Never mind discovering fire or
opposable thumbs.
There’s been a major breakthrough
in my life – a self-cleaning oven.
I suppose I’ve lived simply up till
now. The stove in our first house was a gigantic thing, possibly from the year
of my birth, with double ovens, a warming door beneath and a workspace at least
a foot wide on the side of the burners. I needed the workspace because this
behemoth sat in the middle of the kitchen, miles away from any counters.
And we didn’t have an air-conditioned
car until 1985 – we lived in Massachusetts,
after all, we told ourselves. One of the hottest summers I remember was 1969,
when I came up from steamy Virginia
to an even hotter Massachusetts
on a visit to my then-boyfriend (now husband). I stayed in Amherst
at my sister’s, who lived on the second floor of a two-family with no
air-conditioning, so that may have factored into my North vs South comparison.
We didn’t have air-conditioning in
our second house until 1998, and that only consisted of a few window units we
had to drag out of the closet, staggering across the room with them at the
beginning and end of each season.
And for 47 years I’ve cleaned my
oven the way nature intended:
On all fours, newspapers on the
floor, breathing in the lung-blistering fumes of Easy Off (ha! Really?) oven
cleaner as I strained around the open oven door and wiped and wiped with enough
paper towels to span the globe.
Now it’s a magical new world here
in Condo Land.
Central air and yes! a self-cleaning oven.
I began with trepidation: it runs
for four hours? How hot will it get? This stove is at least 10 years old. Will
it burn the house down? The pre-purchase home inspector never tested for this.
I pushed the button, ran to the
basement for a fan to distribute any fumes so the smoke alarm wouldn’t send the
dog into orbit, and waited.
I wish I had taken before and after
shots, but it’s clean. The self-cleaning pixies eradicated all the sticky
streaks down the oven walls and you can actually see through the oven door.
Magic
my method of cleaning my oven is not to do it...ever. though our current oven that came with this house is self-cleaning, I think my husband has only done it once. We've had this house for 10 years.
ReplyDeleteWow. The only self cleaning item in our house is the cat. I am the self cleaner for all our appliances. And some, oven included, are neglected.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a vast improvement over your earlier travails. My solution is never to cook or bake anything in it. :-)
ReplyDeleteI've been on kind of a tear lately since I've been trucking prepared meals to my brave DIL and son, who have bouncing new twin girls.
DeleteI dream of self-cleaning ovens. My older daughter has one and it's a beautiful thing. After baking anything messy, roasts, casseroles etc, she removes the food, turns up the heat to the "cleaning" setting and leaves it to do its thing. My younger daughter has an older stove that lived in a couple of other homes before the landlord installed it in her kitchen. It wasn't very clean then and is much worse now. but at least it works.
ReplyDeleteDidn't realize how much cooking I'd been doing this year - and I was away for several months - till I finally paid attention to the inside of my oven.
DeleteBoth the A/C and self-cleaning oven are treats to have. Under Sue's direction, we barely turn the oven on in summer and surely wouldn't do the cleaning. The lady runs very hot (Sue, I mean) and in her 70s now, it seems to get worse not better. Aside from the A/C we have fans going all over the place. It's been a hot summer here, and we are under a heat warning with the 'feels-like' temperature to reach 100F today.
ReplyDeleteOMG yes. I've been watching the weather for your part of the world and it's looking toasty indeed.
DeleteOne Thanksgiving Dave and I turned on the self-cleaning function before we cooked the turkey. We had NO IDEA it would take so long. We didn't eat until about 9 p.m.! Here in London, once a year, we hire cleaners to clean the oven. They can do it far better and faster than we ever could!
ReplyDeleteBeing raised a Floridian, I have been aware of A/C since the earliest days. We use to even have it come through the speakers at the drive in movies in the late 50's. The schools didn't have it but the drive ins did.
ReplyDeleteI like to cook with gas so I still clean the primitive way.
I solved the oven problem the old fashioned way: we have a woodstove. When we were first married, yeah, we had one of those do-it-yourselfers, too. Not fun. However, to balance the self cleaning woodstove we have a chimney which is NOT self cleaning.
ReplyDeleteFor years I had a fridge and freezer that you defrosted with a spatula and gloves. When I got my first self cleaning freezer I thought, oh, right. There goes the electric bill. Nope. The only thing it does is make sounds like 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, it's quite entertaining.
No AC. Open the winda and take the blankets off the bed. Now and then a fan.