Kitchen Oven(s)

stove + oven + pantry corner - to the right is a pull-out pantry. 

I am in love-love-love with those pull-out drawers on the left, too.

This is a beautiful kitchen.....at every time of day, it is a hushed landscape of white.    

drawers with built-in sections...this one turns into a basket

for carrying all flatware into the other room, for example

It is filled with pale, modern design & elegant, luxurious amenities very new to me and my socioeconomic ;-) status.

double drawer within one -- top shelf pulls out for shallow pans,

and all the drawers have the soft-bumper which means they always close gently

So I was very surprised to discover that it might -- possibly -- be *too* modern for my inner cook;  specifically the stove and oven.   After three weeks, both have their own histories, but I'm going to start with the oven(s).  

drawer happiness under the stove....two ovens on the left

Well, I'll start really with just the oven-oven.  The one on the top is a combination microwave and regular oven.  I have barely scratched the surface on understanding that one beyond heating up my coffee cup.

The oven on the bottom, then:

how do I even turn this on?!?

This is similar to the one I had in Germany.....

Aha!  It's easy now that I know how to do it...

...well, except for the absence of obvious knobs ;-).  The older oven in the German house was user-friendly, with traditional controls.   I managed to cook my way through those three years using only one or two of the dial settings, (bake, pretty much all the time)   But here -- it really matters which oven setting has been selected, (left dial in the photo above is for the settings....right dial is heat).  I roasted a small chicken last week on what has always been my normal heat + time....and after 90 minutes it was still only 140 F inside the thigh.  The carrots and potatoes in the roasting pan were also nearly raw... (!?!?)  [I guess I have used the microwave for more than just reheating coffee, because that is how I "finished" our chicken dinner]. 

The chicken fiasco was only one of several culinary failures in the first ten days, and I'll admit the whole thing has started to mess with my confidence.   Most especially since my "job" here is to make food --  elegant food, delicious food......food which is cooked all the way through.

ha ha!

I got the manual out to read more thoroughly in each category. The cover clearly promises me that a fabulous plate of something-wonderful can be achieved:

21 weeks of Danish**, (thank you American taxpayer -- really, thank you!), was certainly enough for me to understand the 7 different settings, as well as suggestions for each of those settings.  There was also one very clear, very basic piece of information:

I need to learn how to cook all over again. 

Bread and baked goods in pans will use top/bottom heat;  baked goods without baking pans will use top/bottom + moisture heat. 

This is the mistake I made with a pizza flatbread....no photo....it was shamefully brown on top and soggy dough on the bottom.  Confusingly enough, there is an entirely different setting for frozen pizza or frozen pastry....I have  a couple of frozen boxes in the freezer to test that out this week. 

Baked goods, like cookies on a sheet, will use either top/bottom or convection heat, depending on the number of trays.

Ah....better this time.  Rolls did okay!!! 

All sides did okay!! 

Baking seems to be the place to begin on learning how to use this oven, (at least my triumphs are happening in baking) so I've revisited the setting of  "baked goods + baking pan" several times, and have had pretty good success with a few things: 

Fruit Crisp....

thank you to my friend Melissa...!

....as well as a decent set of cupcakes:

they seem okay from here....but, so did that pizza last week 

yes! They ARE okay!!!  Hooray!

frosting -- the happy 'spackle' which repairs nearly anything

Just as depressing as it was to have the handful of failures (made almost exclusively for dinner, I might add...) it was wonderful, happy, thrilling to have some triumph.  

Plus, I had volunteers to help me take on the experiment....(this is MUCH more interesting than meat and potatoes, after all)

.....and a chance to use the scented geranium outside (how much do I love that she likes this!?!?) 

A moment of culinary success between the learning lab sessions of Ovenology.

Speaking of eureka-moments:

I'm pretty sure I also need an oven RACK, instead of exclusively using the oven sheet pans.  An internet search (+ my Danish**) helped me figure out where I could order an oven rack for this type of oven.  It's the "riste" there in the very blurry book photo, on the right side. 

I feel the rack is necessary, because I'm really hoping needing to be able to do things like this:

finishing a pan near the top, while baking continues below -- as well as using the baking stone I have LOVINGLY seasoned over the years: 

I was so happy that my beautiful baking stone FIT.....

not so happy when I realized it doesn't really work  (flatbread pizza mishap)

The stoneware just doesn't get hot enough on the baking sheet.   :-(

Plus, the instruction manual tells me that roasting success with my chicken is going to come only when I have that rack:

I'm a devoted follower of the manual these days.....I'll do whatever it says!!

Because, of course, I'm going to need to serve something other than pastry one of these days.

:-)

** I am now completely vindicated about the linguistic "hookey" I played last year from time to time with that Danish baking show.... I KNEW those words should have been on the curriculum!!  But, without the mainstream course syllabus, I wouldn't have been able to understand the show in the first place.  So, really -- the perfect circle of learning.