Big Boy’s Brunch

New Stove

Originally uploaded by bignoseduglyguy

For a whole host of reasons too boring to mention, it’s been a very long while since I posted here. However, prime amongst those reasons was the fact that our electric cooker had become absolutely horrid to cook on and sucked all the joy out of preparing meals and baking bread. With a thermostat more temperamental than a Hollywood starlet and a ceramic hob that had more cold spots than a polar bear’s bum, it was impossible to bake bread with predictable results. Likewise, saucepans were either stone cold or hotter than a solar flare.

So you can imagine how much pleasure I derived from dragging that old cooker out of the kitchen earlier this week in anticipation of the arrival of our new stove. Our house, like many in New Zealand, is predominantly powered by electricity but, like many rural properties, had an on-demand water heater that ran on bottled LPG, requiring a contractor to swap out the bottles on a regular basis. Our desire to be able to cook on gas meant we were happy to discover that the gas company’s mains supply actually reaches our street, a fact we gleaned when our neighbour got connected. We ordered our own connection (which also requires basic planning permission) and waited a few weeks for the supply to be run from the street to the house. Once it permission was confirmed, we went out and looked for the gas hob/fan assisted convector oven combination we have always wanted – and today it was installed and hooked up!

After the requisite clean-down and test, I decided that the very best way to christen the stove was to whip up a classic omelette with a little grated blue cheese. After three years of cooking on electric (not including fires at camp and camping stoves during power cuts), it was bliss to dash off an omelette in under three minutes and eat it in under half that! As British Gas used to say in their ’70s TV ads, ‘Cookability – that’s the beauty of gas’.