Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Our new oven

I posted a while ago that I thought our oven was dying. It seemed to work okay for a while after I said that, but it turned out that those were just the dying throes and last gasps. I cooked a ginger cake in it on Sunday morning for church morning tea and then did Anzac biscuits in it on Sunday night. Last night when we were going to bake up some lamb chops for dinner there was no heat. I think the element has finally gone. It's nice to think it had a good last day of baking yummy treats before it was all over.

So this morning it was back to our friends at the local electrical retailers to find a new one. We have Bosch everything else in our kitchen and laundry, so we are now going to have a Bosch oven joining the ranks. It will hold our biggest tray, and, joy of joys, we are spending a little bit extra to get the pyrolytic cleaning function since cleaning the oven is probably up there with my least favourite household tasks.

I had to compromise on the model I was originally planning to get. That one wasn't going to be available in their shop till the end of next week and not installed until the week after that. To get something in and running by early next week I had to get a slightly cheaper model, but the only things it didn't have that my originally chosen one had were telescopic oven racks and push in oven dials. Not essential features. I was told that telescopic oven racks let you pull the oven shelf out when it has a roast on it and they will hold up the baking dish so you don't have to completely remove it from the oven to give the roast a baste. Meh. I can live without that if it saves me $200. And I liked the dials on the one we're getting better anyway.

One thing I did want to go for was a child lock. We have a little household helper who loves to follow us around the house twisting the dials on washing machines, ovens and whatever else he can get his hands on, which means that too many things get turned off when they shouldn't be. His stealth attacks on the washing machine mid-cycle have been particularly annoying of late.

So the oven is being delivered and installed on Monday. We will be ad libbing meals until then since every meal I had left on our menu plan for the week involved use of the oven. But it's almost cold enough here this week to have soup for a few days. Or, if the weather clears up, we'll do barbecues every night. 

And then when the oven does arrive, the festival of baking shall begin!

3 comments:

Nohemi Tutterrow said...

I can feel how much you miss your old oven. Anyway, in a few days, you will have your new oven and continue on with your passion for baking. By the way, how long have you been baking?

Wendy said...

A nice little bit of spam up there. It was almost appropriate until the last sentence!

Ovens are such a way of life for Australians. It was hard to come to grips with the fact that that isn't so in Japan. Our first oven had only one shelf and it was tiny. It also happened to double as the microwave, so you couldn't use both at the same time. Grrr. I'm so spoiled now, I have a microwave/oven as well as a full American-sized stove/oven (antique, though it is). It also has the advantage of having four burners (as opposed to the usual two of a Japanese stove). Luxury!

Karen said...

Missed the spam earlier, it didn't come to my email...maybe it was junked straight away :) But an interesting link to a furnace supplier in the US when I clicked on the name....

Thanks for pointing it out though, if you hadn't I might have missed it ;) And replied something like....no, I won't be missing the old oven at all, now I just want something that works!!

I'm really intrigued by the small stove/oven thing though, I think you have blogged about it before but you've reminded me again about the cultural difference. Imagine only having one shelf in the oven...goodbye roast dinners :(