The Oven Saga, Pt 2

It's in! The beast was fitted by a nice Yorkshire chap a couple of days ago, who's done a pretty good job of it. It turns out that our kitchen wall isn't quite straight, so there's a tiny alteration to the rangehood that needs doing, and I need to plaster over the holes left by the old rangehood, but otherwise we're there.

Before and after pics:

Looks a bit ornery, doesn't it? This is what we're working with now:

5 burners of gas-fueled fury, plus a rangehood that coped perfectly with me searing a massive steak last night, and a double-width electric fan oven that will be crisping up a lamb wellington for this evening.

It's all been worth it.

The Oven Saga

I mentioned in the last post about getting a new oven installed, and I feel that for the sake of my karma I should come clean about what that whole story actually contains.

My wife (My Wife!) and I have been talking for a while about replacing the crappy four-burner electric stove that came with the house. Fortunately, it's a standalone oven / cooker, which as it isn't built into the work surfaces would be comparatively simple to replace. However, as I mentioned below, we're keen to move to gas hobs rather than the awful electric ones we have.

So a few weeks ago, we were out for coffee and a few basic errands (I was buying pants, if you must know), and whilst the Kiwi was in a girl shop doing girl things, I wandered a few doors down to where a local appliance store was having the final weekend of a closing down sale. It was like appliance deal heaven in there, and I looked further in and found a five-burner gas / electric oven for around $2,000 off, which was intriguing. I pulled the Kiwi in and pointed this out. A sales assistant materialised, and offered a number of compelling things - free delivery, interest free credit, that sort of thing.

So we bought it. Despite the following:

• We have no mains gas at our house
• The five-burner stove is somewhat wider than our four-burner one, and thus slightly wider than the gap our cupboards allow
• The addition of a differently-sized oven will require a differently-sized rangehood, and thus a new hole in the wall in a slightly different place

Carpe diem, and all that. So once the thing was safely ensconced in our downstairs spare bedroom, we set about getting quotes to have it installed. Fortunately, we found out that the current rangehood, whilst slightly offset for the new oven, was actually within compliance codes and wouldn't have to be replaced right away. This is good as they're expensive, and I imagined that cutting a new hole in our expensive cedar external wall and filling the old one in would also be somewhat costly.

So we found a gasfitter who'll pipe bottled gas in from outside, remove one of the kitchen cupboards, install the oven and put some cheap glaze over the back wall for not a reasonable sum.

Thing is, that cheap glaze was proving a bit of a challenge. The thinking behind doing it cheaply was that we're probably going to get the rest of the kitchen done sooner or later so we didn't want to put anything too permanent in. However, it's probably not going to be this year, so it does need to look reasonable. This prompted us to look at a nice steel splashback this weekend whilst we were looking at how cheap the cheap wall glaze actually was (the answer was 'very'). We decided on one, and I diligently measured it to ensure it would fit under our existing rangehood - remember we'd decided not to replace the current one.

We had my car with us at the time (two seater roadster), so we headed home to pick up the Kiwi's car (estate (sorry 'sport') wagon) and to measure up. I took the bigger car, returned, and bought the splashback. Job done.

This evening, the Kiwi asked 'did you measure the rangehood in the end?'. Cue small moment of discomfort from your author. I had not, having been distracted by a toasted sandwich on our return home.

As it turns out, the splashback we have bought is about 15cm too tall for the current rangehood, which means that not only will we have to buy a new one in order to get our oven installed, we'll have to have it fitted, which is no small task.

I suspect that our gasfitter finds this all highly amusing. As does my wife.

... and we're back

I'm not sure why I've not been at the blog lately, have been struggling with an explanation for a while now. I could say I've been too busy, but that would be a lie really, and I suppose I could say something about being happy, which I am, but none of that would seem like a genuine reason for apparently having nothing to say. Truth is, there's been numerous times over the past six months or so where I've thought 'I should blog about that', but the thought of going through the process of rekindling this blog kind of put me off. I like continuity, you see, and feel I'd need to fill in the gaps between then and now before writing anything new.

But I'm not going to. Otherwise I'd never get around to starting again. Surely through the likes of Twitter, Facebook and the rumour mill (or because you've visited recently), you know about the kitten and the wedding and all of that, so no need to post about any of that, and what a weight off my shoulders is that?

So here we are, happily married and settling into a cosy Sunday evening in our house, with a chilled weekend (involving a visit to the zoo!) behind us and a productive week of good things ahead of us. At the moment we're furiously saving to have a new oven installed, one with gas hobs, so entertainment has to be of the 'free' or 'extraordinarily cheap' varieties for a while. It'll be worth it to have some degree of control over what I'm cooking, plus we received a number of excellent cooking vessels as wedding gifts and I'm keen not to screw them up on those horrible electrical elements.

It's been a good weekend for food, even with our crappy oven. As the weather here's turning cooler, my thoughts have turned to comfort food (although it's still around 20C at the moment), and so on Friday evening I made tartiflette, that amazing French Alpine concoction of potato, bacon, onion, white wine and cheese. It was phenomenal, even with raclette substituted in place of the traditional reblochon - the latter being entirely unavailable in Auckland and the Kapiti Cheese Co making a great raclette.

I'm slowly getting my head around the food here. It helps that we live close to the Westmere Butcher, one of (if not THE) best butchers in Auckland. The Auckland Fish Market is also just a small detour from my journey home from work, so that helps too. The Kapiti shop is across the road from my office building, and I'm beginning to build a list of places that usually have what I'm looking for.

Funnily enough, that list is potentially not what you'd expect. Self-styled 'speciality' food stores like Sabato and Nosh tend to fail me every single time, with shelves groaning under the weight of super-priced olive oils and comedically useless condiments, but not a single hard to find ingredient in there I couldn't have bought in Tesco in the UK. They seem to exist solely for fabulously wealthy people to spend a whole heap of cash whilst not buying any actual food. What bugs me the most is the cynical pricing, basically an attraction in itself to a certain type of customer. I'm still deciding whether or not to continue this rant over on Eating Auckland.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that stuff is good. We're headed back to the UK for a visit over next Christmas, and the knowledge that that's there helps a lot from day to day. The days straight after the wedding were weird, with no 'big thing' on the horizon involving seeing friends from the UK, but Christmas has taken its place. Here's looking forwards to that...