Working on your knife skills will pay off more than any small organizational optimizations and it's fun.
The top oven of a 30" double oven heats up almost as fast as a toaster oven, you don't have to bend over far to use it, and it takes up no counter space. I thought these were just for people who frequently cook huge meals for large gatherings but we moved into a house with one, used the top oven constantly, and it became a must-have when it was time to replace the range.
I got a gigantic weston vacuum sealer for Christmas one year. Fortunately we have the counter space for it, and drawer space beneath it for the bags, in our pantry. In the amounts we cook it's taken a long time to break even on any cost savings but it's a quality of life game changer. Plus sous vide. In a world where less-than-super-premium American butchery has gone from mediocre to downright sloppy in my lifetime, it's very, very nice being able to break down big roasts and subprimals into chops and steaks and smaller roasts etc and trim them up nicely and freeze whatever we're not going to use immediately. I tie roasts before freezing them.
Just buy the big box of sharpies for the kitchen. They walk off and dry out and get that weird thing that happens when they touch something oily. I mark things like super-duper-pasteurized dairy products with the date opened. I'm not michelin-star disciplined about using painter's tape for other containers. If I have a subprimal's worth of meat to go in the freezer, I use a label maker.
OK now I am curious. How powerful is this drawer and how large? I just set my toaster oven to 450ºF and the thermostat clicked off in 18 seconds, at which point an infrared thermometer indicated the walls of the toaster were 355º. My full height oven would take at least 20 minutes to get there. I can see how cutting the volume in half would help but it feels like you'd need more insulation and/or more power to close that gap.
I don't know how powerful. It will fit a half sheet. The door is a little less than a foot high and the interior obviously is smaller. I wasn't being "I made timing measurements" exact by saying "almost as fast" - think "almost as fast for my purposes". It takes about five-ten minutes to preheat and my old toaster oven took minutes, not tens of seconds. I don't remember how many. It's just a big enough improvement over a full height oven that we use it a lot more, and don't bother with a toaster oven.
You also can toast just about anything in it under the broiler.
Sounds useful. I agree a few minutes is not bad at all. I had just been wondering if you have one of those models that uses a battery to dump energy into the oven.
The top oven of a 30" double oven heats up almost as fast as a toaster oven, you don't have to bend over far to use it, and it takes up no counter space. I thought these were just for people who frequently cook huge meals for large gatherings but we moved into a house with one, used the top oven constantly, and it became a must-have when it was time to replace the range.
I got a gigantic weston vacuum sealer for Christmas one year. Fortunately we have the counter space for it, and drawer space beneath it for the bags, in our pantry. In the amounts we cook it's taken a long time to break even on any cost savings but it's a quality of life game changer. Plus sous vide. In a world where less-than-super-premium American butchery has gone from mediocre to downright sloppy in my lifetime, it's very, very nice being able to break down big roasts and subprimals into chops and steaks and smaller roasts etc and trim them up nicely and freeze whatever we're not going to use immediately. I tie roasts before freezing them.
Just buy the big box of sharpies for the kitchen. They walk off and dry out and get that weird thing that happens when they touch something oily. I mark things like super-duper-pasteurized dairy products with the date opened. I'm not michelin-star disciplined about using painter's tape for other containers. If I have a subprimal's worth of meat to go in the freezer, I use a label maker.