Cooking No. 5

It’s been kind of a slow week here in NEPA. Nora disappeared for twelve hours on Sunday and I ran myself into a four-hour nap yesterday (Note to Self: Righty the Lonely Thyroid is not up to that kind of exertion yet. Cool your jets and keep it down to the “walking to Dairy Queen” level.), but other than that, it’s been pretty quiet. So, in the interest of maintaining the dullness, I am going to write about – drum roll, please! – my stove.

Stove, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

Originally, I intended on writing this post in the form of a haiku. But then I remembered that I have not written a haiku since the second grade and even then it did not go so well. Seven year-old Sarah had trouble grasping the concept of syllables, but hid this fact by writing short, terse poems and trying to pass them off as art. (Was I a closet hipster even then? Perhaps.) Other elementary school concepts I had trouble grasping include: left and right, long and short vowels, and the correct pencil hold. Thankfully, all have been rectified except the latter, where I unfortunately still hold all my writing utensils with entirely way too many fingers and in a particularly cramped style. I can’t help it. I love the feeling of control.

Which may be, perhaps, why I love my new-to-me gas stove. The rest of my kitchen may be a disaster of 1970s proportion, but not my stove. (Okay, the fridge is also brand new, but it’s not exciting. It is your ordinary, everyday, “I will freezer burn your pirogis no matter how you cover them” fridge.) I’ve never cooked on gas before and, I’ll admit, I was a little nervous about it at first – the click-click-click always sounds vaguely bomb-like to me and my “safety switch” turned out to be the oven light – but now I’m hooked. There’s no turning back. I’ve gone to the Dark Side. If all my previous electric stoves were Geo Metros (Sorry, Dad.), than this bad boy has got to be somewhere on the “Designed for the Autobahn” level. It handles like a dream.

Granted, it has no timer, the stove top takes an eternity to boil water, and you need to disconnect the smoke alarm if you want the oven hotter than 400 degrees, but in every other facet of cooking that thing heats quickly, cools instantly, and increases my ability to cook by a factor of ten. (Or at least increases my coolness by a factor of ten. How can you not look awesome when you are cooking with fire?) How have I ever lived without a gas stove? Does everyone know about this? Perhaps I should have posted this under "New Thing of the Day" instead...

And in more exciting news, my mother and two of her sisters will be arriving tomorrow afternoon for a sleepover. If they can’t liven things up around here, no one can. Stay tuned!