Science in the Kitchen

I mentioned that my oven is still not working properly. We have had to eat less than lovely cookies, oven fries and pizza.

Yesterday I conducted an experiment to see what the actual temperature is in the oven.

First I turned it, the oven, on to 350 degrees and waited for the beep to tell me it is up to temperature. Well actually, first I put the new oven thermometer into the oven and THEN I turned it on.

When it beeped I turned on the oven light and looked at the temperature through the window. It read 325. That's 25 degrees low, but I can compensate knowing that. Let's try a higher temp. I turned it up to 400 and waited for the beep, then looked again and it read approximately 375-380 (hard to tell). Okay, it's fairly consistent. Now, let's turn on a timer and see what the temperature reads after 15 minutes. I puttered around the kitchen for 10 minutes and then looked and saw it read 325, and when the timer dinged at 15 minutes the thermometer read 300. No wonder the pizza was practically raw!

This is not good. TopDad already replaced what he thought was the problem, the thermostat. But it still was not working right (I mean 30 minutes for cookies?) so I bought a thermometer and finally got around to testing it. IT failed.

I can do without a lot of things in a kitchen: dishwasher, disposal, counter space, cupboards, I'd even be willing to give up my microwave. But I CAN NOT do without an oven. For very long, or very happily.

It really is true that you never know how much you use something until you don't have it. I never realized how many times a day I washed my hands until we were five days without running water. YIKES! I didn't think I planned so many meals around baking until I can't do it anymore. YIKES!

And just when we think we're getting ahead and going to have some breathing room in the budget and actually put something away for savings, the darn oven goes. Well, who said life was supposed to calm and easy. How boring would that be anyway.

Have a great weekend! And I'll just enjoy the rain without cookies to go with my hot chocolate.