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A man in his kitchen plays many parts
Nov. 8th, 2014 08:41 amI might have posted yesterday in rage at my own stupidities that frittered the day away. Or I might have posted wearily today, looking back with a sigh and a shrug, and saying ironically that the most useful thing I achieved was cleaning the kitchen. Half the kitchen.
But actually I do quite enjoy cleaning the kitchen, in bits. It's not hard and it is rewarding, watching elements of my life go from fucked to unfucked in relatively short order.
And as a result of yesterday, right now I'm feeling positively friendly towards my stove. Cooker. Oven. What should I call it, in California? In the UK, at least in my head/my class and generation/whatever, "stove" and "cooker" both mean the whole thing and are relatively interchangeable; "oven" tends to mean the roasting/baking box element of the whole, though it can be taken by extension to mean the whole thing, burners and all.
But anyway. Dismantling, cleaning and remantling of the burners has established that the failure-to-self-ignite in one of them is a problem with the metal pieces rather than the gas supply or the electrical sparking; probably some crucial gap is plugged, and better cleaning ought to fix it. I'll get on that. Meanwhile I've moved those bits to a rear burner that I rarely use, so that at least my two front ones fire again without need of matches.
And all the spillages are wiped up and the top is sparkly-bright white again, and I am very fond of this cooker. Some days the best thing about it is the width, for it is technically extra-wide; today, though, the best thing about it is the self-cleaning oven feature.
When I was a kid, cleaning the oven involved buckets and soap and hot water and my mum on her knees and scrubbing. The same should probably have been true of me in my teens and early twenties, but, y'know. We were renting and sharing and moving on; cleaning the oven was not a feature. Somebody else's responsibility, whoever came next down the line.
By the time I was living alone and it clearly was my (occasional) problem, there were oven-cleaning pads or spray-on foams that only needed leaving on and wiping off, allegedly. I did it so rarely that every time there was something new to try, and I didn't much care if they didn't work all that well, because hey. Nobody ever sees inside the oven, do they? And at least I'd made the effort; and the chemical reek was actually a reason not to do it all that often, because I was asthmatic and it obviously wasn't healthy for me, really not.
When I bought my house, when I bought my oven, it was supposed to be self-cleaning but I never really figured out how that was meant to work. Maybe it did, just automagically; I don't actually remember cleaning it at all, but nor do I remember its being greasy or clagged-up at all, in all the seventeen years I lived there. (That was a good buy, that was. Never a problem, in all that time.)
And now I live here, and the oven's twice as wide and has its own auto-cleaning feature, but it's impressive and scary: you throw a lever to lock the door, then you turn the oven to "clean" and it heats itself to an incandescent level and just burns everything off. Katherine did it once last year, to show me; last night, I did it myself. And opened it up this morning, and there's a fine layer of grey ash all over that just wipes off, and everything's entirely clean beneath. I love that. And what I love really-best about it? I left the baking stone in, and that's the same. It had been gritty with spillages too burned-on to scrub off (the baking stone lives in the oven full-time, so it gets slopped on by stuff that's not anything to do with baking), but apparently what can be burned on can be burned off; it's factory-pure again, and I love that.
Now I must go to the farmers' market, and buy things. When I come back, maybe I'll tackle the rest of the kitchen. I have this dream where there's actually space to put things down, y'know? Where there's always actually space. Where things are organised and maintenance just happens and nothing gets away from me, ever.
But actually I do quite enjoy cleaning the kitchen, in bits. It's not hard and it is rewarding, watching elements of my life go from fucked to unfucked in relatively short order.
And as a result of yesterday, right now I'm feeling positively friendly towards my stove. Cooker. Oven. What should I call it, in California? In the UK, at least in my head/my class and generation/whatever, "stove" and "cooker" both mean the whole thing and are relatively interchangeable; "oven" tends to mean the roasting/baking box element of the whole, though it can be taken by extension to mean the whole thing, burners and all.
But anyway. Dismantling, cleaning and remantling of the burners has established that the failure-to-self-ignite in one of them is a problem with the metal pieces rather than the gas supply or the electrical sparking; probably some crucial gap is plugged, and better cleaning ought to fix it. I'll get on that. Meanwhile I've moved those bits to a rear burner that I rarely use, so that at least my two front ones fire again without need of matches.
And all the spillages are wiped up and the top is sparkly-bright white again, and I am very fond of this cooker. Some days the best thing about it is the width, for it is technically extra-wide; today, though, the best thing about it is the self-cleaning oven feature.
When I was a kid, cleaning the oven involved buckets and soap and hot water and my mum on her knees and scrubbing. The same should probably have been true of me in my teens and early twenties, but, y'know. We were renting and sharing and moving on; cleaning the oven was not a feature. Somebody else's responsibility, whoever came next down the line.
By the time I was living alone and it clearly was my (occasional) problem, there were oven-cleaning pads or spray-on foams that only needed leaving on and wiping off, allegedly. I did it so rarely that every time there was something new to try, and I didn't much care if they didn't work all that well, because hey. Nobody ever sees inside the oven, do they? And at least I'd made the effort; and the chemical reek was actually a reason not to do it all that often, because I was asthmatic and it obviously wasn't healthy for me, really not.
When I bought my house, when I bought my oven, it was supposed to be self-cleaning but I never really figured out how that was meant to work. Maybe it did, just automagically; I don't actually remember cleaning it at all, but nor do I remember its being greasy or clagged-up at all, in all the seventeen years I lived there. (That was a good buy, that was. Never a problem, in all that time.)
And now I live here, and the oven's twice as wide and has its own auto-cleaning feature, but it's impressive and scary: you throw a lever to lock the door, then you turn the oven to "clean" and it heats itself to an incandescent level and just burns everything off. Katherine did it once last year, to show me; last night, I did it myself. And opened it up this morning, and there's a fine layer of grey ash all over that just wipes off, and everything's entirely clean beneath. I love that. And what I love really-best about it? I left the baking stone in, and that's the same. It had been gritty with spillages too burned-on to scrub off (the baking stone lives in the oven full-time, so it gets slopped on by stuff that's not anything to do with baking), but apparently what can be burned on can be burned off; it's factory-pure again, and I love that.
Now I must go to the farmers' market, and buy things. When I come back, maybe I'll tackle the rest of the kitchen. I have this dream where there's actually space to put things down, y'know? Where there's always actually space. Where things are organised and maintenance just happens and nothing gets away from me, ever.