I present to you my incoherent ranting in regards to cooking. Enjoy.
Everything about our oven is contriving to make my life difficult whenever I want to use it.
I moved into my grandmother's house a little while back, both to keep an eye on her and because home was starting to feel claustrophobic, so among other things I get to familiarize myself with her kitchen. In this kitchen is an oven, I don't really know how old it is, at a guess I'd say at least 30 years? Nan hasn't used it in one or two decades having developed a diet for easier to prepare meals, so we're breaking new ground here.
Anyways, I've been told that the oven was first obtained from somewhere else, so at some point in its life 70% of the markings rusted off. This wasn't difficult to overcome for baking purposes, which is what I use it for, but it means using it for anything else (which I eventually want to do) is going to be a bit trial and error. For now I attached a bit of sticky paper to the dial to signify the desired temperature.
Using an oven means oven mitts, of which we had none, so we got some. Unfortunately these mitts are a lot less flexible than what I'm used to, so that's a nuisance.
There's not much variety in the oven trays so I use a plain flat sheet of metal. It's not wide enough to reach the edges of the oven so I need to place it on the oven rack naturally. Unfortunately these oven racks and this oven have a helpful "feature" where you can't pull them out directly, you need to tilt them up first and then pull them out. (God knows why, it's not like they're going to fall out when the door is shut.) So if I don't want to struggle with the rack, I need to grip and remove the tray with my big, cumbersome oven mitts. The rack also has a kind of arch at the front, so if I want to have hope of pulling the tray out, I need to sit it on the arch, which tilts the tray backwards slightly. More on that later.
Completing this ensemble is the baking paper and aluminium foil. Back home I just wiped the trays with butter to prevent sticking but I soon discovered that this made them impossible to clean, so I got baking paper and foil, in case one or the other didn't pan out. For the past month or two I've been using the baking paper without much difficulty, until I discovered a kind of waxy substance forming on it after use. I thought the temperatures I was baking at might've been too hot for whatever coating it used so I switched to the foil. (Though tonight I discovered the same substance on the foil as well, so who knows what's causing it. It doesn't seem to get in the food at least. Going to get opinions on that later.)
This is where my troubles began. See, the packaging for the foil boasts of its non-sticking properties, and indeed the food doesn't stick! At all! The food I'm usually baking, sausage rolls, do their damnedest to slide right off the tray and into the oven or onto the floor, often before I even touch said tray. This property really synergizes with the backwards tilt on the tray so that while the rolls often don't fall off completely thanks to the oven rack catching them, they're still very close to the edge.
Now, I can usually remove the tray with only a few rolls falling off which get caught by the rack so I can collect them with a pair of tongs. Today however, I thought that maybe I would be better off properly seating the tray onto the oven rack and just removing the rack itself. Boy, big mistake. I had forgotten how high you had to lift the rack to get it to come out so while I struggled to remove the rack, half the rolls fell off and landed onto the bottom of the oven, which I haven't gotten around to cleaning yet. Thanks to the arch on the oven rack you can't just grab the oven tray, so eventually I had to cave and grab a pair of tongs to lift the tray up so I could grab it. The rolls that fell off don't seem to have collected anything so I carefully grabbed them with the tongs one by one and put them with the rest. And then I ate my fill with no regard to which fell because I'm not going to let something like that cheat me out of half my food, dammit.
While it didn't really affect my day, it got me really worked up while it was happening let me tell you.
I'm going to go look into getting a big oven tray that isn't flat and can sit in the oven without needing an oven rack so I can forget this business about food falling off and the finicky process of trying to get it out of my oven.
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Topic: Things that made you mildly upset today thread (Read 859102 times)