The idea of Cooking With Your Coffee Maker started with one of our nephews complaining that the he preferred MRE’s to the food in the mess hall in Afghanistan.

Since a coffee maker was the one appliance that all the soldiers have, I began to wonder if the water from a coffee maker would get hot enough to make instant oatmeal. You see I don’t own a coffee maker because we are not coffee drinkers in my house, so I went out and bought my first coffee maker.

Cooking with the coffee maker became a fun and weird science experiment. Trying different containers and taking their temperatures to see how hot the water would get and to see if I could raise it became an obsession with me.  I tried a metal camp cup first it would hold 2 cups of something, would not break and was easy to wash. I wanted to try using something other than the pot to avoid have to clean it, besides you could cook and eat out of the cup. Well the metal cup worked great. It not only held the temperature but also increased it. Instant oatmeal made with boiling water somehow just does not seem to be quite done, it still needs a little cooking, usually in a micro. But if you leave that same cup of oatmeal on the warming plate of your coffee maker for a few minutes it comes out just right. Next I tried ramen and mac & cheese, these also worked out well. Now I was getting the hang of how to cook with my new favorite kitchen appliance. The secret is using a lid to hold in the temperature and raise it even more. If you want to fry or bake you will need a sierra cup, and don’t forget the lid.

I wanted to come up with some recipes, tips and hints to send to Ty (that’s my nephew) so we could send him some food he could cook for a break from bad chow and MRE’s. As the experiments progressed I realized I was writing a book. I printed up a down and dirty copy to send to my nephew and posted a few pictures on face book.

So see, you can really cook with your coffee maker. After I had made mini cakes, pizzas, hamburgers, hard boiled eggs and breakfast burritos with sausage, scrambled eggs and cheese, soup from scratch with raw meat and cooked a corned beef, I knew there wasn’t much I couldn’t make with mine.