Corduroy Orange

Dear Corduroy:

I am very dependent on my oven for all sorts of cooking and baking. However, the heating element disintegrated overnight while I was cooking a country ham. Do you have any suggestions for making it through the next several weeks while we try to figure out whether to pay the gas company an arm and a leg to put in a gas line so we can have a gas stove or just go buy another electric one? I need to fix quick meals that are going to be healthy. The stove top still works, so I am not completely without cooking equipment.

Do you think the oven might have been objecting to having been used for 14 straight hours yesterday as well as about 6 the day before?

It’s very good that we’re going to be out of town and mooching off our son and his wife for a few days of this emergency.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

It may ease your pain to know that your oven died an honorable death. A real country ham is a delicacy not widely known outside of the South—salt cured, no water injected; it puts the hams commonly found on the mass market to shame.

Fortunately, your oven is the only part of the equipment that is broken and you still have a functioning stovetop. Not only that, but you have full access to all ingredients available in a United Statesian supermarket (I don’t say American because the Americas consist of two continents), and have easy access to produce that you can eat raw. That means that your meal preparation bind is a fair bit less serious than what Derek is up against while working in China. For starters, I’d suggest that you follow the same advice that I gave him: pancakes, hash browns, and eggs if you want a hot breakfast (you could even make waffles—they sure are tasty!); stews, soups, and pan-seared meats for lunches and dinners.

Another quick and easy meal is a grilled cheese sandwich. Put a couple slices of the ham that killed your oven in it for the best grilled ham and cheese you’ve ever eaten. Put an egg over easy on top and eat it with a knife and fork for a croque-madame: a real treat you’ll rarely find outside of France.

Try having a salad with each meal for an easy vegetable. Additionally, you could boil or steam most any vegetable if you prefer them cooked. If you really want your vegetables roasted, you could roast them on the stovetop in a dutch oven.

Other pieces of equipment that are readily available in the States that could help you through your pinch include a toaster oven and a barbecue grill. The toaster oven would allow you to bake small meals; the barbecue grill would assist you in baking larger ones. Its radiant heat would even ease the discomfort of cooking outside in North America during the winter (as might a bottle of beer).

Using your oven for twenty hours out of forty-eight should not kill it, assuming that is in otherwise good shape. If your oven is old or has other problems, heavy use may have been the straw that broke its back. Because I don’t know the details of your specific equipment situation, I can’t advise you one way or another on how to proceed, though depending on the exact nature of the problem, repairing your current oven may turn out to make economical and practical sense and is an option you might want to consider alongside replacing it—especially if you’re just going to replace it with a new electric oven.

I’m sure your son will be happy to see you and won’t consider your holiday visit as “mooching,” though if you do, you might try sending a letter to Jeanne Philips, better known as Abigail Van Buren. She’s probably better equipped to advise you on the dynamics of that relationship than I am.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Advice Column, Cooking Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.