Crock-pots are becoming increasingly more popular as people work longer hours and have less free time to spend on activities like cooking meals. With slow cookers, you can combine all the ingredients into the crock-pot in the morning, allow it to cook all day and come home after work to a piping hot meal.

Cupcake-sized cheesecakes are a great way to serve individual portions of this rich and creamy dessert for a party; alternatively, you can place uneaten portion into the freezer and serve them to yourself one modest portion at a time. Mini-cheesecakes also make excellent additions to a bake sale.

Hot Pockets are turnovers filled with savory cheeses, meats and vegetables that are suitable for breakfast, lunch or dinner. The tasty treats, which area available in over 30 varieties, can often be found in the frozen section of your grocery store.

Rice flour, a gluten-free product that produces many of the same results as wheat flour, possesses its own distinct characteristics. Often used as a thickening agent in cooking, rice flour is also suitable for making crackers, cakes and dumplings.

Even the best-stocked pantry may lack an ingredient from time to time, especially fruits that ripen quickly, such as bananas. Banana bread's emergence as a popular homemade dessert in the 1930s resulted from a marketing effort to convince customers to buy and use ripe and overripe bananas.

Chicken that's been seared, then baked in the oven has a deep brown color and a rich, caramelized flavor, says The Kitchn recipe editor Emma Christensen.

How long you cook pasta can make or break your meal. The taste of perfectly cooked pasta is hard to beat, and removing it from the boiling water at just the right moment is the trick to achieving the desired flavor.

Don't let their name make you think they're one-trick ponies. Rice cookers make just about anything that absorbs hot water during cooking, but do especially well with grains and certain pastas, like couscous. Made from durum wheat, couscous comes in four main varieties: instant, Moroccan, Israeli and Lebanese.

Cooking pasta in a slow cooker can be tricky. If you cook pasta on low-heat for hours, you are likely to end up with a soggy mess. Instead, high-heat settings can be used and you may cook the pasta directly in sauces you have prepared in the slow cooker.

When you think of hamburgers, you're more likely to picture them grilling on the backyard barbeque than baking in the oven. While hamburgers are typically prepared by frying or grilling, you can bake them as well.

Cod roe, often confused with caviar, is considered a delicacy in certain countries, such as Norway. Hard roe is the unfertilized eggs of the female cod, and soft roe is the sperm of a male cod. The food is less common in the United States, and that's too bad because it has a distinct and delicate flavor.

Although a macaroni-and-cheese dish actually takes a little longer to cook in the microwave than it does when you are following the stove-top directions, knowing how to prepare the cheesy-noodle dinner in a microwave comes in handy for those cooking in a college dorm or office break-room setting.