Ovens

I suppose we should be very grateful that the oven didn't decide to up and die on us over Christmas.  Partly, of course, because it would have been quite difficult to have done all the Christmas food without it, but mostly because I think we would have felt that we needed to buy a new one quite promptly.

It was moderately inconvenient that it decided to die on us yesterday.  It had been working perfectly well on Saturday when I had made a huge platter of roasted veg for dinner.  It appeared to be working yesterday when I put more veg in to roast for our Sunday lunch.  It was only when I went in half an hour later to swizzle the veg around a bit that I discovered that the element wasn't heating :-S  No amount of cajoling would convince it to heat.  This was inconvenient because we had been to Marsh Green earlier in the day and bought a nice piece of topside for roasting. I had also bought other things that would have been best prepared in the oven. So I tipped the veg into the wok and more or less treated that as a makeshift oven.  I sliced off two "steaks" from the topside and did them on the griddle.  It all worked, after a fashion.  I put the piece of braising steak into my slow cooker.  Everything else will have to be re-thought as the week progresses - because I am not buying a new oven a mere 5 sleeps before we disappear off for a month. Housesitters will have to make do with the woks, the frying pans and, at a pinch, the barbecue.

I had been intending to bake some bread, a cake and some biscuits to see us through the week.  That plan has had to be abandoned too :-(  Fortunately we can buy bread and I guess it won't hurt us to do without cake and biscuits for a week.

We shall save up and buy the double oven that I have been hankering after, when we get back. I'm not sure, though, whether to put it at the top of the list of things to do or leave it languishing at the bottom.

My brother Matt's suggestion that we should have taken ourselves to the pub for Sunday lunch was a very good suggestion indeed.  Alas, by the time I realised that the oven really wasn't going to work, it was a bit late to go out.  We'll go to the pub for a pre-flight dinner on Friday instead