Limping Along

Did I tell you that my cooktop died?

For all the nearly 17 years that we have lived in this house, I have complained about the kitchen. Not only is it exceedingly ugly with plaid vinyl floor, Stygian cabinets, and mottled mustard-and-brown tile counters, it also has a single oven and only two burners to complement the Jennair grill. I'm sure it was state of the art in 1979 when the house was built but it's more than dated now. I'll bet you haven't seen an analog microwave oven in 20 years; well, we have one.

For all my griping and complaining, it has been a pretty functional kitchen until recently. All the original appliances worked (except for the fridge, which we replaced a few years ago), and that's saying something in this time of planned obsolescence. Last year, however, two major failures happened; one of the oven coils decided not to heat any more and the cooktop decided never to turn off again.  The former, we can deal with - it just takes a long time to heat up the oven. The latter was a real problem. Not turning on is a minor problem; refusing to turn off is a biggie.  

With visions of raging burners in our heads, we went down to the breaker box, worried that we'd have to disable the entire kitchen electricity. Thankfully, it was on its own breaker switch, so we could turn off the juice to just the stove.  Whew!

The next day, I went out and purchased a small, two-burner countertop stove, figuring that was 'way cheaper than calling a repair person to fix a cooktop we would be replacing in just a month or two anyway. So, that's what I'm using for the foreseeable future. It in no way replaces a real stove, but it will do as a stopgap measure.

The kitchen remodel can't start soon enough to please me. Now, if I can just get the architect off the dime to give us plans to work from!

In case you are curious, that's Nueske's corned beef hash in the frying pan. My Beloved ordered it as a Christmas treat. We like it, with reservations. We found it a bit too salty and the texture is very fine, not as chunky as we like. So, we added our own chopped, softened onion and sautéed mushrooms, which rendered it very delicious indeed. Nueske will ship right to your door in a styrofoam cooler, making life easier than ever. And, no, I don't get paid to say nice things about Nueske.

So cooking is happening in our kitchen, even if we are limping along.