The Mini Hot Logic has jumped aboard the Greywacke Van. In a previous post here, we shared our cooking means. We have heard other van owners extoll the virtues of this little lunch box sized personal slow cooking oven. It essentially has a heating pad that slowly cooks items placed in some sort of container – foil, plastic, Pyrex, frozen food carton in which it was purchased, etc. You set up your meal in the desired or available cooking container, close the lid on the container, zip the lunch box closed, plug the lunch box in (12V or “residential” 110v options are available) and leave it to slowly heat your meal. As it cooks on a low heat, burning I am told, does not occur.
For its first use, I followed a recipe in the manual that accompanied the12V version of the mini hot logic. It was a simple meal with three ingredients – frozen raviolis, half a jar of spaghetti sauce (12oz) and a cup of mozzarella. For good measure, I sprayed the Pyrex dish with a vegetable oil spray – likely completely unnecessary. I put in about half the spaghetti sauce and spread it around the dish with a quick jiggle. Then I layered in about a third to half a package of frozen small round cheese raviolis (vs large square versions in which the recipe suggested to use 12) and topped it all with the remaining sauce and sprinkled the top with the mozzarella. As per the recipe book’s suggestion, we let this cook away on the floor of our van for about two hours. I placed a silicone pad underneath to keep it from sliding about and to protect the floor, not knowing how hot the little lunch box might get. That also probably was not necessary, but it made me feel better about what was going on back where the 12V plug is located, so I’ll probably continue to do that.
The end result was a perfectly cooked, simple dish, ready for us when we were ready to eat it. I just chopped up a classic garden lettuce salad and we enjoyed a nice meal after a long day on the road. It is mid-summer and blast oven hot, but the little lunch box did not heat up our van, just the food within it. Next up, time to get a little more adventurous with the ingredients because honestly, there is not too much that can go wrong with cheese, raviolis and sauce! However, the point this first time out was to check on how well it cooked and with that it passed with flying colors. I think that we may like this travel day cooking option!
Others have shared that they use the larger hot logic personal oven version and put two containers inside of it to cook up two different meals or simply cook two separate components or two differently spiced/sauced options as they travel. Interesting idea but the minis will have to prove their space first before I go that route.
I did purchase two mini set-ups – a 12 V and a 110V so that we could use it with or without the need of an inverter being on. One mini came with a plastic cooking container and lid. The other included two cooking containers – a Pyrex type dish with a plastic snap lid and another plastic container with lid.
