Off the top of my head, I don’t have an intimate familiarity with the history of the culinary arts, but I can imagine how cooking came about: Shortly after mankind discovered fire, we also realized that if you leave meat near that fire for at least a few minutes, it ends up tasting a heck of a lot better than it did raw. The point is that even though cooking can seem like this big complicated procedure, there isn’t actually a ton to it, especially when it comes to the basics. This means that you don’t need much to get started. If you want to cook a couple of hot dogs, for example, you can do it with a soup can (via Laughing Squid).

The folks behind the Mr Useful channel on YouTube decided to see if they’d be able to make a functioning barbecue grill from a tin can, and it turns out it’s actually not that complicated and only takes some ready accessible components. It’s pretty simple: Cut a can in half, use some long screws for legs and secure them in place with nuts, re-attach the halves with a small hinge, bend some wire for the rack, and boom, you have yourself a small grill. The video shows this thing successfully heating up some hot dogs, so in theory, depending on the size can you use, you could probably cook pretty much anything.