Oven

I really like cooking. Especially baking because you prepare it and then it comes out of the oven, it seems so neat and tidy, you can clear away the preparation dishes and voila, it comes out nice and warm. Unlike cooking a stir-fry or bolognese when it gets too hot and spits all over the place.

Unfortunate for my love of cooking is that fact that we have a terrible oven. I don’t know if it doesn’t heat up to the temperature it’s supposed to be because everything takes a lot longer than it’s supposed to. Sometimes though, if it’s something that doesn’t take very long the bottom will cook way faster than the rest and will get a bit burnt because the heating element is on the bottom. Sometimes I put another tray in on the second shelf to diffuse the heat, that helps a little.

I made cookies last night, they were okay, I think they’ll be better today now that they’ve cooled down and probably hardened a little. They took longer than they were supposed to, but I was afraid to leave them in in case the bottoms burned. I couldn’t put another tray underneath because the other one was still dirty from the roast we had the night before.

The roast, by the way, was pretty disappointing. I usually do a lamb roast, but I thought for a change that I’d do beef. I think that I usually do 1kg of lamb for about an hour and a half. For some reason I decided to do the beef for 1 hour because that’s what it said on the packet. It was a bad choice because it ended up taking about two hours and it was still pretty rare in the middle. Lucky there was plenty of baked potato to fill us up.

I’m resolved that when we move there must be a good oven in the place. Preferably fan-forced and large enough to actually fit cookie sheets in there. I can only fit small ones in my current oven and they’re quite difficult to buy.