Of course, better still might be to trust your culinary skill and your high-quality pot to cook the food without your having to look at it until you put it on the table. Besides, what on Earth will looking at a casserole tell you? It will look the same as it did an hour ago, but at that time the ingredients were still almost raw. Believe the recipe, leave the oven light off (thus saving about $0.003 a century) and don’t worry about whether it needs more salt. You live in America, so everyone will add more salt to their own portions anyway.

The Pyrex thing baffles me because I cannot see how there is more risk putting a cold dish into a cold oven and letting it all heat up together compared to putting a cold dish into a hot oven. The latter seems more risky to me.

So it seems that food in a glass or ceramic dish would stay hotter longer once removed from a heat source, but food in a metal pan would cook faster than food in a ceramic pan if both pans are cold when put in the oven.

That said, I feel like this series has focused on saving pennies in very, very small increments (sometimes very hard-to-measure increments) in exchange for constantly having to think about things. It might work for some people but at this point I’m finding it a little bit repetitive. A little math tells me that saving a couple of cents a few times a day only adds up to about $36 at the end of the year. Doesn’t seem worth it to me.

Trent, you seem to be working through one category at a time (currently cooking). Perhaps it might be more interesting if you mixed things up a little bit?

Random pizza baking tip: put the broiler on first to get the oven as hot as possible before you start to bake.
I haven’t personally tried this, but it’s from serious eats dot com, a site whose tips I trust.

But that’s already been covered.

And along those lines: if you have a good baking book, and it tells you to use a certain kind of pan, listen to it. Again, this probably matters less for casseroles, but the kind of pan you use can change the time spent in the oven. Glass and ceramic are great at holding heat, but they also take a while to get to temperature.

I don’t ever preheat items for the amount of time it says to, but with baking you should definitely preheat at least 5 minutes. I also turn off the heat right near the end of cooking.

But Izabelle’s advice is perhaps the best savings – use a toaster oven. I personally have not had good results baking breads or cakes in the toaster oven. After a few failed banana breads, I gave up on that. But it is excellent for the kids’ chicken nuggets or baked fish or any other thing that isn’t a baked good. We bought one that accommodates most frozen pizzas as well, so we don’t often use the oven for pizza.