The Little Toaster Oven That Could

Merry Christmas from Japan!

Shepherd's pie in the toaster oven

Basically this has been my lunch for the last week, and will be in the coming week as well!

Rudimentary baked apple

What you can't see is the delicious steam rising from them, or the juice in the bottom.

Perfect for a cold fall night!

Ingredients:

-1 apple (or half of an apple the size of two fists combined, which is what I had)
-1 spoon brown sugar
-cinnamon
-tiny bit of water

Slice up your apple and core it. Mix together brown sugar and cinnamon. Make sure hte apple slices are thin, and arrange them in a tinfoil pan, sprinkling the brown sugar and cinnamon mixture on top of each layer. If your apple's not very juicy, add a tiny bit of water in the bottom of the pan. Pop that sucker in the toaster oven for about eight minutes.

Careful when you take it out: it's hot.

Brazilian cheese puffs

I have too much tapioca flour. I needed to use it. I found this recipe on Yahoo Answers and decided to try it out!

Sweet potato cake

While riding around on my new bicycle (!!) last weekend, I chanced across a small fruit-and-vegetable stand selling what I assume are farm-fresh vegetables. I can't tell, of course, since there's no way I could read this information even if it was advertised, or even ask, but I went in anyway and came out with numerous healthy treats, among them some sweet potatoes, which I just discovered on my top shelf this evening!

Sweet potato cakes are a traditional Japanese treat, naturally gluten-free, and healthy for you, so I figured I'd try my hand at them, since I'm actually not quite sure what else to do with Japanese sweet potatoes. Herein lies the recipe:

I have committed a Cooking Sin...

...I baked first and now I just want to eat that. And not make dinner. Even though dinner is going to be delicious, I can't stop eating it.

"It" being a not-particularly-photogenic banana bread.

Told you.

Recipe follows...

Peanut butter, miso, and cinnamon cookies

Made in my tiny toaster oven!

EDITED AS OF 08/14: These cookies are actually incredibly nasty. I'm not sure what I was thinking, or perhaps I was just incredibly hungry after making them, but they are for all intents and purposes totally inedible now, and the very act of biting into one triggers an instant spit-it-out-now reflex. For the love of Pete, don't put the miso in these cookies. Just... keep them peanutbuttery. I will experiment further sometime down the line, I'm sure.


It's a rainy day in Nagoya, and after walking home from the gym at noon in a torrential downpour, complete with thunder, I abandoned previous plans to bum around downtown shopping, and decided to make it a lazy afternoon at home. And what's more rainy-day than making some cookies? These are modified from a recipe I found at Pattycake.