Handy! 7 unexpected kitchen tools
Did you know you can braise food in the dishwasher? Bake on your car’s engine block? Grill on an iron? And boil eggs in the kettle? Absolutely—and fortunately, there are experimental spirits who have tried it out for you. Concrete mixer at the ready, let’s cook!
Sausages from the coffee maker
Maybe you’re hungry but have no clean pans left, or maybe you’re simply the experimental type. In either case, it’s good to know that you can cook frankfurters in the coffee maker. Put the sausages in the coffee pot, fill the water reservoir to the top line and switch it on. Leave the sausages in the hot water in the pot for half an hour, and they’ll be heated all the way through. Your cup of coffee the next day may taste a little funky…
Kettle wonder machine
If your kitchen is truly teeny-tiny, you don’t need any kitchen equipment apart from a kettle. You can, for example, boil eggs in it: put the eggs in the kettle, add water and switch it on; leave the eggs in the hot water for 3 minutes for soft-boiled and 5 minutes for hard-boiled eggs. If you have a kettle with a coil on the bottom that heats up (just open the lid and look inside), you can’t cook pasta in it, but otherwise: 1 litre of water per 100 grams of pasta, bring to a boil and then wait 10 minutes (or a little longer if you’re making wholewheat pasta). It also works with vegetables that only need to be cooked briefly, such as carrots, green beans and frozen peas.
Get creative with your paint stripper
The stairs have been stripped, the window frames are looking sharp in their fresh coat of paint, and now you have an idle paint stripper in your toolbox. Fortunately, it also works very well for creating a crisp sugar topping on crème brûlée. Charring peppers? You can do it on the gas stove, but it works even better with your paint stripper. Grilling an ear of corn? You guessed it.
Concrete mixer to the rescue
Also useful for the handy DIY enthusiast: that concrete mixer you once happily used for a project can also be used when you want to make a large quantity of pancake batter (children’s party!) or need to mix litres of oliebollen batter (New Year’s Eve!). Just pick up a fresh mortar tub—it won’t break the bank either.
Iron always ready
Dennis and Valerio demonstrate it convincingly: you can toast bread on an iron, fry bacon slices until crisp and even almost fry an egg. You can make a toasted sandwich too: cheese and ham between two slices of bread, wrap it in aluminium foil and put the iron on top. Patience is a virtue, just as with the frankfurters. Tip: don’t set the iron to steam mode; it won’t work.
Cooking in the dishwasher
Multitasking like a boss: cooking and doing the dishes—at the same time. It works if you cook in the dishwasher. The secret is perfectly sealed jam jars. Put all the ingredients in them, place them (upright!) in the rack between the cups and wine glasses, and run the long cycle. Everything is then heated for a long time at 65 degrees. Just Google dishwasher salmon and you’ll get the idea. Hey, isn’t that the same as those expensive sous-vide preparations in restaurants? Exactly—and they even have a dishwasher on staff. Do the math.
Grilling on the engine block
Apparently a trend from the sixties, when American truckers cooked steaks and burgers on their truck’s glowing engine block. But you can also do it in an ordinary family car: cook food in the car. Pack everything well in heat-resistant containers, cover with aluminium foil and place in strategic spots under the bonnet. Drive around for an hour and… enjoy your meal. To avoid having to scrub set egg off the battery, or no longer being able to tell teriyaki marinade from engine oil, it might be handy to have the book ‘Cooking with an engine for beginners’ by experts Bob Van Laerhoven and Olivier Elen at hand.
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