I miss my oven.

I miss my oven. Shortly before leaving DC, we renovated our kitchen and by that I mean we wrote moderately large checks and new appliances and cabinets arrived that were installed by nice people. Among the appliances was a wonderful oven with nifty toys for a baker like a bread proofing temperature, a convection oven option, and gas burners and an electric over for even baking.

Here is Jordan we have a gas oven that I hate. The stove top is fine (although it is difficult to cook with the window open because it tends to blow the burners out.) But one year into life here and I still haven’t learned to cope with this oven. First off, you have to light it every time you use it. Which sometimes goes flawlessly and sometimes seems to create explosions that make you fear for your life (okay this really only happened once when we had a houseguest who couldn’t get the oven started and the gas built up in the closed oven without a flame). But the oven only has one shelf, so this weekend I made cookies for a dinner party and it took hours since I could only do one cookie sheet at a time. The one shelf is also close to the flames and I find I often have to stack cookie sheets to disperse the heat so the bottom of the cookies doesn’t burn before the top and middle cook. The cookies did turn out fine (although a little dark on the bottom relative to the pale top). I was actually tempted to flip them over like pancakes for even browning but this seemed like overkill for a batch of double chocolate chip cookies.

On the plus side, I have been able to find most ingredients for baking here. I did order almond flour online and because the shipping price was high relative to the flour price, there is now several pounds of it in the freezer waiting for me to make frangipane (almond filling used in tarts and croissants). Frangipane tends to go a LONG way (and freezes so I find once I make it, the next five desserts I make all have to be almond. I know if Vicky, who loves my almond tart were here, there would be no complaints. I also recently inherited a lot of ingredients from a baker who left post for Krgystan? Turkmenistan? One of those - so we now have quite literally 20 pounds of nuts in the freezer - so in addition to getting almond tarts for dessert, all dinner guests are also served spiced nuts as an appetizer.