Skip to main content

New Oven

New Oven

I am bursting with anticipation. There is a new addition to the family - not the two-legged or even the four-legged kind. It does not bark, poop, talk back or scratch. It is a state-of-the-art convection oven with turbo-quartz radiation
( haven't figured out what that is all about yet ) and several knobs with different functions. I drool and fantasize while poring over pages after pages of professionally tweaked pictures of bakes,pizzas, pot-roasts and desserts. Oh, the possibilities and promises! 

Over the past few months, we have been eating out a lot - out of conveniece, chilling with good friends, trying out new joints, tired of eating the same ole boring stuff...any excuse will work, really. It turns out to  be a bummer when you pay good money for poor food, sometimes accompanied by even poorer service. Every now and then, the thought creeps up - " I could do better than that, and get more bang for the buck." In the end, pride prevailed, and the tipping point came when I was introduced to this oven at TOTT that could deliver crispy thin crust pizza on a pizza stone, baked to perfection, burnt to the right note. Yum! After a swipe of the credit card and the ding of the cash till, there was one happy staff beaming from ear to ear from the sale of a relatively big ticket item that's coming home with me.

Baking a cake is somewhat of an enigma. You take several ingredients, weigh and mix them with precision, turn on the heat, and voila, the end product! Depending on the skill of the chef and quality of the ingredients, you await the results.Sometimes it sinks when it's supposed to rise, and vice versa. 

I am thinking of an analogy - which may be venturing into dangerous territory based on events that have transpired not too long ago, but now the dust has settled.  Life is like a piece of cake - Aargh, beginning to sound a little flat already!
But I will persist. You can determine what cake you'd like, and choose the ingredients carefully. Sometimes, you cannot control the temperature, but you can turn on the in-built thermostat and stay cool. Many cakes do not utilise the thermostat function and end up getting burnt - not pretty nor digestible. Usually, some form of heat control is required for the ingredients to set and the cake to form, even the non-bake cheese-cake variety ( which I consider a little flaky) needs to be put into the fridge. Once again, the end product may turn out to be good, bad, mediocre,, noble, selfless, selfish, over the top...there are many varieties of cake, with or without yeast. An instruction manual is essential, to get the proper mix and method. Make sure you get the right one! 

In the meantime, I am ready to get acquainted with my new oven and looking forward to a long and beautiful relationship.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New Perspectives

  So What If The Day Started Badly This morning, as I was reversing my car out of the porch for a dental appointment, I drove right into a van who just happened to park in front of the house across the road, right at the very instant. The knee jerk instinct was to feel sorry and angry with myself at the same time. I said a little prayer for comfort and that the rest of the day would turn out better, with small mercies along the way. I also texted G, telling him what happened and that I was a little shaken by the incident, trivial as it was. The text came back " No worries". It was all the comfort I needed - no judgment, no reproof, just a quiet understanding and acceptance. The Rest Of the Day Got the tooth fixed, had my comfort food for lunch, left car with dented bumper with mechanic, took a bus to Ang Mo Kio library to while away the time. Along the way, discovered my favorite Yong Tau Foo franchise had moved to the food centre here, much nearer home, and also picked up a ...

Special Residents of Istanbul and Ephesus

 My recent road trip of Turkey traversed several cities. But it was mostly in Istanbul ( and a few more in Ephesus ) that cats who roamed the streets with the familiarity of a resident, independent and free, yet well-provided with food, shelter, water and loving affection.  On our very first day, we bought a bag of cat food and fed them whenever we encountered them. Some were hungry and responded to us, but others kept their distance, or came over to sniff at the kibbles and walked away. It warmed our hearts to see these adorable creatures as part of the landscape and culture of a most memorable trip in a land so richly endowed with the legacy of the past facing a challenging future ahead. Here's a gallery of cuteness overload. This link best sums up the history and back story of these adorable felines.  https://consciouscat.net/relationship-between-istanbul-and-its-cats/

PROJECT GROWING UP ( Or the Little House that would )

In the Beginning In 1997, G and I went house-hunting. We decided on a not-so-big single-storey house in Serangoon Gardens and made it our home, together with D, aged one. So the small family of then three moved in, together with our domestic helper, an absolutely indispensable part of the life and times of the Sims. In 2000, A joined the brood and we became a household of five. As the years rolled on, this little house stood the test of time, armed with a resolve to remain true to itself while all around, the neighbours were mutating into towering structures, forever altering the once charming landscape of this cosy precinct. But as D and A morphed from age to age, they made encroaching demands on sanity and space. Chaos aside, the study was first to go, for each one to have their own private den and mess containment. Soon the deluge of homework and assessment sheets spilled into the living room and there was no more division of boundaries. The living room became the ...