitchens in them...seriously???)
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They're going to turn around & rent it to someone lower-functioning than me for twice the rent. Do you think these Fox-watching ninnies give a tinker's damn for things like standards? It's off-market unofficial stuff.
 
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My son invented cooking on a light bulb when he was young. He tried to make cheese toast on the light bulb in his bedside lamp. He draped two slices of American cheese over the hot bulb with a piece of bread balanced on top. Darn near burned down our house which stunk like burned cheese for days. I threw away the lamp which was encrusted with burnt drips of cheese. His father gave him a very stern lecture and a lesson in fire prevention.

Do not try this at home!
 
Yeshuasdaughter said:
This is off topic, but if it was a real situation, I've taught a friend to make a super-hot solar parbolic cooker out of an old Dish Network sattelite dish, and a solar oven out of an aquarium.

If you have direct sunshine, you have a way to cook.
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You know what, the parabolic cooker is a brilliant idea, and the solar oven-- same thing. There's no shortage of sunlight with this nice weather.

Another trick: If you need something quick to eat, and have ramen noodles on hand--Ditch the flavor packet, use vegetable bouillon or something, and go from there; if you don't have a stove you can use an electric percolator to cook it in. Been there done that. I had to quarantine once in 2018 and ended up using one of those old 1920s coffeepots that looks like a funeral urn to make ramen in.

Glad to see you back on line; you were missed.
 
One of my younger siblings once took a toy iron and heated it up with a book of matches, one match at a time and then burned a hole through a bedspread by setting it down. This was way back in the fifties, when safety standards for children's toys were much less stringent. I mean this iron was about the size of an adult woman's hand, and I have no idea how much of the book of matches was used, but I do remember the charred, iron shaped hole in the bedspread. :D
 
Yeshuasdaughter said:
I feel like I have to be the forum mom who lectures everyone:

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!

All right? We don't cook on clothes irons.
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Since I can't see your facial expression and don't know if you're kidding, I am just going to ask: Did you miss that the original post was tongue-in-cheek and nobody is seriously proposing cooking with an iron? Just checking. I know some NDs have trouble with parody, irony, tongue-in-cheek etc and can mistake those for literal and serious. But it seems to me a lot of people did understand this, judging by the laughing emojis, and I've not run into many people here yet who seem to miss this stuff in general conversation. I can put a disclaimer on the next tongue-in-cheek thing I say, but it sort of spoils the fun, and it's a bit patronising to the people here as a whole...
 
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Yeshuasdaughter said:
I'm being silly right back at you! But you know, there is bound to be some person on the internet who sees this post and is like "OH WOW! I've got to try that!" So it was my way of protecting them from their own logical fallacy.
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ROFL. :smile: I wasn't sure, because sometimes people do completely miss when someone is just being silly. I once had an English class who thought Jonathan Swift was a horrible man who wanted to eat babies, because they had just read A Modest Proposal and didn't realise it was a biting satire... (first time I had encountered this in ten years of working with high schoolers...)

Or that this was very much tongue-in-cheek:


(If that doesn't work try this, or look directly for Bob Geldof's Great Song Of Indifference!)

...after all, this was by the guy who organised the Live Aid concerts for African famine relief back in the 1980s... so the idea of him being serious about the things he sings in that song is just hilarious.

And speaking of cultural stuff in relation to that - I hear that some places in the world mandate laugh tracks on comedy programmes to cue people when to laugh in case they miss a joke. :fearscream:

Also there was the case of a woman who microwaved her chihuahua to death and then successfully sued the microwave manufacturer for not saying in the instruction booklet that is wasn't suitable for drying your dogs in after bathing them. :screamcat::screamcat::screamcat:

But yeah, considering people say some people with ASD are really literal and don't get metaphor, satire etc, I really have to say I've not met that at a rate different to any other forum here (and anyway I'm sure it's something people can learn with practise?).
 
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