What did she buy? What did that crazy woman do now? Didn’t she just buy windows? What is she thinking?
She’s thinking about dinner and sometimes, breakfast or lunch. She’s thinking about baking and how difficult it has gotten to get an even temperature in the oven. We bought our range about 14 years ago. I thought it was more recent until I realized that my father had seen it and he died 13 years ago.
The number of things that have passed through this oven. The number of loaves of bread, pizza, roasts, Thanksgiving and Christmas, birthdays and every celebration in which food is part of the fun — which, if you are me, is pretty much everything. Jewish families believe in food. Good food and plenty of it. We might fast on Yom Kippur, but before the holiday, we eat and after it? We eat more.
I am not as fond of food as I was and I don’t eat nearly as much. I’m also a whole person thinner than I was 20 years ago. The loss of that weight is one of the reasons I can still walk on my own. The arthritis was much worse when I carried more weight.
I didn’t plan on buying a stove today, but I didn’t not plan on buying one. Last night was the kicker for me. I knew my big oven wasn’t working well enough to bake anything, so I crossed my fingers and tried to do it in the countertop Ninja and the result was exactly as I feared: perfection on the outside, solid liquid in the middle.
Is this stove going to save me money? Probably not. Will it do what I need to do? I’m sure it will. It is remarkably similar to the one we already have, except with some useful updates including a warming setting on the stovetop, convection, and an air fryer. No wi-fi. Just a stove that is a bit higher tech than the one that’s leaving. Otherwise, I don’t think you’ll be able to tell the difference. But my cornbread and French bread will know the difference and hopefully bake evenly. Most of all, it will be sparkling clean and shiny.
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Categories: #Food, #Photography, Anecdote, Kitchen
SERENDIPITY: SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
Love the photo. My house was built in 1939 and I’m sure it originally had one of those in the kitchen, because there was a large patched up hole in the wall for the vent pipe/chimney, At some point someone replaced it with a modern electric stove which took up a good deal of the kitchen space (it’s a very small kitchen). We replaced that with an apartment sized electric stove – which is just fine because there’s only two of us and we don’t cook a lot and rarely bake anything. I sincerely hope that little stove lasts as long as we’re in this house. I definitely don’t want to go stove shopping again.
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I’m sure you will enjoy cooking on it much more. I’m in my third year of doing all my baking and roasting in the convection microwave that friends gave me before I moved. My microwave was rusting inside so I didn’t want to take it with me. I planned to buy a new one but they offered me a spare they had. These friends are foodies so I knew it would be better quality than anything I could afford to buy.
I didn’t expect to be using it for everything though. One day I will replace the oven here. The hotplates work the oven doesn’t. It is probably only in need of an element but I really don’t like it very much. I find myself often burning food on the hotplates and I don’t like that the controls are at the back, forcing me to reach over the hotplates to turn them off. It might be safer to keep them out of reach of kids but no kids are going to come here. There is an oven downstairs that works well but I’m not carrying dishes up and down a steep flight of stairs to use it.
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I was in a similar position. The hotplates were working, but almost as erratically as the oven flaring hot, then cooling, then flaring hot again. They oven had been about 10 degrees cool, but now the left side of the oven is about 40 degrees cool while the right side is about 25 degrees hotter — but if you put in two items, one simply doesn’t cook at all. I’m not sure the bottom element works. There was a time when — using an old gas stove — it would run pretty much forever until rust made it unsightly.
Now? They have a “good run” of about 10 years, plus a few more as it gradually fails. Electric stoves don’t last as long as gas did — and anyway, we don’t have gas out here. We’d have to convert to tanks and I’m not doing it. This stove, when all is said and done and including delivery, installation, removing the old stove, and replacing the power cord (you don’t get the warranty if you don’t replace the cord) — and taxes (ouch) — it’s maybe $150 more than the one it is replacing.
When I realized I couldn’t bake anything anymore, I gave in. It was just a matter of time, but no matter how I sliced and diced it, I was going to have to buy it. So I just did it because I didn’t see a reasonable choice. I would have liked to get a stove that uses less electricity, but electric stoves are not energy efficient. I don’t think they CAN be, not with all those heating elements. And I cook for the three of us — four of us on weekends when Owen’s friend comes by — every day, hell or high water.
that much cooking without having a proper range wasn’t working out.
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No, you had to have something. I had an oven I really liked in Geeveston. It was a wall oven probably from the 1980s but still worked well. The hotplates were not so great, maybe I got used to them not heating up as much as these do.
I had gas in Adelaide because most suburbs were connected to natural gas and it was pretty cheap. Very few places in Tasmania are connected and bottled gas is expensive so I’m not interested in getting it.
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There would also need to be a lot of infra-structure changes to use bottled gas. You have to run the pipes from outside to wherever you are using gas and in this house, never set up for it, it would be expensive — and not necessarily cheaper either. I like gas better for baking. It has natural convection, but it’s not going to happen here. Gas isn’t piped this far outside Boston. Also there have been two HUGE accidents of where areas of cities exploded from bad (neglected) piping, so I’m not all that unhappy to not have it!
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This house had bottled gas at one time, there is a non working gas heater and I see where the connection was. Our old house had it at one time too but we were told it was expensive so we never bothered about it.
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