It has been 200 years since the industrial revolution began and this morning, in my kitchen, I reflected upon that. I thought about the immense changes and benefits that technological progress has brought to humanity over the last two centuries and the finest evidence of that was staring me right in the face. Yes, we have gone from first flight to the moon in a very brief 66 years. Yes, today our lives are facilitated, accelerated by automobiles, airplanes, the mobile phone, the computer, the Internet. But no technological device has been more of an emancipator to human pleasure and desire than the one I am looking at right now, here, in my humble kitchen. No appliance is more versatile, efficient, essential to your daily needs and decoratively adaptive as this one here.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: the toaster oven. My toaster oven.

 We have had our toaster oven for about ten years now. Looking at the grease stains on it gives me goosebumps. I revel in the rattling noise of its timer. I lie awake at night dreaming of what concoction I will place within this holy, magical cavern. Few are the days in which I do not use it.

And I grew up in a home with a continuous series of toaster ovens. We had one once, a Black & Decker, which refused to succumb to our daily abuse of it. We finally replaced it out of sheer boredom. We would use it to make cheese-melt or smoked-meat sandwiches and my mother would cook “carne e patate” about twice a week – usually chicken legs and potatoes – as well as the bi-weekly lasagna. But we used it for much more than that, from heating up leftovers to making bruschetta, or baked salmon, or pizza.

For the toaster oven is not, not ever, to be confused with its misbegotten, perverse, abjectly evil sibling the microwave. I have never owned a microwave oven in my life and never will. If you know me and you have one, please, for the sake of our friendship do not ever tell me about it and hide it desperately from sight whenever I come over. I once wrote a short story about a celebrated chef who murders an underling for heating up a plate of soup in a microwave. Oddly enough, I have had trouble getting that one published. I believe, we should be now clear on where I stand on this issue.

Our toaster oven is the Moulinex OptiChef Rotisserie, which includes, obviously, a rotisserie for roasting chicken. It is a fairly high range model, which means it costs about 100 bucks. And that is one of the many advantages of a toaster oven, they're cheap and they last forever.

You can get a decent toaster oven for about 50 bucks. Or you can go whole hog and get a DeLonghi, the proverbial Ferrari of toaster ovens, which can go for up to 200. Generally, the larger ones cost more but allow for more options, like a rotisserie, and making larger portions which is helpful for families. Also, if you're going to make a pan pizza in one, it's better if each one can serve at least two – though you can easily bake more in succession.

A toaster oven is healthy, since it requires far less cooking oil and baked/broiled is always better than fried. And they are efficient, since they don't require anywhere near the same amount of energy needed to heat your full-sized oven. The toaster oven even looks good there on your kitchen counter – flexible, willing and inviting you to make yourself a quick, hot sandwich, or some crostini, or stuffed peppers for dinner or just heat up yesterday's leftovers.

The only thing it doesn't do is zap to a boil a cup of water for my tea. But for that, I have my electric boiler.