Update to the Robert Dyas/Halogen Oven shenanigans.
Oven collected Monday, replacement showed up Tuesday. Replacement is FRICKING AWESOME. So far, have done oven chips, nuggets, (for the kids! dont panic!) little pastry buffet nibble things; some curry cones and jalapeno peppers in breadcrumbs, and some syn free Cumberland sausage.
Everything thus far has cooked beautifully and I am SO impressed. My old oven is sulking untouched in the kitchen. I did a SW fry up tonight and having the sausages in the oven was splendid, stick them in, set the temp, leave them be till the timer went ding. Normally I am juggling frying pans, trying to do bacon and mushrooms and eggs and with the sausages out of the equation, things got a whole lot simpler and easier to manage.
I think the sausages would be slightly improved if I turned them half way through, but they tasted SO much better than the normal way I do them (frylight in the frying pan). Because they are syn-free they can get quite dry in texture due to having no fat in the sausage, but they were so juicy and lovely done in the halogen oven. I guessed at the temp and time and fortunately it was spot on.
The other advantage of course is that you can see how things are getting on in there because the oven bowl is completely clear, so if things are burning you just pop the lid off and move them to the other shelf, or cover in tin foil.
Am yet to do anything really adventurous, like chicken and veg at the same time, but results so far have been impressive and I have used it every day.
In other news however, DHL re-delivered us the broken one back yesterday. We presume they confused their delivery address and collection addresses, but they had applied their own sticker over the top of my one, which stated perfectly well where it was supposed to be going and this had apparently not been questioned.
Phoned Robert Dyas and the very nice lady said she would arrange to have it re-collected tomorrow.