The oven is out.
Okay, it’s been out for twelve years now and we use it for storage.
Suddenly I have this urge to be domestic. I’ve made a damn good stew and I’m ready to move on to something else.
We like meat and potatoes and spicey things with onions and cheese. I’m also willing to try anything but pork brains or Spam. And I don’t want anything that stares back at me.
Grease is good, but I’m willing to try delicate and subtle.
And suggestions?
Do you have a microwave? If you do, it’s helpful. But anyway, here’s a recipe my family enjoys:
1 lb. smoked sausage (get the spicy kind if it floats your boat)
1 and 1/2 C. whole wheat macaroni elbows
1 C milk
1 Tbsp. butter
1/2 C. cheese sauce mix (we get ours at Sam’s Club)
1/2 C shredded sharp cheddar
Bring about 3 quarts of water to a boil; add noodles and boil for 10 minutes. While noodles are boiling, dice sausage. Bring milk and butter to a low simmer in a small saucepan and whisk in cheese powder. Drain noodles, return to pot. Add diced sausage and cheese sauce and mix well. Sprinkle top with shredded cheddar and cover tightly so cheddear melts on top.
A slow cooker is good, too. If you have one, I can give you several good recipes.
This works for chicken filets, veal, certain cuts of beef, but most of all for fish. A fish filet with more flavor of its own, like salmon or steelhead trout, works better, but it’s also good for mild-flavored fish.
Ingredients are olive oil, shallots (or onions or scallions), the protein of your choice, and julienned sundried tomatoes. I’m not giving quantities because that will vary depending on how many servings you’re making and how much of the condiment ingredients you want.
The process: Chop the shallots/onions/scallions. Sautee in olive oil at medium heat until just softened. Stir in sundried tomatoes (the best kind for this are the ones packed in olive oil – add some of the packing oil too).
Add the protein and cover the pan, turning the heat low. After a minute or two, flip the protein, stirring the other stuff a bit as you do, and cover the pan again. Serve with pan scrapings when the chicken/fish/veal/beef is cooked through.
If you use bluefish or another strong-flavored fish, it’s better to marinate it in soy sauce before cooking and leave out the sundried tomatoes.
You can also grate uncooked carrots or purple cabbage or parsnips or butternut squash and add that to the sautee for a minute or two before the protein. I’d use one (or two together) of them with onions rather than the more delicate-flavored shallots or scallions.
With this as a basis, you can experiment with other ingredients and try different marinades beforehand.
My oven has been out for almost a year as well. I am not getting it fixed or replaced because I hope to renovate the kitchen in the spring and bring in a gas line so I can have a natural gas cooktop. So in the mean time bought a toaster oven for about $79 that is large enough to hold a standard casserole dish. Just in case you hadn’t thought about this as an option.
Here’s one for chili (with beans (frowned on by chili purists)):
CHILI
1 can of kidney beans
1 onion, chopped
½ green pepper, chopped
1 lb. ground beef
1 can of tomato sauce
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp. catsup
2 tsp. brown sugar
dash of paprika
dash of cayenne pepper
1 bay leaf
1 to 2 tbsp. chili powder
1 cup of water
Saute onion and green pepper. Brown meat separately (throw out drippings, no telling what’s in that stuff) and add to onion and green pepper. Add tomato sauce, water and seasonings. Simmer 15 minutes and taste. Add beans and simmer about 2 hours. Makes 4 to 6 servings.
I find pork chops work very well on the stovetop, while having that warm, satisfying “baked for hours” feeling. Here’s two ideas.
Sautee 1 chopped onion in a little butter. Brown 4 pork chops on both sides. Add 1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup, 1/2 cup white wine or dry vermouth and four potatoes, cut into wedges. Turn the heat to low. Check on it periodically, adding a little milk, salt and pepper as needed. (The moisture from the pork will pull out as it cooks, thinning the sauce considerably.) Cook it until the potatoes are soft (about an hour). Served with petite peas, this is a family meant-n-taters favorite, and it’s so easy I’m ashamed to even claim I cooked.
Another one is Mom’s Pork Chops and Peaches. Brown four to six pork chops, drain off any fat and season with salt and pepper. Drain a large (1 lb. 13 oz) can of peach halves, reserving 1/4 cup of the syrup. Put the peach slices over the pork chops in the pan. To the reserved syrup, add 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/5 tsp ground cloves, 1/4 cup cider vinegar and an 8 ounce can of tomato sauce. Mix well and pour over the pork chops and peaches. Cover and simmer for 45 minutes, basting a few times with the sauce. You could conceivably add some powdered cayeene to the spices to heat it up. As written, it’s sweet and savory. I serve it over brown rice with green beans and corn on the side.
There are literally thousands of stove-top dishes, from omelettes to chicken marsala to pepper steak. I wouldn’t know where to begin. You need a cookbook.
Yeah. Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food, recommended by dozens on this board several thousand times, would be a good choice.
You might also look into a book of crockpot recipes. We’ve got one put out by Rival, and it’s got recipes for damn near everything, including breads. I made their lemon-herb chicken last week, and it was awfully yummy.
SNORT!
My ex claimed that the oven was broken. For about the last five years of our marriage, she couldn’t make cakes or pies because the oven was broken and I wouldn’t buy a new one.
Exit the ex and enter De-Light of My Life:
She: “I’ll make a pie today.”
Me: “You can’t, the oven doesn’t work.”
She, 15 seconds later: “There’s nothing wrong with this oven. I’ll make a pie”
A short time later she had a pie baked and ready to enjoy. Men like me are so easy to trick. :smack:
Here’s my stove top recipe, used when necessary:
Open can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli
Heat in saucepan until hot.
Serve with two pieces of heavily buttered bread and a glass of iced tea. YUMMY!
John, don’t you cook for yourself on occasion? 
A recipie that is easy, yummy, and idiot-proof:
Put two chicken breasts in a medium-sized pan.
Cover them with cream-of-mushroom soup concentrate (Campbell’s or whatever)
Add a dash or two of paprika
Cover and cook on medium low until chicken breast is cooked through (from 20 to 40 min).
While this is cooking, you can make rice or mashed potatoes to go with it. When the chicken is done, the leftover soup makes a great gravy.
The best part (for me) is that you can get distracted and forget the chicken for a while, because it doesn’t need to be turned and the range of acceptable cooking time is so large.
Yeah, when necessary. See ravioli recipe above. Also chicken noodle soup and fried spam. I do a mean hamburger on the grille, but use an oven? Perish the thought!
norinew, we both love sausage and pasta so that sounds great! We will have to send someone into Sam’s. We are probably the only people in the world who don’t qualify. Is this sauce mix sold elsewhere – like Kroger? And yes, we do have a microwave – 2nd hand of course. How else can I have “my specialty” – Stouffer’s mac and cheese. 
Pity my poor grandchildren. No slow cooker though.
EddyTeddyFreddy, I really want to try this because we don’t have fish very often and aren’t getting enough mercury. I’ll bet this is really good with salmon! I love anything with sundried tomatoes. I feel a trip to Wild Oats coming.
Patty O’Furniture, I had thought about the toaster oven, but my husband is the sort that if I ever decided that I wanted to actually replace the dead full-sized built in oven, he would say that I already have a perfectly good toaster oven. Gr-r-r-r.
mambocrow, I like chili with beans, and I was hoping that someone would include a good chili recipe. I don’t think cayenne pepper comes in dashes though. And did you mean to leave out the chocolate? (I’m a big fan of Cincinnati chili and that is one of their secret ingredients. Don’t tell.) Your recipe will serve 6 normal people or the two of us. THANKS!!
WhyNot, bingo! We have been known to drive two hundred miles roundtrip to try out what is rumored to be the best porkchops in the South. (PattI’s or Patty’s in Kentucky) I will try both of these. The second one sounds a little weird, but my man loves peaches too and I like the sweet and savory combination.
Chefguy, do you have a stove top recipe for marsala that is fairly easy? I get so desperate for the flavor that I have been known to buy frozen microwavable chicken marsala at Wild Oats and from a local Indian import store. It is one of the few ways that I can tolerate chicken.
Ukulele Ike, since I don’t cook much, I seldom read recipe threads except the weird snack and sandwich variety. So thank you very much for posting that title again. My favorite cookbook is a booklet that tells how to bake a potato and boil an egg. It’s called The College Kid’s Cookbook and came out in the 1960’s or 1970’s. I won a cornbread baking contest when I was ten and after that, my mother wouldn’t let me in the kitchen except to set the table and clean up. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
CrazyCatLady, if I send you a self-addressed stamped package of of dry ice, will you send me lemon-herb chicken?
John Carter of Mars, how did you get my family recipe? I love Italian cooking, don’t you? Sometimes I just make the bread and butter.
Susan, when I was single, I used to make that chicken and mushroom soup recipe for myself – but in the oven. I’d never thought of trying in on the stove! Cool!
It’s a pretty simple dish, once you get the hang of it.
2-3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
flour
oil (peanut or corn)
1 oz butter
8 oz mushrooms, sliced
2 shallots, sliced (or use green onions, or even regular onion, about 1/4 cup)
1/2 cup Marsala wine (or use sherry, but NEVER ‘cooking’ sherry)
1 cup chicken stock (you can buy this in a can or cardboard box at the grocery)
1 cup cream, 1/2 & 1/2, or milk
2 oz butter, cut in pieces
Egg noodles, cooked.
Preheat a large, heavy saute pan or skillet. While it’s heating, flatten the chicken with a mallet or other heavy object. It helps to place it between two sheets of plastic wrap before doing this. Season with salt and pepper and dredge in the flour, shaking off the excess.
Add a small amount of oil to the pan; just enough to cover the bottom. I don’t recommend using olive oil for this dish because of the heavy flavor. Add the chicken and saute over medium-high until browned. Once browned, remove to a warm platter. Drain off any excess oil from pan. Add the one ounce of butter. Toss in the shallots and the mushrooms and cook and stir until golden.
Add the Marsala, to deglaze the pan. Reduce the wine until it’s almost dry, or syrupy. This will take a few minutes. Add the stock and reduce by half. Add the cream and reduce until it is slightly thickened. Swirl in the 2 oz of butter.
Add the chicken back into the pan to reheat and to coat with the sauce. Serve over egg noodles.
By the way, if you don’t have a mallet, you can use the edge of a heavy plate. Don’t flatten so much that you tear the chicken. If you don’t like noodles, you can serve this with rice.
It may take a couple or three tries to get the reduction of the liquid just right for the consistency you like, but it’s all good.
I love chicken marsala. Here’s a recipe similar to the one I use. After the chicken is browned and removed to a warm plate I saute a bit of chopped up bacon, 2 or 3 tablespoons about, then the mushrooms. I omit the onion and the chicken broth and instead use 11/2 cups of marsala wine to deglaze the pan and reduce for the sauce. Hey, that’s the flavor you’re after, right? It makes a really good dish. Even my kitten loved it. 
And dammit, I type too slow. Well I’ll post this anyway. Have a chicken marsala cook-off some night.
Heh heh. I thought the OP said they didn’t have a slow cooker. That’s not funny.
GET A SLOW COOKER!!!
You can make biscuits in a slow cooker, fer crissakes. There are slow cooker sites online where you enter your ingredients, and they give you recipes using them.
The grandkids’ll love the meatballs from the Rival recipe.
You can get a decent slow cooker for about $25 or less (my last one cost $19.99 at Home Depot :dubious: ). Another great cooking tool is a Dutch Oven. This is basically just a large, heavy-duty covered pot (usually 5 quarts). You can do soups, stews, pot roasts, poultry, etc. in this on the stovetop, but a good one costs quite a bit more than a slow cooker, which does almost the same thing (only slower and IMO not as well).
(slight hijack)
OTOH, have you considered fixing your oven? If it’s electric, it’s quite easy to work on. If gas, only slightly harder. I was an appliance repair tech (among other things) for several years. Right before Thanksgiving we’d get a spate of oven repair calls. People who hadn’t used their ovens all year needed to get them ready for turkey day. About half of these calls turned out to be an operator error. There is a very common oven timer clock with a timed bake function that is started by pressing the clock stem down. If the clock has stopped working (as they all did), the oven would never cook and never come out of timed bake. All you had to do to “fix” it was advance the time until the stem popped out. I generally fixed 6-10 of these each year.
(end hijack)
I’ve never found this cheese sauce mix anywhere else; however, you can make cheese sauce by melting cubed Velveeta (or the generic equivalent) in the microwave; thin with a little milk if necessary; alternately, you can use Ragu Cheese Sauce (in a jar near the pasta sauces) or Campbell’s Cream of Cheddar soup.