125 Best Toaster Oven Recipes [Paperback]

Linda Stephen is a professionally trained chef whose recipes have appeared in magazines and cookbooks. She runs her own cooking school, Linda's Country Kitchen.

Introduction

I saw my first toaster oven twenty years ago, when I was staying with a friend who used it to toast bread and bagels. But I didn't get one of my own until I wrote The Best Convection Oven Cookbook, which included a chapter of convection toaster oven recipes. That's when I first started to actually cook in the toaster oven, and right away I was hooked.

Over the many years that I have been cooking, teaching and catering, I have become used to cooking meals for anywhere from six to two hundred people. So it was second nature to me to turn on the big kitchen oven when I was at home, even when I was cooking for just a few people.

Then I realized that this convenient countertop item was really just a tiny oven, and that it really would cook. I could make entire meals for three or four in it. I could bake cakes, pies and bread in it. I could roast and broil in it. An I could even use it for reheating and toasting bread and bagels! Now the toaster oven is a permanent appliance in my kitchen.

Not only convenient for students, singles, young couples, empty-nesters and retirees, the toaster oven is also ideal for families. Kids can easily learn to make themselves nachos, mini pizzas and French toast. It's perfect for whipping up a Spaghetti Pie (page 100) for a weekday meal, or Beef Tenderloin (page 78) and Baked Alaska (page 182) for a special-occasion dinner for two.

And at a time when we are all faced with soaring energy costs and even blackouts, consumers are becoming more aware of how much energy large appliances use. Why turn on the big oven when the toaster oven will do the same task?

As a cautious consumer and veteran cook, it takes me a long time to change my habits and my equipment. But I have quickly become a cheerleader and advocate of the toaster oven, and I now use it almost daily.

And my friend? She now has a stepped-up model of a toaster oven that she uses more often than she uses her standard oven.