Roast

Caramelized onions, sweet and succulent, are so easy to prepare in the convection oven. They roast quickly and evenly to a golden caramel color. Serve them as a sandwich filling, a topping for croutons, or on top of grilled burgers. A mandoline makes easy work of slicing the onions.

Meals don’t come much easier, quicker, or better than this!

Roasted peppers are not only good by themselves but they’re a tasty ingredient in spreads and appetizers. Here is my favorite roasting method.

A pan of these vegetables cooks easily along with chicken, Cornish game hens, or pork roast. Consider adding a dessert to the oven, too. All three items can be baked on separate racks. Place the vegetables in the center and the dessert on the bottom rack.

Roasted asparagus spears are crisp-tender with great flavor. They can be roasted at higher temperatures as well (400° to 500°F), in which case the roasting time is short (8 to 10 minutes). If you are roasting meat or poultry at 375°F, that temperature will be fine for the asparagus, too. Don’t add the asparagus to the oven too soon or it will be overcooked.

Both the beet greens and the root are favorite vegetables, making beets about the most edible of all vegetables. You can roast beets in the convection oven in less time than it takes to boil them, and you save a whole lot of mess, too!

Tandoori Chicken is a classic northern Indian dish. The word “tandoori” comes from the Hindi word “tandoor,” a tall, cylindrical clay oven originally used in northern India to cook meat dishes and bread. Here, we use a tandoori spice mixture as a marinade for salmon. Traditionalists might balk, but when I’m in a hurry, I use a store-bought tandoori spice mixture. In the convection oven, the salmon cooks quickly and is moist and mildly fragrant. A minty cucumber-yogurt sauce adds an authentic flavor.

There’s nothing quite so delicious as salmon roasted with soy-flavored butter as a final baste. In the convection oven it cooks amazingly fast. Remove from the oven just when the fish is done.

Roasting brings out all the aromatics in this seasoning mix.

It takes a very hot oven to roast this fish, and the results are incredible! The halibut is gently browned on the outside. You’d never be able to accomplish this “blast of hot air” in a conventional oven because the circulating heat hits everything at one time. Sometimes I add a few baby potatoes, scrubbed and quartered, or a quartered fennel bulb, tossed in melted butter and scattered around the fish. They’ll be done at the same time as the halibut.

A coating of herbed mayonnaise keeps the fish moist while it bakes.

When I roast salmon steaks, I often like to start a pan of root vegetables in the oven 5 to 10 minutes before the salmon. I toss quartered potatoes and 1-inch chunks of parsnips and carrots with a small amount of olive oil. A complete meal is cooked in less than 20 minutes!

This is a fast and easy method for preparing firm, thick fish fillets. A heavy skillet with a ridged bottom will produce nice grill marks when preheated in the oven. Serve this fish with stir-fried Asian noodles or spaghetti tossed with sautéed bok choy, green onions, and any type of sprouts, seasoned with minced garlic, ginger, rice vinegar, and sesame oil.

Tuna steaks are delicious when the exterior is browned but the center is rare. These steaks can be done on an outdoor grill, but when that isn’t feasible, the convection oven does a wonderful job.

Roast the tomatoes, peppers, and garlic right along with the meat loaf to make the sauce.

Butterflied game hens—split down the backbone and flattened, with the backbone removed—can be cooked at a higher temperature and in less time in the convection oven. You’ll notice that the temperature is higher than with whole hens, because these hens are butterflied.

Not only is this sauce delicious with meat loaf, it also goes well with roasted chicken or salmon.

Roast a selection of seasonal vegetables right along with the chicken breasts to make a delicious meal. Turnips, carrots, onions, and potatoes are perfect for a winter evening.

This simple recipe might well replace a turkey for a special holiday meal. The even browning that the convection oven offers and repeated basting with the slightly spicy glaze guarantee beautifully burnished, succulent little birds.

Fragrant with garlic, lemon juice, and butter, this may just become a favorite. Soak up the tasty pan juices with crusty French bread.