I Killed My Oven

Remember my intelligent wall oven? The one trying to speak to me in Morse code? I think I killed it.

I was tired of hearing the oven screaming at my delicious green beans, so I went to jiggle the part that I always jiggle when I need to silence the irritating alarms. I must have jiggled harder than usual, because this time the whole thing fell out into the oven, trailing ancient wires and insulation with it. The best part? The alarm was then permanently on. One frayed wire had come loose from its connector on the part, so I tried to jam it back into place with my oven-mitted hands, with little success. I couldn't get it to stay in place, and even when I held it there, the alarm wasn't shutting off. The shrieking wouldn't stop until I turned the oven off - as soon as I tried switching it back on, the alarm came back, no matter what I did with those wires. It was a few minutes before I realized that I was playing around with wires that may be hot in a couple of different ways, and I gave up.

Dave made a valiant effort at fixing it, but it's beyond our abilities. Looks like I'll be exploring the art of microwave cookery for a while. I wonder if any appliance repair guys will know how to fix a 30+ year old oven, or if we need to consider moving up our kitchen remodeling plans.

A GPS Moment

Since my husband gets home a few hours after I do, I try to have dinner ready, or at least close to ready, around the time he arrives, so we can eat together. 

The other night, he was a little earlier than usual, or maybe I was running late. Whichever it was, I had just popped the marinated chicken breasts into the oven as he came through the door. It would be half an hour or so before we could eat the main course (Lemon-garlic chicken and purple mashed potatoes), but I threw together a big salad appetizer to tide us over.

We settled into our designated spots on the couch with our big salads, and watched half an hour of something or other, until the oven timer interrupted us with a loud buzz. Down went the salad bowl, and up went I to the kitchen, fumbling to find the oven mitts. I poked the metal spike of the digital meat thermometer into the thickest part of the biggest piece of chicken, and pressed the button. Numbers appeared on the screen and began to climb, slowing to a crawl around 80. Concerned, I checked the setting on the oven - 375 as usual - and then tried the temperature in a different piece of chicken. No difference: the temperature still wouldn't get past 80.

Damn.

"It's going to be a while, honey. I should have pounded these stupid things; they're too fat and they're going to take a while." I offered him some mashed potatoes, but he was content to wait, so I covered the baking dish with some foil and put it back into the heat, setting the timer for 25 more minutes and returning to my mindless TV.

More buzzing, more fumbling for oven mitts, more temperature-taking. This time the numbers stopped near 100. I may have cursed at this point. I may have flapped a dish towel around in frustration.

"Fine", I may have muttered to myself, "if they don't want to cook in the oven, I will nuke these sons of bitches. They won't taste right but we'll be able to eat something before midnight, and maybe this way I won't kill us with salmonella!"

"They won't get up to temp," I informed my hungry husband, "so I'm just going to nuke them so we can eat. They're supposed to get to 165 to not kill us, and they're still way below that."

One and a half minutes of full-power microwaving later, the thermometer still didn't want to get past 105. I flung it onto the counter and tried to think what the hell else I had in the fridge so I could throw together a quick replacement dinner. And that's when I saw it. 

The readout of the digital meat thermometer, still on, a few feet away on the counter.

It said: 21.

Oven-mittened facepalm ensued.

"Um, honey? I think I just had a GPS moment."

There were two seconds of silence, and then a giggle from downstairs.

"Celsius?"

It amazes me that no other explanation was required.

We ate the chicken. On the bright side, even the hyperthermophilic* bacteria that live beside superheated ocean vents can't survive past 105C, so we were definitely safe from Salmonella.

*Hyperthermophilic: loves extreme heat.

Purple Mashed Potatoes

As I promised, I'm back to share the results of my mashed purple potato experiment.

This batch of purple potatoes was not as purple as the first, so already we've got an unexpected variable to contend with. This is terrible science*, but at least I can admit it - the worst terrible science is the kind that tries to pass itself off as the real thing.

I blithely assumed that the potatoes from Wegmans would look like the potatoes from the farmer's market on the inside, because they looked the same on the outside. Consider this proof that you cannot judge the purple-ity of a potato by its skin. The Wegmans potatoes were pale immediately under their skins, but a medium, radiating purple at their core. Not as dark as the first set, and with more white streaks through the middle, but definitely still purple.

I treated them exactly like I would normal potatoes. I boiled them until they were fork-tender, drained them, and then mashed them by hand with some milk, butter, salt, and pepper. The water I poured off was an unappetizing grey shade, and the end result was a sad greyish lavender color, with a few purple chunks.

Honestly? They reminded me of Montreal's slushy winter streets, and despite them tasting exactly like regular mashed potatoes, I wasn't really happy with them. Some of the color washed out during the boiling process, since the water was greyish, but adding milk likely also contributed to diluting the purple. Maybe very purple potatoes would have fared better, but I'm not going to keep trying, since they're quite a bit more expensive than regular old potatoes. Nope, it'll be russets or reds for mashing, and if I decide to get fancy with purple potatoes again, I'll roast them to preserve their beauty and impress friends.

*To make this a little more accurate, I'd have needed white potatoes to boil and mash and compare to the purple ones, because maybe the boiled-potato-water is grey for white potatoes too and I've just never noticed before because it goes straight down the sink. I only saved the boiled-purple-potato-water because I was expecting it to have color. An experiment with no control, conveniently confirming my hypothesis? I hang my head in shame. Maybe they'll let me use the spectrophotometer at work to see just how much color difference there is in the runoff from boiled white vs purple potatoes...

Marmalade Muffins, part 2

How to make furry marmalade muffins:

1. Make marmalade muffins.
2. Don't eat the marmalade muffins.


So simple! And I may have developed a new antibiotic!

As you can see, we weren't impressed by the recipe I tried. I seem to be having bad luck with "made from scratch" muffins. There are so many boxed muffin mixes, I suppose maybe I should just stick with those, but I would love to be able to throw a few basic ingredients in a bowl and bake up some delicious muffins without needing to ask Betty Crocker for help.

Recipe Fail - Marmalade Muffins

Another cookbook find at the book sale provided me with this intriguing recipe. Marmalade muffins sounded tasty, so I assembled everything and gave them a shot. Only after my ingredients were lined up on the counter did I realize that the recipe did not call for sugar. At all. No white sugar, brown sugar, honey, nothing. I hesitated, but it did ask for 2/3 cup of marmalade, and my jar listed high fructose corn syrup at the first ingredient, so I figured that would count as my sugar and I'd be fine.


I was wrong.

They were a little dry, and didn't taste marmaladey enough for me. Or sweet enough. I guess it's possible they were meant to be savoury muffins, but I didn't expect a fruit muffin to be without sweetness. They're probably good with butter and would go with a meal, like corn muffins would. But alas, they're not breakfast muffins. So I made pumpkin bread from a mix instead and have been eating that for breakfast.

I can come back and post the recipe if anyone's interested... but I recommend against interest on this particular occasion.

Recipe Fail - Roasted tomato slices

I had a tomato. Just one. A big round one. And I wasn't planning to make a salad, or a sandwich, and I wasn't sure what to do with one tomato. So I remembered how I sometimes like grilled tomatoes, and decided to try putting tomato slices under the broiler instead. I am not sure why I thought that was a reasonable substitution of cooking method.

I sliced the tomato into thick slices and sprinkled some salt and pepper on them, and stuck them under the broiler. After a minute or two, they were just barely browning, so I added a little cheese, because cheese makes everything delicious, and put them back. Two more minutes and the cheese was bubbly and the slices looked pretty good. I forgot to take a picture, but it's just as well, because I don't want any poor innocent readers seeing a delicious-looking picture and then trying this sad recipe, because disappointment is guaranteed.

They were incredibly squishy. They completely fell apart into tomatoey, cheesy goo as soon as I tried lifting them off the baking sheet. I have since found a recipe in a book (probably a better bet than the ones that appear in my head) that cautions to only use underripe tomatoes for this sort of thing, lest they fall apart on you.

Lesson learned.

If my tomato plants make it through the summer and start giving me tomatoes, hopefully I will have a chance to test this and many other tomato recipes, as I try to get through what will surely be mounds of giant tomatoes.

Recipe Fail - Honey Cinnamon Muffins

I'm not going to post the recipe because I'm still not sure how I botched these, and I don't want someone out there to make bad muffins and blame me.

I've made these before and they were delicious, but this time they got crispy and burned very quickly. Did I copy down the recipe wrong, or is my oven too hot? Or is it because I used our CSA honey and it's cursed?

My husband enjoyed eating the burnt offerings for breakfast today, which is sweet of him. But I'm going to try them again next weekend and use an oven thermometer to see what's going on. The oven is a near-antique wall oven and I think its temperature sensor is broken. There's a... thing... on the inside of the oven wall, which I suspect might be a sensor of some sort. If I knock it while putting something in, it shrieks. Just before sticking my muffin pans in, this happened, so maybe I messed something up, but I've also noticed that my oven tends to cook things faster than it is supposed to, and I need to keep a closer eye on things near the end of the cooking time.

My stove has issues too - the rings stay so hot for so long that even after I've turned the heat off, water will continue to boil for several minutes. It makes me nervous to try anything fancy that would require good heat control.

One of my long-term hopes for this place is to get a new stove and oven so I have something better to work with.