What's Cooking

My not-very-good picture of our
beautiful new oven!

When we bought our house, it was abundantly clear that the previous owners' use of the kitchen pretty much began and ended with the fridge. The stovetop range and oven were in fair condition, but definitely not selected or maintained by anyone who loved to cook. That wasn't a big deal, and we just made a mental note that everything would have to get replaced sooner or later.

We replaced the dinosaur of a fridge first, upgrading to a much smaller (and far more efficient) model. Then we traded in the stovetop, again getting a much more efficient (and better designed) model. The double wall oven started going on the fritz well over a year ago, but I chose to strategically ignore and work around it. First the top oven stopped heating up to anything over 200 degrees. So I switched to solely using the bottom one. When the thermometer kicked and the oven temp stopped having any relation to what was on the dial, we got a small in-oven thermometer and I just used that to calibrate to the right temp. That worked quite nicely (most of the time), until a few weeks ago.

When the heater coil on the bottom oven arced and caught fire, I cried uncle and stopped putting off its replacement. Because the oven was a weird size (as so many things randomly seem to be in this house), we had to order the replacement and wait for it to come in. Since I saw no point in paying stupid amounts of money for another self-cleaning double oven when I'd gotten along just fine with one for so long, we went with a single oven this time. Thanks to My Prince's excellent skills (and a bit of luck), we did not end up having to dismantle the entire cabinet built around the oven as I'd feared might be the case. Instead, he was able to shave the edges of the opening a smidge and then slide the new oven right in. Isn't it pretty?!

The fact that it's smaller is actually going to work out to be a bonus, because the additional space will get framed in and become cabinet space. While I'm extremely efficient with my kitchen space and don't technically need it, cabinets are a huge selling point so the extra will be in our favor someday when it's time for us to move on from here.

To celebrate having an oven that works properly, I made Paleo GingerSnaps. Nom! Now that I think about it, I'm not entirely sure what ovens are made of, but maybe we did end up getting each other steel for our anniversary…