Everyone knows that cooking your own food is cheaper than eating out, but it’s nearly impossible to cook when you’re traveling. Unless you’re staying in a tricked-out suite or have a kitchenette in your extended stay room, chances are that the only appliance you have for making anything in your temporary bedroom is a coffeemaker. As it turns out, that’s not a problem at all. The folks over at NPR’s The Salt blog discovered that the coffeemaker can be a pretty useful tool in your quest for in-room dining.

Basically, you can make almost any meal that can be steamed, poached, or grilled. The coffee pot itself is for poaching, the filter basket is for steaming, and the warming plate underneath the pot is useful as a makeshift flat-top grill. If you’re looking to grill two sides of something at once, break out your iron and do double-duty. Hello, hotel paninis!

The adventurous testers over at NPR opted to try out poached salmon, couscous, and steamed broccoli and, honestly, it doesn’t look all that bad. Sure, the person who gets the room after you might not enjoy a little fishy aftertaste in their morning java, but that’s for them to worry about.

If you want to get in on the coffeemaker cooking action, add your ideas and recipes in the comments. Just hope your next hotel didn’t switch over to those fancy pod machines…

RECIPE FROM NPR’s The Salt blog:

Coffee Maker Dinner With Poached Salmon, Couscous And Steamed Vegetables

1. Add chopped broccoli and cauliflower into the basket until it is halfway full.
2. Add the maximum amount of water into the coffee maker’s reservoir. Run the coffeemaker until the reservoir has just enough water left in it to cook the couscous. Stop the appliance.
3. Dump out the water in the carafe. Add the couscous to the carafe.
4. With a fork, mix up the vegetables in the basket to ensure even steaming. Then restart the coffee maker until the cycle finishes. Let couscous sit for 5 minutes. Transfer to a bowl.
5. Keep the vegetables in the basket (it takes two cycles to steam-cook them). Place the salmon in the carafe. Add some soy sauce, ginger, garlic or whatever seasoning you’d like. Fill the reservoir with about 3 cups of water and run the cycle.
6. Let the salmon sit in the hot water until it’s opaque and flaky (for us it took only 7 minutes). Remove salmon and vegetables. Plate.

Note: We had a hard time getting the cooked salmon out of the carafe.

 

Read more about it here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/11/15/245442083/coffee-maker-cooking-brew-up-your-next-dinner?ft=1&f=1001

 

Photo by freakapotimus/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.