Saturday, November 29, 2008

Thanksgiving Adventure

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving week-end with 16 for dinner and several friends staying over with us or in the area and returning for breakfast and longer the next day. We were very happy and a bit surprised how well it all went-we had had some suspense: my oven died while I was baking pies the day before.
I always start baking the pies a day early because the turkey completely fills my European oven! I had two pumpkin pies cooling on the racks and was about to take the apple pie from the oven and put in the blueberry when I noticed that the pumpkin pies while perfect on top, looked very pale on the sides-I looked closer, picked one up and looked at the bottom-totally uncooked! I looked at the apple-same thing, I stuck my hand in the oven, hot on top and cool at the bottom. What was I going to do! I pulled out the electric frying pan, turned it on, popped a pie on it and tried to "bake" the bottom-hey, its an electric oven that wasn't heating from the bottom, so I thought I'd supply the bottom "heat". 45 minutes later-no change in the crust. So I tried a frying pan on the gas range-that actually worked better...but wait, how would I cook the turkey-stewed turkey?
Then DH came home-"Lets go buy a new oven." But how can we get it delivered today?

Nothing is impossible for my Rock-he called a local appliance store-no problem they say come on in-in we go and an hour after we bought the oven it was in our house! Problem solved...well, not quite-we couldn't turn the oven on! We call the store-oh you need a technician to come...Next morning at 8:00am we were told a technician would be there-promised-by 10:00 and he was...truly remarkable. Here is my lovely new stove with a small top oven and a "large" (at least turkey sized) bottom oven.

Now if I can only learn to turn on the gas ...there's this safety feature that keeps turning off the gas so the flame goes out...hold for 5 seconds... release the button gently...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow - what a nice oven. The timing was terrible but the end result is great! Good for you.

Neabear said...

Wow! A new stove just like that!! How cool! Hope you enjoyed your yummy meal.

Eileen said...

Oh my goodness! How did it all urn out then? Did the turkey cook ok?
I am laughing so hard imaging you trying to bake your pies in a skillet! But I'm sure you were NOT laughing. I bet you will tell this story every Thanksgiving. :-) And always be thankful for your oven.

The Calico Cat said...

we have a similar stove/oven combination. We use the top for dairy & the bottom for meat. Ours has a shabbat mode, but I haven't quite figured out how to use that - is it safe to have a raw chicken in the oven & ow does it work with cooking if the oven has to heat up...