Merry Christmas to me! That's right, I got a new oven. Before you go thinking that I am the luckiest girl in the world, let me tell you about my old oven. It had a few...problems.
- Missing front piece of glass covering the door and door handle. This is because it spontaneously combusted one day, in a flurry of glass shards, all over the kitchen. When the oven was ice-cold. I am still finding fragments of glass to this day.
- Missing plastic piece which covered the handle, and the spring for the door. This meant that the handle would get just as hot as the oven, and because it was missing the spring, the door would not stay open. I had to hold the handle with a pot holder, open the oven, balance the piping hot handle against my hip, and get whatever it was I was baking into the oven before getting a first degree burn on my hip. I was sometimes successful.
- Temperature gauge had Alzheimer's. It would take about an hour to head up, and then when the beeper went off to tell me it was at 350, I would tweak it slightly and it would say the actual temperature, usually around 125. Then we would go back and forth with this up and down temperature throughout the entire cooking time. I used to get furious, then I realized that it was just old and forgetful. "Hello...where was I? How did I get here? What is your name? Oh, all right...hello?"
- Cooked unevenly. In order not to have things turn out half-raw and half-burned, I constantly had to rotate the pan to ensure even cooking.
In short, totally fucked up.
So off we went to Home Depot, and ordered our new oven. We have a very old kitchen, circa 1960, so appliances have to be in the Betty Crocker Easy-Bake oven size. Charles did the research, and found the one you see above, ready for delivery. It came yesterday, and he and one of his employees had it installed by the end of the day. The old oven is next to the garbage, in peace at last.
I started re-reading all of my cookbooks, from Julia Child to Charlie Trotter to Gale Gand, to my newest one by Nigella Lawson (thanks Kristina!). I bought ingredients to make a blueberry pie from scratch. I clipped out a recipe for Jacques Pepin's favorite pound cake.
And the food item that took the maiden voyage in our new oven? Heat and eat Nestle's Toll House Cookies! Hahahahaha. Well, I can't think of anything better to accompany the Laguna Beach Marathon. God bless America, and God bless my new oven!
