Really Cookin'
I was supposed to be working on a script for my program on collaborative divorce but ran into a conflict. The Lovely Linda had finally had it with the antique stove and had arranged with her cousin the contractor to obtain a very expensive replacement at his much lower if still pricey cost. Not that I have any issue with Linda's complaint, and getting a new stove would eliminate a significant obstacle to her baking. Not that we need her baking, as good as it is, especially in the slower-moving winter months.
Also, for the record, not being the gourmet cook that she is, I would have plunked down a few hunnert -- maybe even six or seven -- and had a stove that would have been more than adequate for my needs. Not that I hadn't been lobbying for a new stove, but the one we've been using came with the house, and is a model that first came out around the time Benjamin Franklin was flying kites in thunderstorms.
Being the one who did most of the cooking -- because Linda works outside of the home and I don't and because she found the stove more frustrating than a reasonable person should have to endure -- I made due without frequent bitter complaints about the unit. It was 'lectrical as opposed to gas, and I much prefer gas. The insulation around the oven door was fatigued, as were the knobs, so controlling the temperature within was essentially a matter of, If you want it cooked, it's gonna be cooked, which meant dry.
Personally, I liked dry, but that was more because I was used to my own cooking, didn't like the idea of worms finding their way from my food to my stomach, and because most of the time, food is fuel. Being Linda's primary source of prepared victuals, I made a greater effort to make more pleasing meals, which meant not so well-done, but I wasn't very good at it. I got better when she bought us (sic!) a Weber grill. I would still mostly over-cook, but at least I managed, somehow, to keep things moist.
In any event, Cousin Bob arrived with the Jenn-Air in this van late yesterday morning, only minutes after my Cajan Pal Larry -- he calls himself a transplanted coon-ass -- finished connecting the appropriate propane piping through a hole in the back of the wall of the kitchen. Both men know what they're doin' around their tools, and my role was basically lifting heavy things and saying uh-huh when I was asked anything.
Until it came time to the actual installing of the new unit, and Bob wanted some serious consulting. He had followed the directions -- a foreign concept to me -- and cut a hole in the floor as it said, to vent the stove. The diagram said it should be in the back on the right. But if he put the vent where they said, we'd have to lower the stove into place rather than slide it in as most people without a derrick in their kitchen would, but the blower would still be in the way of piping the gas into the regulator.
Now these directions were in enough languages to please Kofi Annan, but they were clearly wrong. So Bob had to cut another hole in the floor, more towards the center, to make it all work. He also had to spend more than an hour trying to connect everything through the bottom of the front of the stove. It seemed it would have made more sense to attach everything, and then build the house underneath it.
The good news is that Bob knew what he was doing, as did Larry before him, and with a flick of the circuit and then the gas valve, we were in business. In an hour, I had some peas boiling over a beautiful blue flame. I could set my heat by sight, which is far more fulfilling, and when I was done, bang-zoom, the heat went away. Take that, Mr. Edison.
Okay, not an exciting first meal. I cooked a steak on the Weber and baked potatoes in the microwave. I'm gonna edge up to the full magilla slowly. Maybe I'll watch Linda read through the instructions about seasoning the grill top, and other need-to's in the thick spiral-bound booklet that accompanied the grill. After all, I don't want to break anything.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
PS: Oops. Linda, who's got an extraordinary olfactory sense, said she smelled gas. I didn't. Neighbor Sammi says you always do with propane. Pal Norvin says you shouldn't. He installs stoves, and is a serious cook to boot. He says give it a coupla days, and if the smell doesn't go away, he'll pay us a visit.
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