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All by just using an oven toaster: 'fried' egg, honey garlic cauliflower and chicken nuggets
[Welcome to summer! Let's try to kill boredom with cool activities at home, awesome travel itineraries, and TV and movies!]
The oven toaster is probably the most underrated — and underused — appliance in the kitchen. Most people use it for, the obvious, toasting bread. Some people may have baked boxed cake mixes made specifically for oven toasters. And there may have been some who have used it to heat food instead of a microwave.
But it really is the most important piece of equipment in your kitchen and you don’t even know it yet!
Here’s how my love affair with the oven toaster began. I have very basic cooking knowledge and the thought of deep frying scares me. So one morning, as I was contemplating preparing a pack of chicken nuggets for breakfast, I read the instructions on the packaging.
Did you know that you could cook the nuggets in your oven toaster straight from the freezer? I sure didn’t. But the ease of it all, just made me question the validity of said instructions. Would it cook all the way through? Would I end up just frying the sad mess I’d end up with after toasting them?
So I popped the still frozen chicken nuggets on the baking pan that came with my oven toaster and set the counter for 10 minutes. There was a promise of golden nuggets in that amount of time. I waited eagerly.
Ding, it came. I bit into the nugget and discovered it was perfectly cooked. I never looked back.
The thought of never having to fry anything ever again made me giddy. With a head of cauliflower sitting in our fridge all week, I went online and typed in “cauliflower” “recipes” and “toaster oven”.
I saw a recipe for Honey Garlic Cauliflower that said “bake the cauliflower in an oven” and figured I could try doing it in the oven toaster. All I needed was the baking pan that fit in my toaster, parchment paper, and some non-stick spray.
I followed the steps: chop up your cauli into bite-sized florets, dredge in flour, dip in an egg that’s been beaten, cover in bread crumbs, season with salt and pepper, and bake till golden brown.
After I had done my honey garlic sauce, I tossed the golden cauli until fully coated before giving it a final toast. The result was crisp and crunchy cauliflower that has since earned its rightful place in our family’s weekly menu.
But I didn’t stop there. I was determined to use the heck out of the oven toaster, toasting bread not counted. Because if I could get away with never having to turn on the stove, I would do it.
I’ve baked frozen fish an infinite number of ways—with mayo and seasoned bread crumbs; with butter and lemon; with homemade salsa; and so much more.
I’ve made Broccoli Pizza with Garlic Bechamel on ready-made pizza crusts. I’ve roasted veggies (sliced some kalabasa, carrots, onions and drizzle with olive oil before sprinkling with my choice of herbs—rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano). I’ve even used said roasted veggies in a simple pasta dish.
On one particularly lazy day, I actually “fried” eggs in the toaster. I covered the pan with aluminum foil and sprayed it with cooking oil, cracked my eggs into the pan, seasoned with salt and pepper, and left it in the toaster to cook until the yolks were just about done. It was a bit of a struggle to slide them out but they were cooked and that’s what mattered!
The best part? You only have to clean one thing: the baking pan. Sometimes, when I use foil, I don’t even need to wash anything. I swear, this oven toaster will never leave my house!
I still have many toaster experiments in mind, including baking bread in it. I have a baby loaf pan that fits my toaster perfectly and I’m curious to see if it’ll give me the mini wheat loaf of my dreams for days when an entire regular-sized loaf is just way too much for one person. Imagine all the possibilities. — LA, GMA News
