Eat In Color: Where have I been

I haven't been cooking recipes that is for sure, but I have been cooking. In fact I have been relearning how to cook. Our electric stove caught on fire in our new (to us) house. Clearly the stove was not new. It was a rather exciting day. I emptied an entire fire extinguisher on the stove and it wouldn't stop smoking and sparking and the stove wasn't even on when it caught fire. The motor started to make weird noises and sparks arced across the kitchen and it smoked and smoked and smoked. I gave up and called the professionals.

Instead of paying the same amount to replace the electric stove with another electric stove, we decided to have a gas line put in and replace it with a gas stove. This was in our long term plan, but things happen, and that changed. Now, the long term plan also include remodeling the kitchen so I wasn't going to buy a nice new fancy stove, which we also can't afford right now. Having the gas line put in wasn't very expensive as it only needed to be extended 10 feet from the gas already in the laundry room. Finding a replacement stove was a different story. I needed to find a replacement that would also just drop into our 30" downdraft counter top hole which is sort of a very unique type of stove. That took about a month. I scoured craigslist, ebay, sears outlet, all the discount stores in the area and finally we found someone selling a used one that needed a replacement part, but it would fit in nicely. Now I have a nice gas stove and can start cooking again.

So what did I do for a month without a stove. I learned how to cook lots of things in the oven like oatmeal and rice, in fact I really like oven cooked oatmeal way more than stovetop cooked. We also made good use of our family size broil king griddle. That thing can handle a lot. I could fit 3 pots on it. The only thing it couldn't do well was boil water and keep it boiling (we are at altitude) to make pasta and whatnot. We did not eat a lot of pasta the last month. We did however survive and manage to eat well, we just ate a lot of staples and to be honest we did eat out more than usual.

That is where I have been, and hopefully with the new year and the newish stove I can pick up again trying to get through my recipes. Apparently it is going to be a two year resolution. If not more.