oven
I am banned from using the oven.
Over a decade ago, after having lived in my childhood home for over a decade, my parents finally got around to re-doing the kitchen. They ripped up the red, hexagonal tiles—which stopped short at the threshold, the boundary filled in with cement instead of cutting the tiles to fit—and tiled neatly through to the dining room. Out went the panelled cupboard doors with their magnetic latches. The tall fridge-freezer in the corner was gone, the oven with its gas hob, the microwave from the counter, even the kettle. I think pretty much the only thing they kept was the dishwasher, which had itself been replaced not that long prior, and was "a good model".
Mother had been waiting a long, long time for this renovation, and the work took a long, long time itself. By the end of it my parents and the contractor, Wayne—thereafter referred to only with this particular tone of voice, not unlike "whine"—had, I think, lost all patience with one another. Wayne was always cutting corners and lying about when he'd be coming back with his guys and breaking our mugs. Mother and Father were always moaning and asking them back to do a better job.
But eventually, it was finished, and the new kitchen—it must be said—looked fantastic. Our house is small by modern standards, but they'd still managed to cram in two lavish work-surfaces with cupboards above. Brand-new brand-name appliances, all-built-in (barring the dishwasher and the kettle). A tasteful pale green colour scheme. A curved cupboard door rounding off the row of units, so as not to loom too badly into the newly-expanded serving hatch through to the dining room. Superficially, it is the sort of kitchen people dream of.
At the time, I was young enough that Mother was still cooking all my meals. I went away to uni, and when I came back to visit, again, it was rare for me to end up taking over the cooking. Mother seemed happy with her kitchen, and her usage of it was left largely opaque to me. Barring one or two blemishes if you look closely, the kitchen, by appearances, is still as good as new. But I know better.
The thing about our kitchen is that it makes you feel like you're doing something wrong.
Once, I was visiting, and Mother asked me to make tea for her, or something. So I filled the kettle and put it on to boil, and left the room to go do something else. I don't recall what it was that first alerted me that something was wrong. But in no particular order, I remember my Mother letting out a terrifying cry; I remember the air being misty; I remember this noise, a burbling, a rattling; I remember the condensation on the cupboard door; I remember the kettle, on its little stand, physically shaking so violently that it looked to be moments away from tipping over. Our kettle, you see, has a little hatch on the top, that opens, and closes, so you can fill it with water. I had opened it, filled it with water, and failed to close it again before putting it on to boil. Instead of reaching boiling point and stopping, the kettle carried on boiling the water off, into the air, directly into the underside of the cupboard above. The tasteful pale green paint was warped and discoloured.
Mother was distraught. I mean, she was really angry, properly cross at me. I felt a little guilty, though of course I was aware that it was an accident, and as a rule I try to have enough pride not to self-flagellate over things that are outside of my control. I was trying to work out why on Earth I'd left the lid open. And then I realised: every kettle I'd used up to that point had a button that, when pressed, raised the lid, and when released, closed it. Most kettles, you'll realise, are designed to prevent this exact thing from happening: they will not let water out unless you are physically holding it.
My parents, somehow, had managed to buy the one kettle in the store capable of turning a whole two litres of water into steam without asking questions.
(Look out for this next time you're buying a kettle, and for the other mistake kettle manufacturers are constantly making: putting the transparent window under the handle, so that the water level is completely obscured when your hand is in the way.)
It's not just bringing water to the boil that's a concern in our kitchen: you also have to worry about cooling boiling water back down again. See, when they got their gorgeous stone-laminate (?) countertops installed, they also opted to have an integrated sink. Rather than a metal or ceramic sink set into a hole in the countertop, like you're probably used to, our sink is fused with the countertop itself, completely seamlessly. It's a lovely, pristine white.
I don't remember when they first told me—I would've been poaching eggs, or making pasta—but at some point they made it very clear to me that, if ever I poured boiling water directly into this sink, the sudden shock of the temperature differential would crack the basin and the whole countertop would need to be replaced (and, presumably, the one on the other side of the kitchen to match). Instead, I was to first fill the sink with cold water, to absorb the heat from the boiling water as it's poured in. Or, better yet, cook my pasta in a colander in an even bigger pan—boil the kettle thrice to fill it—so as to lift the pasta straight out of the water, which can be left to cool naturally on the side.
Also, I can't use anything abrasive to clean it, I have to impotently rub at it with a sponge until the orange marks fade to a dull peach.
Again, I find myself at a loss for words. A cursory Google for "integrated sink" immediately turns up forum threads full of people saying "do NOT buy an integrated sink, they are a nightmare to clean, and if they get damaged you have to replace the whole countertop". Granted, these users have presumably had a decade to regret their remodelling decisions, but nevertheless... did my parents just not research the sink at all before spending hundreds of pounds on it? I mean, this would've been vastly more expensive than a bog-standard metal basin! Even without reviews, the guidance for maintaining the sink would have made it patently clear what a pain in the ass it was going to be!
Probably the most ill-conceived piece of garbage in the kitchen, though, is the in-built oven. You know, the oven, the big box of "of in the cold food of out hot eat the food" fame? While I don't think the oven is quite so smart as to be internet-of-things connected to the wi-fi, it is pretty smart, with a full-on touchscreen interface instead of actual buttons you can press. The induction hob is the same, but with a magnetic dial piece that affixes to the panel and can be used to control the temperature of any of the individual burners, depending on which direction you press it before turning it; we have to store it in a drawer when it's not in use.
I do get the idea: by eschewing physical buttons and seams, you make the surfaces easier to clean and less likely to wear out. The problem, though, is that touch interfaces are a colossal pain in the ass.
Once, I accidentally placed a pot covering some of the capacitive-touch buttons on the hob, and a little key icon appeared, presumably some sort of child-lock feature. I tried pressing, pressing-and-holding, and pressing-in-combination ever button I could think of. I called Mother through, and she did the same. Apparently this had happened before but she didn't remember what the combination was, nor when the manual had been squirreled away. Just when I was about to Google Lens the hob to try and find an online copy, she inputted the correct combo code and it beeped happily. Normal thing for your hob to do.
The oven, though, is far more temperamental. It must be said that, a few years back, my parents did somehow start a fire in there, so the fact that it still works at all is a miracle. But to the best of my recollection, even pre-fire, it was always a colossal pain in the ass. When you tap the button to turn it on, you have to wait for a little startup jingle to finish, like it's booting into Windows XP or something. Then it physically growls at you. A little popup tells you that you need to run the EnviroClean program immediately; you press a button to dismiss it. (Or you can run the program if you like, but this won't actually do anything, and it'll just ask you again next time you turn it on. Burn scars.) You have a horizontal list of little icons, which you scroll through by swiping ineffectually at the greasy little screen. It's not as simple as modes like, "Fan", "Grill", "Keep Warm", they all have bizarre names like EnviroCycle Cook or Cook Intensive. Each of them allows for different maximum temperatures which I am convinced are total lies, the oven never seems to get that hot regardless of what you select.
Any time you open the door to check on your food or take something in or out, if you leave it open for too long, the program automatically stops and you have to remember to press the "resume" button once you've shut the door or it won't carry on cooking.
My parents bought the maximum number of racks available for that model of oven, and they store them all in the oven, which means there's never enough room to put in any food unless you take one out. If you do so, there isn't anywhere in the kitchen to store the spare racks, so you just have to lean them on the floor against the wall. If you forget to plan ahead and work out exactly how many racks you need in advance, you'll have a 200-degree (well, less) rack sitting at perfect kicking level while you cook.
The hob's surface, meanwhile, is a single massive glass sheet which can be easily chipped or cracked or scratched if anything too heavy is placed on it too roughly, or slid between burners. Which is a problem, because it's an induction hob, and because of the boiling-water situation I talked about earlier; the pans you're putting on it are much heavier they otherwise ought to be. I'm pretty sure I have in fact already scratched the hob, though my parents have had the good sense not to chastise me for that particular indiscretion.
According to the interface, the hob's warmth is gradated from 0-9, but in practise I find that it's more of a four-point scale. 0-6.5 is "off". 7 is "on". 7.5 is "hot". 8-9 is "burn". You have to fully spin the little magnetic dial maybe four complete revolutions to get to 7. You have to do this every time you turn a burner on. Because it's an induction hob, absolutely no heat goes up the sides of the pan, which means you have to stir your food constantly or whatever's on the bottom will burn while the rest of it goes uncooked. I get that induction is cleaner than a gas flame but I like making stir fry so it's a bit of a sore point.
Despite having this big, fancy, expensive, smart oven, Mother and Father seemingly abhor using it. Instead, they—like so many people—have bought an air fryer.
Look, if you're reading this, you know about the whole air fryer meme. I will try to keep it short and leave the low-hanging fruit on the tree. What you need to know is that an air fryer is just a tiny fan oven. It is not magic, it does not do anything special. It works exactly the same as a regular oven, but it's smaller, so it takes less time and energy to preheat. Also because you can pick up the compartment in your hand, you can shake the food to turn it more easily. These are the unique selling points of air fryers as I understand them.
I once watched my parents sit through a segment of The Gadget Show that boiled down to "why should you buy an air fryer?", a product that they already owned. In it, the presenter goes to the house of this family and gets them to make chips using an air fryer. The mum and the kids are pretty stoked about it. The dad, who seems to do most of the cooking, and apparently makes his own chips, and likes to take care over them, spends the whole segment visibly grimacing. At the end they ask him if he's been convinced and his response boils down to "not really" and the presenter is like, Well, you're outvoted, so! Yay!
Perhaps it is only that my parents are using it wrong, but I can say with confidence that I have never enjoyed any form of potato that has been cooked with an air fryer. I did not previously know it was possible for food to be simultaneously dry and soggy but everything to come out of that infernal machine somehow manages it. Load whatever perfectly-good nicely-prepared ingredients you like in there and the only thing it seems to do reliably is ruin 'em.
Which is a problem, because Father will not cook a meal any other way. Let's say I'm doing a really straightforward oven meal: burgers, or fish & chips. I will load one tray up with the meat, and another tray up with the potato. For some meals I do, there'll be a third tray of vegetables or something. I will preheat the oven, then load in all of the trays at approximately the same time to ensure that all the food is ready to eat in sync.
If Father cooks the same meal, what he'll do is cook two consecutive baskets of chips, then two consecutive baskets of meat, then warm the chips back up somehow. That's if you're lucky; he might just decide to overload the basket and fuck it up that way. I swear I've seen him cook pizza in there using a similar batch process.
His earnest belief is that using the air fryer is more energy-efficient than using the oven. This might be true, for reheating small amounts of food, or cooking a single element of meal. But I have watched our smart meter while using the oven, and the complete cooking process seems to cost on the order of pennies. If the air fryer saves any money at all—which, if you're needing to reheat the basket that many times, I doubt—it is, at most, pennies. It's so marginal that for the amount of the hassle it involves—not to mention the counterspace the appliance uses up—it's just not even worth thinking about.
So far, I've been talking as if in all other respects the air fryer really is a mini fan oven. But that's not really true! The truth is that I just don't trust that thing. The whole basket is nonstick-coated and is undergoing near-constant abrasion whenever the food gets shaken around. I can see bare metal on the little grate in there! Sometimes when the food comes out I swear I see little black flecks on it—and it's certainly not because it's getting a nice char on!
Every surface inside that thing is disrupted, broken up by seams, fittings, vents, ridges, whatever. More places for the coating to start to fail. Hell, more places for dirt to accumulate. The basket is a big unwieldy multi-part utensil that is impossible to clean. Seemingly realising this, my parents have bought some ill-fitting silicone liners for the basket. These are already falling to bits, visibly discoloured, and block the air circulation which is the whole point of the air fryer in the first place.
Look, I don't know the extent to which fears surrounding microplastics are hysteria or not. I don't think there's enough hard evidence yet that we can say, empirically, a) microplastics are really bad for us and b) nonstick kitchen utensils are a major source of ingested microplastics. But if it is a health hazard, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that the free market has allowed millions of people to be exposed to harmful chemicals via household goods. A study from just last year includes the disturbing sentence, "Finally, even greater accumulation of [microplastics] was observed in [...] brains with documented dementia diagnosis". Sure, it could be that dementia somehow causes more microplastics to gather in your brain, harmlessly! Or it could be that our cling film is making us all fucking senile.
And I am starting to worry about my parents, to be totally honest with you.
So I use the oven, they use the air fryer. When I use the oven, Father asks me why I'm not using the air fryer and makes a cross face. I tell him I'm cooking for the three of us and there's too much food to go in the air fryer. I have explained all the rest to him, too, but he doesn't listen to me.
I was using the oven, but, getting back to the point of this blog post... I have been banned from using the oven.
Apparently, because I'm using it so much, the oven is getting too dirty. Now, to clarify, the vast majority of my meals are cooked entirely on the hob. I was using the oven maybe once or twice a week, and I have been here for less than three months. I've inspected it and it is a damn sight cleaner than the oven tended to be at my old flat. Apparently, though, it's too dirty, and my parents believe that the more times you cook with a dirty oven, the more the dirt gets burned on, and the harder it is to clean. So, to stop the dirt getting more burned on, we can't use the oven until somebody cleans it.
Now, I would just clean it. I never had a problem cleaning the oven in my flat. I think it's ridiculous to be wasting time cleaning a nearly-clean oven at a time when Mother is convalescing and the household is clinging on by a fucking thread, but for the sake of avoiding the argument, sure, I'd bin that hour and clean the oven. But this is where we get to the actual problem: Mother doesn't want me to clean the oven, either.
Mother's rules for cleaning the oven are simple. You cannot use any cleaning products on it. You cannot use anything harsher than a soft sponge on it. To hear her tell it, cleaning the oven takes on the order of three hours of gentle, vigorous scrubbing. The reason for this is that the oven has a special self-cleaning surface which means you don't have to clean it. Remember the cleaning cycle it asks you to do every time you turn it on? Yeah, that. The walls and roof of the oven are made of some sort of porous ceramic and it just blasts them with high heat or something.
This slowly comes to light over the course of my conversation with her. I eventually ask something along the lines of, "So you're telling me that because of this self-cleaning surface, you cannot use any form of standard oven cleaner, or even just basic degreaser, on any surface on the whole oven?" And, barefaced, she tells me yes.
And, I'm sorry, but I just don't believe her. So I go and dig out the manual. They're all stored on the shelf with the recipe books, random unsorted paper booklets, half of them for appliances we no longer own. I find an oven one and realise it's for the previous oven, which must've gone to the tip over a decade ago. I find the correct oven one. There's a whole spread in there devoted to the proper cleaning procedures for the oven, and to be fair to Mother, they are more detailed and exacting than any oven I've previously encountered, particularly on account of the self-cleaning surfaces.
However, plain as day, the manual suggests that on basically all of the parts of the oven that get dirty—the glass door, the bottom of the compartment, and the metal racks, none of which are self-cleaning—you are indeed encouraged to use off-the-shelf oven cleaner. It's fine. Good, even.
Which is great news! I can clean the oven after all! I take the manual through to her, and I show her the page, and I point at the words "oven cleaner", and say, look, I'm happy to do it, but you have to let me use proper degreaser. But she forbids it. Eventually I give up. "Elbow grease! That's what I use!" she cries after me.
"Your problem is that you're inflexible," Father agrees.
I'm inflexible. I'm, too inflexible. I'm too, inflexible. I'm not flexible. I am not flexible.
"I need to cook food. To eat," I whine, falling down the stairs on Maslow's ziggurat.
That was over a week ago. To be fair, I haven't used the oven since. They haven't cleaned it either.
I sneak downstairs for breakfast whenever it seems like nobody's lurking there, usually close to midday, in and out like a ninja. For lunch, I trudge over to the retail park under the baleful sun, my body sticking to itself, and scarf something down standing in the shade, huffing the fumes from the car park. It's between three and four by the time I get out there. I tend to buy a different item every time, and usually go for something clearanced if I can help it, because all of the options taste like sand anyway, and if it's not gonna be good it could at least be cheap.
Dinner... well, dinner is served at six. It used to be that I would start cooking at some point between five and six, depending on when I finished whatever I was doing, and then that would take some indeterminate amount of time because cooking anything in this hell kitchen takes twice as long as you think it will, so we might be eating as late as seven. Eventually Father loses it and asks what is my problem with getting it done for six. Would I prefer to cook for seven instead? It's really important for their health that they eat at the same time every day. Any time it's getting close to six and there isn't a sign of food being imminently served, he storms in and asks me, "When's food?" Like that. "When's food?" Fuck if I know, man, I just got a peeler out of this drawer full of bent and broken spatulas and now it won't close again. The oven turned itself off ten minutes ago and I didn't realise.
What's my problem is that, internally, I've decided that I want to live the rest of my life without ever working under pressure again. I'm sure I will have to at some point, don't get me wrong! I'm actually pretty good under pressure. It's just that I don't enjoy it. In my day-to-day life, where I'm my own boss baby, I see no reason why I should ever put myself on a deadline for something that just doesn't matter. Things will get done when they get done and I have more important things to think about.
But, y'know, I guess it was bothering them, so I'm really trying to get the food done for six now.
