Yesterday was to be my biggest baking day ever. 13 loaves of bread, for a presentation I’m giving tonight to 200 people. The event is called Pecha Kucha, and I’m giving a short talk on bread, accompanied by a slideshow. Thinking it would be cruel to show pictures of delicious bread without providing some, I planned on making a bunch of ciabatta for the crowd, to be shared at the end of the presentation. Ha ha, stupid Peter! Why you make so much work for yourself?
Sunday morning, I preheat the oven to 550 for 2 ½ hours. All lights are green, I get the signal to go, and I put in my ciabatta. Hmm, oven feels kinda cool. Not cool. When I pour hot water into the preheated skillet, instead of a angry burst of steam, I get an anemic hiss. Water sprayed on the floor of the oven puddles. $@*#! The thermometer reads 200 degrees. The range works, the broiler works. So I put on the broiler and burn the tops of the first two loaves, the bottoms are underbaked.
My memory is hazy about the next hour or two, but at one point I was on my knees, punching the side of the oven. I do remember that it didn’t fix the oven.
With multiple trays of dough ready to go and no oven, I called the Stately English Manor. My friends Heidi and Lionel were happy to let me use their stove and heat up their kitchen to Luciferian temperatures. Hooray! The rest of the day was spent shuttling back and forth to their house, preparing dough at home, and bringing warm bread home. This morning I packed up 13 loaves of bread and am amazed it all worked. What would’ve been an incredibly busy and stressful day turned into a painful marathon. I am actually glad our oven bit the dust, though I have some disappointed customers who wanted bread for this week. What it means is that I can get a larger better oven, maybe even a retro model with two separate ovens so I can do two temps at once! Also, I know that a forty-year-old oven is more likely to keep working, while the P.O.S. recent GE model of ours will find itself shunted out to the alley with the other failing appliances.
This week’s task: sell off/give away the oven, washer, dryer, hot water heater, TV, window A/C unit, and microwave. All these things have been sitting in our garage and taking up space. Maybe I can scrounge up enough cash to get one of these.
Haha, why you so stupid?!
Writer, architect, father, husband.
thanks for your blog, it made me laugh. sell or give away your stuff, get that beautiful oven and keep baking bread!