Tinfoil Chef

The recent ice storm that swept across the Central US left over a million people without power. When you’ve got an electric stove that makes preparing food something of a challenge. After thinking about it for a while, I came up with something of a makeshift stove that still allowed me to heat some things up.

Before I go any farther, let me say that this is by no means a way to do much more than heat something up. This method lets you put some heat into food and that’s about it. It also requires constant babysitting and extreme caution.

I was blessed to be prepared for the power failure in that I have several oil lanterns and a supply of lamp oil so that at least I wouldn’t have to just sit in the dark. After a while it occurred to me that the lamp flame could be used for more than just light.

I set one of the lamps on the kitchen table and removed the chimney. Then I took eight soup cans (the kind that are shaped so that they “nest” one on top of the other nicely) and made four stacks of two cans each, evenly spaced around and right against the lamp.

For a pan to cook in, I selected a small wok because it’s lightweight and made of a thin steel that allows it to heat up quickly and thus make the most of a small flame.

Here’s the tricky part

After the lamp was lit I carefully balanced the wok on the four stacks of soup cans, putting the lamp flame dead center under the wok. This is a tricky balancing act and requires that nothing bumps the table, wok, cans or even walk heavy in the same room. You might even want to hold the wok most, if not all, of the time you’re cooking.

From there it’s a matter of putting either a pat of butter or a very light coating of olive oil in the wok (just in case to prevent burning) and then adding the food you’re going to cook.

For this trial I didn’t get very adventurous, I just put a few smoked sausage / hot-dog-with-an-attitude things in there and cooked them enough so that they’d be hot.

Cooking like this definitely takes longer because of the small flame. The three sausages I made took nearly ten minutes or so to heat up. They were good though, especially considering that it was 35 degrees in the house at the time.

One VERY important thing is to keep watch on the flame. It will behave a bit strange because the lamp chimney isn’t there. You do NOT want to turn it up too high because that will only increase the risk of fire. You’re better off using a lower flame and taking a few minutes longer.

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