Cooking the Oven

You know how people say "when it rains, it pours" in reference to a streak of bad luck?  I think that is perfectly appropriate for us during the last couple weeks. Except "when it smokes, there's fire" would be even more accurate.

My wife calls it an "exciting" day. I think "horrendous" would be more apt.

A couple days ago, my wife was baking cookies for an event at her place of work. Suddenly (calmly) she says, "Oh, great...the oven's on fire." While she's taking it in stride, just another day in the kitchen, I've already hit the "panic button," ready to call 911, the fire department, the armed guard, whoever. 

My wife takes the handy-dandy kitchen fire extinguisher to it, but that didn't put it out as it was an electrical fire (the so-called "electrical element" or some such gizmo was the culprit). So my wife runs down to the basement and shuts off the power to the range.

(All of which goes to show everyone that in the case of a zombie apocalypse, my wife should be the one to take charge. But I digress...)

I said, "ahhh...aren't you supposed to cook what's inside the oven and not the oven itself?"

"Oh, shut up."

For a while, we were both stumped on how to handle such a situation. 

"Um...who do we call to fix it? Is it fixable?" I asked.

"I don't know," replied my wife, "I've never had this happen before."

In the meantime, my wife starts pulling out various pots and pans. "Here," she said, "you're going to have to improvise while you cook."

I looked at the strange proffered cooking gadgets, wondering what the hell she was on about.

"You can grill food in the small grill and nuke the rest of it." 

Needless to say, dinner was a very interesting  (and not very successful) mess that night.

The next day, my wife comes home from work and says, "I bought an oven. It'll be here tomorrow." (I guess my meal was THAT bad.)

No moss on her, I thought great, problem solved, now I can get back to cooking the way God intended us to cook.

Except it opened the door on a ton of new problems. When the delivery men finally dropped it off (on the coldest day of the year, natch), I stared at the cockamamie device, wondering what sort of strange, robotic machine has my wife unleashed?

Where's the buttons? The knobs? How do you turn the damn thing on? Timer? WHAT timer??? Calgon, take me away!!! ARGHHH!

Apparently, my wife hadn't realized she had bought a "smart" oven. And clearly it had outsmarted me in every way. It didn't help that in this day and age of "keeping it green," there was no damn manual.

As I write this warning of robotics gone amok, we've only had the oven for a couple of days and I'm still trying to figure out the basics (and creating imaginative strings of curse words in the process). 

Give me a "dumb" oven any day. 

While I've got "dumb" on my brain, I'd be remiss if I didn't pimp my Zach and Zora comical murder mystery series. Hands down, one of the protagonists is the dumbest character you'll ever read in a book, satisfaction guaranteed! (Thank God, Zach's detective sister, Zora, is along for the crazy ride to offset Zach's dumbosity.) Start at the beginning with Bad Day in a Banana Hammock and continue from there. All the books will be on the test.