A Toaster Oven Life

The U.S. is approximately 42 days into the 94 day long summer of 2014. Although it has not been the warmest summer on record, it is still hot here most days; too hot to turn on the oven. Our high Monday was 100 and Tuesday 96 degrees. With these kinds of high temperatures, the last thing I want to do is heat up the house cooking with open flames and ovens. What I've come to learn is that the crock pot and toaster oven are really helpful when it comes to preparing a meal without overheating myself or over working the air-conditioning. I'm fully convinced that if I was suddenly down sized into living in a very small space and had only space enough for a tiny little kitchen, I'd be fine with an under counter sized fridge (as long as it is self defrosting and has a separate freezer) a 2 burner hotplate, a strong microwave, a crock pot and a good convection toaster oven. Honestly I never thought I would be able to prepare backed goods or baked meals in a toaster oven, but I'm doing it and it's working great! Granted, my family is small, but I'm just glad it helps me keep what I cook to meal size! (read: I have a little problem cooking too much food! :)) So, I'm working on a little series on Toaster Oven cooking.

Any of my existing recipes that require the oven, I'll make certain to have some instructions that cover how to best cook the meal in a toaster oven.  I use and suggest the KitchenAid 12-inch Convection Bake Countertop Oven. It really is the best one I've ever owned. The convection baking part makes for very even cooking. Some recipes do require multiple batch baking sessions. For instance, a 6 cup muffin tin fits perfectly in the toaster oven, but most recipes make 12 (Hint: half the recipe!). So I bake in batches or as indicated before, split the recipe into a smaller portion. The best part of all, my kitchen and home stay relatively cool.

I was really missing baking for my family and on a whim decided to try doing it in the toaster oven. One recipe led to another and before I knew it, I was baking all the time. I even baked the bacon for our Club Sandwiches on Tuesday night in the toaster oven and it was perfectly cooked! Tonight I'm making another of my favorite kinds of meals, a One Pot dish. If I'm cooking a short pasta shape in my dish it is easily transformed into a One Pot dish by eliminating the pasta boiling part. Tonight is Skillet Nancy Orecchiette. Be sure to check out the recipe in the sidebar. The trick to cooking any short cut pasta from its dry state in a skillet, is to make sure that for every 2.5-3 cups of dry pasta, that you have 4.5 cups of liquid/water besides any sauce that you want to have left behind. In the case of the dish above, I will be using white wine and chicken stock as my cooking liquid, with cream, pecorino cheese and butter playing the part of the 'sauce' ingredients. Orecchiette is one of my favorite pasta shapes. In Italian it means, "little ear" and I love how the Italians name the pasta shapes with such sweetness. Little Ears...it just tickles me! I hope you try the skillet pasta and I hope you love it as much as we do!

That's it for today. I will continue work on my Toaster Oven series, but for now, be sure to check out the recipe for Scones in the sidebar. Until later when I'll write more about the adventures of family cooking in a Toaster Oven and other nonsense, Godspeed, Voyagers!!