Roasting vegetables on the stove

I live in a tropical country. It’s always hot. So, if there’s a tiny amount of something to be baked, I tend to do it on top of the stove – it saves on the amount of heat that gets released into the kitchen, which saves on me sweating to death, and it also saves on the cost of gas.

I’ve baked bread on the stove many times as well as roasted eggplant and beets. It works great!

To roast beets, I removed the leaves, leaving about a half inch of the stems behind, and  scrubbed the beet to remove dirt and other ickies while leaving the peel intact. Then I wrapped the beets (I did two this time) in foil and placed them in my handy-dandy baking-on-the-stove contraption which consists of two aluminum lids placed on the fire with a trivet on top of the lids so that whatever I’m baking doesn’t burn due to direct heat. Then I put whatever I’m baking, in this case beets, on the trivet.

Then I put an old rice cooker pot (which can’t be used for rice cooking any more due to a small hole in the pot) over that. Cheap (used materials from around the house), pretty much ugly, but effective.

And in the picture above, I put eggplants that I needed roasted for a dip into my round aluminum cake pan, covered that with a lid, and put that on top of the rice cooker lid. The fire is on medium high.

This is effective enough that my double-deckered beets and eggplants were both done around the same time, in about 45 minutes. And it used a fraction of the amount of gas it would have taken to bake in the oven.

Would roasting/baking like this save you money and, well, sweating in the summer? Can you think of materials you have around your house that you could use?

Tags: stovetop baking, stovetop roasting, experiments, cooking, baking