Quite an Oven-t

At long last, we have an oven - this is a big deal! 

We've been cooking on only a stove since August, and three and a half months of stovetop food gets a little old. I'm a big roasted veggie fan (and I despise steamed veggies so...) and it's so great to do that again. It's nice to have toasted sandwiches (we eat a lot of sandwiches), and if we have leftovers to warm up, it's nice to not heat up pizza in a pan on the stove. 

We've been looking at toaster ovens for awhile but were waiting to get one until we got our housing subsidy. That arrived, and it was the push we needed! 

We were on team Crockpot for a long time because that's the machine I use to cook most back home, but when we looked, we were told they didn't sell crockpots in stores, only online, and paying for shipping and not being able to check them out beforehand? no thanks. And a microwave was briefly considered, but we rarely use ours back home (ovens are way better for heating up that aforementioned leftover pizza, and I think the only thing I really microwaved was butter for stovetop popcorn). 

So we finally settled on a toaster oven! We looked at a few department stores, but found this one at Saturn and proudly took it home. I did notice once we got home that behind Carson in this picture are what appear to be crock-pots, although everyone said they aren't sold in stores. I may go back just to see if that's what they are, even though I'm happy with the toaster oven choice. 

We had an event the evening we bought the oven, so we couldn't take it home right away and test it out. We stashed it in Carson's office while we did a walking tour of the city, and then by the time we came home, it was 11pm and not the time to heat something up. We didn't end up using it until several days later because we just weren't home! When we did though, Carson dashed across the street to buy a frozen pizza. He's been dying over not being able to taste the frozen pizzas here, so that was our inaugural "meal". He chose one with green onions and ricotta on it and it was different, but I thought it was pretty tasty.

Here are some roasted potatoes, mushrooms and garlic we also made in the oven. So much better than on the stove! 

As far as a home for our oven, well, it's living on the desk in the living room. It's not very big, but is too big for our tiny counters. A bonus to having it in the living room is that you can watch it bake if you're in there, and it provides a little heat, which is always welcome this time of year!

I'd originally typed this up in a post with other pictures, but quickly realized I had way too much to say on the topic. I told you this is a big deal to us!