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This whole being-without-an-oven thing, as we call it in the trade, is forcing me to reevaluate my cookery. Normally, I get in from work (late) and stick something ready-made into the cooker. Proper cooking with ingredients is reserved for my days off. There are two main reasons for this: one, it’s late and I’m tired and hungry; and two, cooking properly, with ingredients, is something I actually enjoy doing, so I don’t particularly want to do it when it’s late and I’m tired and hungry.

I have a friend (hi David!) who’s a much better cook than me. It’s a bit embarrassing for both of us. I’m supposed to be the internet-famous cookery show star, and no one’s ever eaten anything I’ve cooked; and he always apologizes every time he produces some fantastic culinary marvel that he suspects might not be entirely perfect. (He’s usually mistaken.). But we both know more-or-less as much as each other about food and what you do with it. So why is he the one who gets to play with quails and fondant tarts, while I can just about stretch to a Sunday roast if you give me a day to do it?

I think the answer is time. I’ve gone off on one already about the Findus Crispy Pancakes generation, but the fact remains that sometimes I want to eat something in order to stave off imminent starvation, without having to go to the effort of putting my creative head on. If I finished work at five and got home by six, with the evening stretching out ahead of me, I might feel differently.

Without an oven, I’m being forced to get creative. (I know there exist microwaveable ready meals, but come on, I have some standards.) For instance, I’ve just reinvented pizza. They all laughed at me when I said I was going to spread toast with tomato puree, then put chicken and cheese on top of it and grill it. (I still have a grill. An oven without a door is a grill.) But I’ll show them, I’ll show them all. And I still have a hob, which means that I’m rediscovering soups.

I’m also making an awful lot of toasted sandwiches. Toasted sandwiches are another way that you can play around with flavours and combinations of ingredients without having to do any real work. I have a sandwich toaster, but I don’t own a health grill, which is a shame, because then I could toast sandwiches and do other stuff as well.

We cover health grills in greater depth, after a fashion, on Wednesday, in the appropriately-named Health Grill Episode. It’s a shorter episode than usual, because it turns out that there’s not a great deal to say about health grills. We hope that we’ve covered all the basics and still managed to be amusing.

In the meantime, does anybody have any other useful tips for coking without an oven?