Improvising an oven

I got rid of my RoadPro oven a while back. It used too much electricity and put out too little heat. That left me without an oven, which limited my diet. Not a tragedy, but sometimes I’d like to heat something up. Like the burritos I got at Trader Joe’s yesterday. I enjoy them enough to figure out a way to warm them (though they’re not that bad cold).

What is an oven, really? A heated container. Well, I have a container—a two-quart pot with a lid. And I knew from my RoadPro experience that I could put some crumpled aluminum foil in the bottom of the pot to act sort of like a rack, keeping the food off the pot where it might stick or burn or both. The pot is small, so I cut the burrito in half.

This was an experiment, not just lunch, so I turned the propane burner as low as possible. And waited. After about ten minutes I turned off the flame and just let it sit for about five minutes more. It came out perfect. Any hotter and I would’ve burned my mouth. I left one half of the burrito in the “oven” to stay warm while I ate the other.

Celebrity chef Alton Brown says he avoids kitchen items that serve only one purpose. He calls them “mono-taskers.” I think that’s especially germane for those of us living in vehicles. So now my pot is also an oven. Oh, and it has also been a bowl. Why dirty another dish when you can eat straight from the pot?