got so excited with cooking and baking again that I almost forgot to tell you! We got an oven! YAY!! After nearly four months of being ovenless, we’ve finally got an oven! Life has been hard without an oven. You forget that you don’t have one and you say Hey, I’d like to make a cake today…but you can’t (unless of course you make a microwave cake) because you don’t have an oven to bake it in!
You might wonder, why don’t you have an oven and why did it take you 4 months to get one?! Well you may recall that I said we were moving a few months back. We’ll I’m really not sure if I mentioned we were moving countries again! So an international move is a lot of work. Our flat in the Middle East came completely unfurnished. That means no curtains, no fridge, no oven…just a big empty space. So when we left it also needed to be completely unfurnished. Which means I had to sell by big, fancy, shiny dual fuel Bompani cooker (I didn’t know what a cooker was until I moved to there, apparently that’s what they call ovens or stoves there). And it had to be sold before we moved out so four months ago we parted ways and I cooked my last meal, a delicious beer dough pizza and said goodbye.
So why didn’t we get a new oven right away? Well we sold the oven a few weeks before we moved out, and then we left the country about 3 weeks later so that was a whole month. And then we got to Singapore (Oh yeah, by the way we moved to Singapore because I got a fantastic new teaching job teaching SCIENCE again ←love love love!!!) Well, it turns out that ovens are not a standard feature in housing here!! Locally, they don’t do a lot of cooking at home and they don’t bake many things so rice cookers are popular and most flats come furnished with only a hob (two burners built into the countertop). So finding an oven was tricky! And they were spendy as well! The oven that I sold for $600 sells for over $2000 here! Yikes!!! We tried to buy used but that’s difficult when you don’t have a car to transport things so it took some time to find one! Oh and a place to put it! Because stand alone ovens us American’ are used to are not the norm here! Instead they are built into cabinets and guess what, our trendy new flat…no oven cabinet!
Luckily, we found a very inexpensive oven cabinet at Ikea that gave us some additional counter space to work with (double yay!) and then after lots of shopping we found this shiny new Bosch oven on sale! So, finally after four months without I have my lovely new oven and I’ve been baking up a storm.
And of course, for continuity our first meal with the new oven? Well of course it was pizza!
Happy Eating!
~nikki
And we will be ovenless for the next two months or so. I haven’t told you that we’re moving? Ooops. I loathe moving, but somehow I end up doing this way too frequently. That’s a whole different story, but yep, we’re headed off for our next adventure on July 25th and we’ve got to start emptying out our flat, selling our belongings and getting ready for the movers. So, today, at 6 pm the new owners of my oven will come to take it away.
