Sometimes you just don’t have an oven or stove. Maybe you’ve gone camping and ran out of gas for the stove, or your cooker broke and you need to put dinner on the table. Whatever the reason, here’s 11 meal ideas for how you can cook without a stove, bon appetit!
1. Cereal
It’s a classic! Cereal is a perfectly good meal to eat at any time of day, and if the milk has been in the fridge a while it’s probably a very good shout. Points in favour of cereal are the ease of prep, the low amounts of washing up, and how easy it is to adjust to personal taste. You’re a vegan? Use dairy-free milk! Easy!
2. Green Salad
You might say that this menu item is evergreen. If you enjoy terrible puns that is. It is nonetheless true that the humble green salad has always had a place on summer menus and likely always will. Like cereal, it’s easy to adjust to personal taste but has the benefit of being savoury. The most basic versions, just green leaves and tomatoes can be a little bland, but this meal, or side, is easy to dress up.
An interesting dressing is a really simple way to add flavour. But you might also add more varied ingredients, like pre-cooked chicken or ham, olives, pickled gherkins, pickled garlic, pickled citrus peel, avocados, spinach leaves, or anything else your pantry can provide!
Simple Salad Dressing:
Olive oil,
vinegar, (malt, white, balsamic, all are good)
seasoning, (salt, pepper, mustard, garlic powder, spices, etc.)
Mix it up, add to salad.
3. PB+J Sandwich
This is more of an American classic. It holds much the same appeals and drawbacks as cereal. It’s sweet, it’s easy to make, and has very little washing up. Again, it’s pretty easy to adjust too, peanut allergy, just have jam!
4. Savoury Sandwich
This can be a little more complicated to put together than the humble PB+J. You could have salad, in fact I recommend adding some sliced tomato if you intend to eat right away as this will add a juiciness factor. It’s important to remember that we get about 20% of the water we need from our food (source) so it’s important to eat foods that are high in moisture.
Good sandwich fillings include cold cooked meats, pâtés, cheeses, egg salad, hummus, pickle, etc. basically whatever you’ve got in the fridge will probably go pretty well between a couple of slices of bread!
5. Wraps
Similar to the sandwich, but the different format will allow for some other fillings. You can get a whole lot more green salad in a wrap than you can fit into a sandwich!
Re-fried beans, left over chilli, left over almost anything, so long as it’s not too runny.
Tomatoes will be a big source of drips here, so look out for how many you add, and make sure you fold the bottom up before wrapping the sides in.
Top tip: the more you turn up at the bottom the more moisture it will hold, so if you have a runny filling be sure to fold plenty up!
6. Bean salad
This is a favourite of mine, you can make it with ingredients from the pantry, so it’s good for if you lack a fridge as needing to cook without a stove. If you’re camping for example.
Tin of beans, either mixed beans if serving one or two people or a few tins of different beans if serving more people. Butter beans, mung beans, adzuki beans, black-eyed peas, all will be good for this salad. Mix ‘em up with the simple salad dressing above and add some extras. You could add olives, cherry tomatoes, chopped peppers, spring onions, tinned sweetcorn, raw onion, pickled garlic, capers, tinned tuna, small chunks of cooked meats, loads of stuff will work in this!
7. Bean salad wrap
Okay, this is really similar to the bean salad, and the wraps, but hear me out! This is a really delicious way to eat bean salad, and you can leave the house with it and not have to worry about taking dishes if you’re in a rush. You get to add a few nutrients too. Carbs from the wrap, and you can incorporate some of that lovely green salad in there too! Though for the sake of avoiding drips, I recommend leaving the salad dressing off the greens.
8. Pre-prepped salads.
These are never going to be as good as the version you make yourself, but if you’re trying to get by and cook without a stove for a while, pre-made potato salad may be the way to go.
Supermarkets often have a good selection of these in the deli section. Potato salad, pasta salad, couscous, usually a few flavours of each.
9. Couscous
This is a little different from the rest of the list because this one assumes you may have access to a kettle. Which, if it’s an electric kettle, means you can cook without a stove!
Couscous is a great quick meal because it will cook in just the residual heat after boiling the water. This means that if you can make coffee, you can cook couscous. Just mix your seasonings with the couscous, and I recommend a good amount of seasoning as couscous can be a little bland without it, then pour the boiled water over and leave it to steep.
3 minutes later, ta-da! Cooked couscous.
10. Fresh pasta
In the same vein as the couscous above, freshly made pasta takes a mere 3 minutes to cook and can be made with just a kettle.
You can buy fresh pasta from the supermarket; if you’re looking for a quick and easy meal the tortellini is a good option. One box usually serves two (or one hungry person), put in a bowl, pour the boiling water over, let stand, then drain and enjoy. You may want to add some butter or olive oil, or a sauce of some kind.
Consider leaving some of the water on the pasta to mix with the sauce. It sounds like you’ll just get a runny sauce, but it’s actually a good trick to get the sauce to loosen slightly and coat the pasta nicely.
You can also make fresh pasta easily at home, I have a post on how to make pasta here.
11. Take away
For when you really just need a filling hot meal. It’s not the cheapest, it’s not the healthiest. But sometimes it just really hits the spot.
