Marinated Chicken Thighs & Potato Wedges

There is nothing to this. It's hardly worth blogging !

However, I've had loads of emails recently asking if I cook fancy evening meals. The answer is - only rarely. Generally it's something quick and easy .... unless it's a special occasion or one of us fancies something rather out of the ordinary.

I use my halogen cooker a lot. It's generally used at least an average of 5 days a week. Oliver loves fish fingers and I can cook those in 6 > 7 minutes with a few chips (no preheat) - so my halogen oven is fab for things like that. I can also do fish on the baking tray with steamer plate over the top to diffuse in a similar amount of time. Saves tons of energy and I don't feel guilty about putting the normal oven on to cook just two fish fingers for a toddler and then later again for our evening meal.

For example, tonight I marinated some chicken thighs with garlic and lemon juice and tiny bit of olive oil. I cooked those in the halogen oven at 200deg C for about 15 mins until cooked through. I then decided to make some potato wedges with cracked black pepper and a sprinkle of paprika and popped those in on the top rack for about 10mins. Everything was beautifully browned.

 I could have cooked everything together on the baking tray on the bottom rack. However, if you use a tray on the top rack, the low rack then cooks by convection as it does not get the direct infra-red glow to "speed cook" and takes a good bit longer. I could also have cooked faster if I'd put the wedges on the bottom and chicken on the top rack (letting juices drip onto the wedges - yum yum) as the fan blows the hot air round everything that way.

Truth is, I'd a toddler to bath and get ready for bed and wanted to know our dinner was on the way without rushing bathtime ! That's the thing with the halogen oven - it cooks a lot faster than a normal oven and often faster than I expect. It's also far more energy efficient. The normal oven is 4500W at maximum, whilst the halogen oven is 1400W at maximum. BIG difference - especially with drastically reduced cooking times too. It's much faster cooking for the majority of things and easy to wash up.

Our halogen ovens are arriving back into stock on Friday. I think there are about 800 arriving ! Unlike most retailers, we importantly also stock replacement halogen bulbs for our ovens. Surprisingly few stockists do and a halogen oven with no bulb is pretty useless...

You'll find some recipes on the website here . I promise to try and get round to doing some more - it's just that I forget when I'm using it on such a regular basis !