One of the perks of studying third-year in the country is that we are supplied with accommodation, rent-free. My little house is incredibly cute ... two bedrooms, a study, wooden floors ... so I am most impressed with my situation here. There is only one problem – my oven is shite. It’s an el cheapo electric oven, which heats from a single element at the bottom and hence burns my food from the bottom without even beginning to brown it on top. I have been experimenting with various temperatures, placing baking trays on the bottom shelf, and finishing off the browning under the griller, but so far the results have been unsatisfactory.
And so I complained. You know the feeling, when your complaint seems totally valid and articulate – until you try and explain it to somebody in authority? The man at the council was very patient with me, listening to all of my oven problems, and in the end summed it up with, “so the problem is, it burns your food?”
Nevertheless, he did not give up on me and came to inspect the oven himself the following day, to assure himself that I wasn’t merely incompetent. When he saw that it was, in fact, a terrible oven, he promised to go straight home and ask his wife what to do. It probably helped that I described all of the marvellous things that I could (hypothetically) bake, “if only I had a decent oven”. His wife clearly didn’t have any solutions, because the next phone call I received was from the electrician, arranging a time to check the oven properly.
The council man phoned again this afternoon to see how I was getting on and we had a bit of a chat. When I told him that I was going home for the weekend, he declared, “I would too, with an oven like that!”
He gets me.
And so I complained. You know the feeling, when your complaint seems totally valid and articulate – until you try and explain it to somebody in authority? The man at the council was very patient with me, listening to all of my oven problems, and in the end summed it up with, “so the problem is, it burns your food?”
Nevertheless, he did not give up on me and came to inspect the oven himself the following day, to assure himself that I wasn’t merely incompetent. When he saw that it was, in fact, a terrible oven, he promised to go straight home and ask his wife what to do. It probably helped that I described all of the marvellous things that I could (hypothetically) bake, “if only I had a decent oven”. His wife clearly didn’t have any solutions, because the next phone call I received was from the electrician, arranging a time to check the oven properly.
The council man phoned again this afternoon to see how I was getting on and we had a bit of a chat. When I told him that I was going home for the weekend, he declared, “I would too, with an oven like that!”
He gets me.
2 comments:
Have you tried turning your food upside-down halfway through the cooking time?
Yes. Turned out to be the worst pizza ever.
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