Hot Hot Hot!

I'm talking about the Montgomery Ward brand electric oven that came with the rent house. Sunday afternoon I thought it might be fun and tasty to make this snack. I found the recipe on the Family Food blog, and as I happen to have a 3/4 full can of chickpeas sitting in the fridge (left over from my vegtable barley soup), I thought, "A ha!" and then sang a little song. The recipe was super simple: just put the chickpeas on a roasting pan, cover with oil and spices, and roast at 350 degrees. So easy, even a caveman can do it!

Well, I threw the roasting pan into the oven and put the timer on 10 minutes. The recipe called for 20-25, but our oven generally cooks a little hot, and for the past week even more so. I thought 10 minutes on the timer, then take a look/taste to see how much longer. In the meantime, play with kid (lately, we do a lot of Ariel/Eric make believe. guess who gets to be Eric. It's a little disconcerting to tell your daughter to do something and she says, "Okay Eric. I will Eric." Ten minutes later, the oven has worked itself up to a scorching 475 degrees. Hmmm. Turn off oven. The chickpeas aren't done, so I keep them in for about 30 more minutes. When I take them out for the last time, the oven is still 300 degrees hot. And it's off.

The reason I know the exact temp is because I have an oven thermostat in there. One of those little ones you hang off the racks, bought because there was always something a little off about the oven. Trey always cooks things about 5 degrees below the called-for temp, and that seems about right. But for the past week, we'd been referring to the oven as demon-spawn. Everything was getting burned. You get used to your appliances working at a certain speed, but when the timing gets wonky the change can be so subtle you don't notice it. I made a pie for valentine's day and burned the crust--really, this was probably the first real sign it was truly broken. I mean, you only cook the crust for less than 10 minutes, really just to set the butter and graham crackers. Well, my crust was burnt, and when we ate the pie (a chocolate, cream cheese thingy), well, while the crust was still very tasty, it was a lot of work to cut through. Like the sugar was transformed into glass (Trey's description).

In any case, oven's broke. I tested it one more time when I made a shepard's pie thingy that night, and yup. It's tricky to bake things when your oven quickly heats up to Hell temperature. The landlord knows, and the girl who takes the info down said something about needing to check whether it's under warranty or not. HA! It's a Montgomery Ward brand electric oven. It's probably as old as my sister. Hopefully, we'll get a new one (albeit the cheapest new one they can find). That would still be pretty exciting.