Do It Yourself: 5 Ways to Cook in Your Hotel Room

When reader Jenni wrote to me asking, “Can you cook in your hotel room?â€, I instantly had visions of Seinfeld’s Kramer making meals in the bathtub. Salad, anyone?

However, many people find that cooking in their hotel room saves money on eating expensive meals out. It is also useful for soldiers who are only allowed coffee pots in their rooms while deployed, and students in dorm rooms. Skeptical? Some people make full meals in their hotel room. An example is salmon with rice, broccoli, and chocolate fondue for dessert.

If you‘re going to give it a try, the most important thing is to make sure that your cooking gear is cleaned and washed before you start and cleaned again afterwards for the next guest.

Next, make sure you have stored your ingredients property. Some hotels will provide you with a refrigerator for free if you ask. This way you can keep your eggs, meat, fish, etc. at the right temperature before you cook them.

Have something on hand in case your cooking suddenly starts smoking or catches on fire, just as you would if you were at home in your kitchen.

1. Probably the most basic thing to make in a hotel room is a toasted cheese sandwich, using an iron. How to do it? Prepare a sandwich with cheese, butter and bread, heat the iron, and press the iron down firmly on both sides of the sandwich until nice and melted.

2. From there you could move on to the tea kettle. Want to poach eggs? Line a glass with a shower cap, add a teaspoon of olive oil, crack an egg into the shower cap, hang the cap inside the tea kettle partially filled with water. Turn on the tea kettle and poach the egg for about 3-5 minutes. You can also tie vegetables with string and hang them inside the tea kettle to steam them.

Do you feel like McGyver yet?

A coffee pot offers three different ways to cook.

3. The top basket of the coffee maker can be used for steaming vegetables like cauliflower or broccoli.

4. The carafe offers the broadest spectrum of cooking possibilities. You can make instant rice, poach chicken or fish, hard boil eggs, make couscous or oatmeal.

5. The burner of the coffee pot can be used as a hot surface for grilling.

Bonus! You can even combine them. Example – crumbling sugar cookies in the carafe and adding Kahlua, brewing a little bit of coffee, pouring the mixture into a mug, and adding whipped cream.

Most hotel rooms don’t have dishwashers but if yours does you can cook chicken or fish while washing your dishes.

There are even full websites dedicated solely to cooking in your hotel room.

Click here for a great website (you may need Google translate if you don’t understand Swedish) that has recipes for how to make hot dogs with spaghetti, date wrapped bacon, and tapas.

Some of you will be disgusted by reading about cooking by using coffee pots and irons, and others will be excited. Still others may be reading this while pressing an iron down on foil wrapped bacon. Would you cook in your hotel room?