Here goes another pasta experiment. This time, I went with 100% durum wheat (other than a little KA that I used to flour the board and the pasta as it went through the machine). To make the dough, I combined 3 egg yolks (yolks only, trying for a very yellow noodle), the zest of 6 lemons, 1T each dill and basil, and 1.5t kosher salt in a blender, then mixed it into two cups of fresh-ground durum wheat (no sifting, 100% WW).

The dough sat for around four hours, then half was cut into fettucini. The other half is sitting in my fridge, and will be used tomorrow probably...

For the final dish, roast 2/3 cup of pine nuts and reserve. The chicken breasts had been coated in olive oil and kosher salt that morning, then stuck in the fridge in a plastic bag that I flipped every couple of hours during the day.  Rough chop 2 small onions, 8 oz mushrooms, and 5 cloves of garlic. I browned the chicken in a mix of butter and olive oil, then dumped the onion mixture on top and hit with some kosher salt. After most of the water cooked out of the veg mix, I added chicken stock to a 1/4" depth in the pan, put in a bunch of lemon slices, covered and simmered for 15-20 minutes. The pasta cooked for 4 minutes. I added a few tablespoons of half and half to the pan, combined for a minute, then added the noodles and cooked for another 90 seconds or so. Yum. The noodles weren't quite the bright yellow I was hoping for, maybe I'll add a few drops of food coloring next time :)

Hi all

After two frightening hydro bills, I decided that I needed to investigate more energy efficient methods for baking small items.  Typically I would heat up my full-sized conventional oven to bake a crust for cheesecake which would take 10-15 minutes after preheating for probably 15-20 minutes.  I still intend to use my large oven for bread, but I suspect many other things could be done more economically in a counter-top oven.

My toaster oven doesn't have convection or rotisserie features, but it seems well designed.  It has a crumb tray, rack, and aluminum pan.  With all of those in place, I tried baking chicken strips and was impressed how evenly they browned, and it even seemed faster than in the large oven.  I think I hadn't tried it sooner because I feared the cleanup, but the materials seemed to shed any debris very easily.  I used to use my George Foreman Party Time grill almost every day and it was an ordeal to clean but probably saved me a lot of hydro, though at the time I had a self-cleaning oven that was well insulated.

This morning I tried baking a Dutch Baby Apple Pancake crust in the toaster oven.  I didn't put the pan in this time, and I think that was a mistake because the oven burned the butter I was trying to melt before adding the batter.  The second attempt was with the pan and the butter melted well enough, though the crust didn't come out quite as well as in the conventional oven.

Because this toaster oven is 10" wide, I think I might try baking a tart crust or cheesecake crust in it, but of course these items have a lot of butter so I'm a bit nervous about it.  I don't have a working oven thermometer right now to test the accuracy of the temperature.

If anyone else has used a counter-top oven for small items, I would love to hear about any helpful tricks.  I'm not planning to try anything that takes much more than half an hour to bake.

If anyone has found a counter-top convection oven that bakes great cakes, that would be of interest, too!

Many thanks!

Right, so about six months ago I was in Cambodia, in Sihanoukville to be precise where I happened to stay at a guesthouse called Thida's inn. Thida the lovely lady who ran it, was a rather good cook and one day someone said, "have you tried the chicken wrap?" no I replied, is that on the menu?

No she replied, someone showed her how to make it, he was south american I think, try it.

I did. I don't precisely know what she used to make it, a kind of magic I think, all I know is it's one of the greatest items of food I have ever tasted, I generally ate at least two a day and on balance I would love to make them again.

So one day I sauntered into the kitchen and said, thida, show me how you make your chicken wrap, which she did, unfortunately while I saw and video'd how she made the contents of the wrap, she'd premade the wraps themselves the day before and refridgerated them, she simply grabbed a precooked one, dropped it onto an ungreased hot plate and warmed it up. I asked her how she made the wrap and she said it was exactly the same as the pizza bases she made only thinner obviously.

So last weekend I decided to give the pizza base thing a go, I grabbed some recipes of the net (I never got hers unfortunately) did some dough, rolled some out and threw it onto a hot plate and... I made naan bread, well it certainly looked like naan bread, tasted nice, great, but not the magic wrap.

So I through the second one in the oven and I got.... pita bread! hurray I can now make naan bread and pita bread but no $*U%($ng wrap!

So I am after some advice, the recipe I used was basically flour, yeast, sugar, water, salt. I heated the flour and water before hand, chucked it alltogether kneaded it, let it rise for an hour then kneaded it some more, rolled it out and cooked it. So I'm wondering about some alternate recipes and if anyone has any ideas, would baking powder make a difference vs yeast? I really don't know, any help appreciated.

Rob