Now We’re Cooking With Gas!

You know that old adage that says a watched pot never boils? Let me assure you that it does . . . and quickly to!

When we bought our house just over a year ago, it came equipped with a black flat top range. Not having a lot of experience with flat tops, I didn’t have any particular objections to the range. However, over the course of the past year I have come to hate that range with a blinding, fiery passion. Sure, it was easy to clean when something spilled, but that in no way made up for the fact that it took 30-40 minutes for the oven to preheat. Unless I was cooking on high, when the burner cycled off the food in the pan would stop sizzling. The oven could be set to turn on by itself or off by itself, but not both which kind of defeats the purpose of timed baking. And I bottled applesauce on a propane camp stove in the garage last summer because the heat was not consistent enough to handle canning (and there is also the fact that the instruction manual warned that the glass of the range could not handle the weight of a canner). I could turn on the stove to heat, mix up the pancakes, and still have to wait ten minutes for the pan to be hot. And then the first pancake took ten minutes to cook. Boiling a big pot of water for spaghetti took forever!

So imagine my delight when part of this year’s tax return bought me a brand new gas range (and the gas line to make it usable). The oven preheats to 450 degrees in ten minutes flat (and has timer functions that will turn it both on and off). You can literally watch the water come to a boil when you put the burner on high. (In fact, I like to bring something to a boil and then watch the size of the bubbles decrease and increase as I turn the knob. It's fun!) Now I can mix up the pancakes, turn on the stove, and have the first pancakes cooking in about two minutes. I am having a severe case of culinary bliss!

In spite of my deep rooted dislike for the old stove, someone actually wanted it and it was sold and gone less than a day after I posted it in the online classified ads. Hopefully they aren’t as finicky as I am about their cooking apparatus. And the money from the old stove will pay to put in a sand box for Matthew. There’s no down side to that exchange!