Cooking WITH an oven!

After living with Eric for almost a year, yesterday, we finally got an oven. It was a Christmas present from his Mom and although they wanted to get it the Wednesday before Christmas, apparently Sears was very busy delivering all the other appliances people got for the holidays and we were put on hold until January. It was worth it. Friday night, Eric's mom called and told us that it would be delivered between 8:45am and 10:30am. Friday night, surprisingly, Eric was the one who had problems sleeping. I was confident and happy and didn't want to get too excited, but knew exactly what we were having for dinner on Saturday night. My mother's pork chop and rice recipe! A recipe I used to make once a week and now hadn't had for probably over a year.

Around 9:30 or so, Eric went outside for a cigarette and to help his Mom unload groceries from her car. Just as he was closing the trunk I heard the "beep! beep! beep!" of the delivery truck backing up! Even though I had awoken with a horrible toothache, I had a big smile on my face. The delivery guy came upstairs to see how to negotiate the stairs and where the oven was going and then proceeded back to his truck. Eric looked off the balcony and said "It's in a really big box." I assured him that they would probably take it out of the box before they brought it upstairs, which they did. This new oven is stainless steel and had some protective plastic on it, so when they brought it upstairs and we first saw it through the back door, Eric looked at me and said "It's GREEN?" I assured him that no, it was not green, we do not live in the 70's. They brought it in and placed it in its position. Then they connected it to the gas, turned on all the burners, explained to us that we needed to run it for 30 to 40 minutes before we used it to bake off a protective coating and that was that. The oven was home!

Eric invited his mom up to see it and we all just stood around the kitchen in awe. Then we kicked her out and headed to the grocery store for things to put into our new baby. We got a very large take home pizza from Dominick's to bake for lunch and we also got all the ingredients for pork chops and rice. I had also spent the morning watching Food Network and Tyler Florence had a great recipe for panko crusted, rosemary and garlic chicken legs that could be baked in the oven. So we got the ingredients for that as well. Plus Eric's birthday is tomorrow so we got stuff to make him a German Chocolate cake.

When we got home, I turned on the oven and let it bake off its protective coating for the alotted time and then slowly slid the pizza in. After 20 minutes we had an evenly baked, perfectly golden pizza. Yeah! Plus, since it came in its own tray, we didn't even get the oven dirty! I was very happy.

I moved into Eric's with a lot of stuff. I had previously lived in a 3 bedroom house inherited from my parents with a full basement, a 4 bedroom house in Florida, and a two bedroom, rather large apartment in Lake Zurich. So downsizing to an older, smaller two bedroom apartment in the city was a little hard for me. Luckily the apartment across the hall from us is empty and I was able to store all my stuff that didn't fit, which is quite a bit, over there. After lunch Eric and I went across the hall and I began opening my pots and pans boxes to find all my casserole dishes, my baking dishes, my cake pans, my bread pans and the rest of the things I didn't need while I wasn't cooking with an oven. It was like finding old friends. I found my dish towels, my Cuisinart mini-prep, my good cooking utensils and my immersion blender so I can make fantastic soups. I was so happy and excited. We started to bring all this stuff over to our apartment and realized that we didn't really have a place to put it. However, my parents not only left me the love and the joy and the recipes of their culinary lives, they also left me their french bakers rack. We moved the small table that the microwave had been sitting on, went back across the hall and moved the bakers rack over here. It looks really good. I now have a place to put my pots, my dishes, AND some of the hundreds of cookbooks I have. It was almost like bringing in the new oven brought us a whole new kitchen. (We also found my refrigerator magnets and put those up). It now looks like it is a kitchen people use rather than a place people pass through on their way to the bathroom or the bedroom.

I practically sang when I put a pat of butter in the middle of my saute pan and it didn't slide to one side of the pan. I loved the smell of the pork chops and rice coming from the kitchen. It probably wasn't my best pork chops and rice, but it had to be one of the best times I had preparing it and eating it. Today the oven has been used to bake biscuits for breakfast and to make Eric's birthday cake. It will get a rest tonight when Eric gets taken out for his birthday dinner, but tomorrow, I can guarantee you I will be punching the button to heat it up, setting the timer and putting something inside it and smelling the wonderfulness that comes out of it.

I am truly happy.

As for my book progress, unfortunately I am still on the second book, "Amateur Barbarians." I really don't like it. The story doesn't interest me, the characters don't interest me and the man who wrote it, obviously doesn't know how teenagers talk because the scenes in the book with the younger characters are very poorly written. Also, this book was advertised as a book where two middle aged men's lives intertwine. Well, I'm about 50 pages from the end and they are only now getting intertwined. I will finish the book today probably and still don't have my next two yet so I am falling a bit behind on my goal. Ok...I am falling far behind on my goal. But all of you who know me, know how determined I can be and I will succeed. I'll let you know in the middle of the week how I'm doing.

Just Like Old Times

I am swimming in nostalgia this week. On Wednesday, when I came home from work, the weather outside reminded me exactly of the Octobers of my youth, when we would all get excited for the costume parade at school for Halloween, and then all cry when we had to wear jackets over our costumes. Some people in my neighborhood must have fireplaces because I stepped out of the car and the aroma of burning wood filled my nostrils. I couldn't wait to get inside and curl up with a cup of hot chocolate. It's starting to get darker earlier (and will be dark by 4pm next week when we put the clocks back). There is a chill in the air. The weather is cloudy and rainy. The trees are giving off their final blaze of glory. I guarantee that if it wasn't raining, I would go take a walk in the park across the street and let the brown, yellow and red leaves crunch under my feet.

Maybe upon feeling this nostalgia, Saturday morning my boyfriend and I went out to eat "comfort food." For me it was an open faced turkey sandwich, served on white bread with mashed potatoes and gravy on top, all with a side of cranberry sauce. I hadn't eaten one of those since my days back at Mizzou in the dining halls. The same dining halls that would have a sign describing the night's side dish as "chessy" rice. There was nothing like the taste of a slice of Wonder bread, topped with a slice of processed turkey meat and a perfect ice cream scoop of mashed potatoes and bright yellow, almost snot-colored gravy. They usually only served those on weekends and it was great because a lot of people went home, so they always had plenty of servings. For Eric, his comfort food was meatloaf with mashed potatoes. Mushroom gravy on the meatloaf, different gravy on the potatoes. I smiled at his horror when he broke the dam on his mound of mashed potatoes and the gravys started to mix. This is not allowed in Eric's world. Each taste must be separate. He managed to shore up the damn and enjoy his lunch. Now meatloaf was not something my mother made. In fact, I don't believe I ever had meatloaf until I was 11 or 12 and living in New Mexico. I rode horses and my trainer one night before a horse show had me come by, learn how to braid my horse's mane, and then I stayed for dinner. Meatloaf, covered in Heinz ketchup. It was delicious. I am hoping that soon Eric and I can get a new oven so I can experiment with making my own meatloaf.

After lunch, Eric and I went to Kohl's and bought a waffle iron. When I was growing up, Sunday mornings when we had waffles were an event. My mother and father had a waffle iron that had been given to either her parents or his parents as a wedding gift. It was heavy, large, and the cord was beginning to get frayed. There was a big dome light on the front and I remember my brother and myself waiting until that light to glow yellow so that the batter could be poured slowly, out of the giant plastic bowl, onto the grid. Then the games began. My brother and I would guess whether the waffle would stick to the top or the bottom. Whomever got the right answer, got the waffle. And it was never good enough to just yell "top" or "bottom." You always had to yell it three times! "Top! TOP! TOP!!!" or "Bottom, BOTTOM, BOTTOM!!" There were cries of disappointment when we were wrong, cries of joy when we were right and my father said that he actually could accurately predict where it would end up depending on how the pour went. We, as children, of course believed him and were amazed that he was always right. Now when we went to Kohl's there were all sorts of new fangled waffle irons that turn and twist and fold and all that other unnecessary stuff. Then there was the Cuisinart waffle iron, that not only didn't twist and flip, but was also on sale! I am a big fan of Cuisinart, owning not only the original Cuisinart, but a mini-prep, coffee maker and hand blender that all carry the Cusinart name. So we got that and this morning I was thrilled to discover, that after my first "practice" waffle that ended up sticking everywhere, (My fault, I didn't use enough batter), that of the next two batches, one ended up on the top and one ended up on the bottom. Both tasted the same and were brown and beautiful. We covered them with butter and Mrs. Butterworth's syrup. It was great!

Tonight, we're going to have pork chops and applesauce. No, not really about the applesauce, but we are going to watch Bears football, have some pork chops and then watch "Dexter." That's not really nostalgic, but it's a nice way to end the weekend. A nice family, nostalgic weekend with my new family. Eric, Harley, Blair, Jasper and Elsie. Let's get out the jiffy pop and the plastic pumpkin to stick candy in and dive deep into the pool of our past.