Neat Heat, Sweet Eat
Well, maybe you can, after all, teach an old dog new tricks. Of course there's a limit to that, but let's see now: I've owned a toaster-oven of one kind or another for as long as I can think of. And I've used it to do our morning toast. Rarely have I ever put it to other uses. Uses for which it is designed, in fact. The very name itself implies its many potential uses.
It took our daughter-in-law, visiting and bringing with her green unroasted fair-trade coffee beans, and wishing to roast them in the toaster-oven, and doing that most successfully, then remarking she might just get one for her own kitchen, since it appears it might have many uses, including baking. Aha! Well, we bought her a toaster oven for a gift, and then my thoughts turned to our own little handy kitchen device.
It's been hot, really hot and humid of late. Sometimes when we don't want to put the oven on in the kitchen we go for the option of using the barbeque out on the deck. Like yesterday, when we did rainbow trout for dinner. But along with the high humidity and heat comes the likelihood of rain, and there's nothing like rain to foil plans for cooking out-of-doors.
It so happened on yet another one of those hot days I decided to make a corn chowder for dinner, along with a yeast flat bread topped with tomato sauce, shredded cheese and thyme. No problem about the chowder, it went on the stove top, and guess what? the bread was popped into the toaster oven. And dinner was really delicious; that little toaster oven baked the bread thoroughly, perfectly, delectably.
I like to bake on Fridays, something nice for dessert, but it was too hot to turn the oven on. I'd bought a basket of Ontario peaches earlier in the week and found them to be too unripe, too hard, and somewhat lacking in that fine fragrance and wonderful taste Ontario peaches are normally imbued with. I baked a nice, large, cinnamon-flavoured peach pie in that little toaster oven. I wasn't able to use my favourite pottery pie plate, the one our youngest son made for me, but a large pyrex pie plate slipped into the oven's cavity quite nicely.
The pastry baked wonderfully well, the interior fruit was well baked, and nestled in the flavourfully thickened juice of the fruit: perfection. Later (I was on a roll) I also baked in that modest little toaster oven a potato pudding (Friday night potatonik!) and it came out perfectly crusted, dark brown and crisply delicious. Oops! chicken breast halves, nicely seasoned came out moist and delicious.
But for the chicken soup that cooked on top of the stove, that little toaster oven slaved away all day on our behalf. And the house kept nice and cool.
Arf, Arf!
posted by Pieface @ Friday, July 28, 2006
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