08.14.08
no-bake break
For the past two weeks, I have been without an oven. A severe lightning storm that managed to set fire to the steeple and roof of a church a couple of blocks from me also managed to fry the digital control panel of my gas oven, leading me to wonder just what the Whirlpool people were thinking when they decided to make a gas oven that was exclusively responsive to electronic controls.
(I have fantasies of the marketing meeting: “See, Barry, it’s the best of both worlds! All the benefits of a gas oven, but with the whole-household protection of an electric that can’t be used during a power outage! I mean, it’s dangerous for people to have brownies during an electrical storm, everybody knows that. I know, I know what you’re going to say. Some people might want to be able to use their oven if the lights go out. But lightning is attracted to baked goods. Everybody knows that. Didn’t you see the news last year? That whole family in Nashua that got burned to a crisp because someone thought they were going to be so smart and bake snickerdoodles during that big rainstorm? I read it on the Internet, so it must be true. Trust me, we’re saving lives here, Barry.”)
In my state of no-bake, I have been unaccountably culinarily frustrated. It’s not that I’ve lacked things to cook, and interesting things at that. But you know how it is: you always want the one you cannot have, and so I have been yearning to make pies, and roasted beets/cauliflower/green beans, and baked eggplant for baba ghanoush, and, well, you get the picture. Even the weather was, for about a week, incredibly oven-use compliant, at least for this time of year, in that it was pleasantly breezy and in the 70s or low 80s.
Instead, for us and for the friends who ate with us during the past couple of weeks, I cooked a fairly typical round of Chinese dishes, interspersed with a bit of Western cookery for the hell of it. There was a meal of black bean pork and peppers, one of our standbys. There were lamb leg steaks and stir-fried mizuna. I steamed a whole fish, an incredibly satisfying and really very simple method of cooking fish that is always delicious and which I plan to photograph and write up the next time I do it. I made radish kimchee fried rice for myself one lunch, and for another I had vegetarian shakshouka (didn’t have any merguez). I comforted myself with breakfasts of long-cooked, slightly salty oatmeal drizzled with olive oil and, spooned over the top, a few tablespoons of ground pork sauteed with lots and lots of thinly-sliced onion. (Savory oats are the bomb). I even made spicy, oniony, garlicky blackeyed peas and rice with half of the gorgeous blackeyed peas I got fresh at the farmer’s market. And some hard-cooked eggs.
You wouldn’t think I would be able to still be cranky about my lack of oven with all that going on. But I kept thinking about everything I couldn’t make. Friends volunteered to let me use their oven, but I never quite got myself in gear to go do that. I just stared at my defunct oven and pouted, and daydreamed about the day –and I swear to you that it will come– that I finally have the space and the means and the house-I-plan-to-die-in and I acquire a huge siege engine of an Aga cooker (plus, of course, several restaurant-powered gas burners for the things one needs those for, like wok cooking), whereupon I will have not one but four, count ‘em, FOUR ovens at my beck and call.
Eric the Appliance Guy is coming to fix my oven tomorrow morning.
Truly, not a moment too soon.