Trials and Tribulations of a reluctant Range owner

Trials and Tribulations of a reluctant Range owner

or

How I became liberated from a cooking nightmare

If you know me personally, or have been following me on Twitter, you will have heard the saga of the Rayburn. If you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about here’s a quick re-cap….

About 7 or 8 years ago we moved from a poky flat to a lovely spacious house, finally after our move north, which basically meant we’d had to start again, I got what I’d been dreaming of. However there was a beast in the kitchen. It was green.

Now the first thing people used to say when they walked in the kitchen was “oooh A Rayburn” and then they’d proceed to lean against it and warm their backsides. Yes they are very handy for this, in the dead of winter there is something strangely satisfying about leaning against a range with a cuppa, slowly getting warm and cosy.

However I was to develop a love/hate relationship with the big green monster.

At first it was a novelty, a beautiful thing to behold and over the first winter images of country kitchens and a settled existence descended. We bought two collie puppies and with the two cats I’d sit in the kitchen reading Country Living and revelling in a large kitchen of my own. Bliss. Then we needed an engineer to service it. This is where our love/hate relationship started. Finding an engineer was difficult, but find one we did and he was lovely, strange though how so many country folk have ranges but there was no-one to service it. The nearest Aga serviceman is 100 miles away, go figure.

As the years rolled by it dawned on me that the lack of a cooker (a REAL cooker) was a nightmare. Sure the range gave constant hot water and you could bake lovely cakes, stews and roasts in it, but waiting 2 hours for it to heat up just doesn’t sit with my “oh, lets have a stir-fry” mentality. Spontaneity was out of the question. My cookbooks gathered dust after too many times of remembering a lovely recipe, then realising that it needed to boil quickly then simmer for a while. There was just no way to do this on the range no matter what the books say, and boil an egg? Ha, dream on Sara.

Unfortunately our kitchen is so badly designed that there is no room for a range and a cooker. Something had to give, but the lack of funds for a cooker and a new heating system meant we had to just make do. But this year something did give way, partly my sanity (try living 7 years without a good crispy fried egg) and partly the old girl herself.  She’d not been well for a while, breaking down mid-winter and leaving us forking out for repairs – our engineer kept extolling the virtues of a new boiler (I know…he would, it’s his living) but when she broke down before Christmas this year he finally figured out what the problem was; a small part was causing the problem, easy to fix and cheap too. However by then I’d had enough. He had too much work on to fit the part so we decided to bite the bullet and order a new boiler and not fix the range. Little did we realise that we would spend the coldest winter in 100 years with no heating except small moveable electric radiators!

But today my love/hate relationship with the big green monster has ended. She’s off to a new family, with her new part she’ll work as well as she did before and will hopefully give them many years of domestic bliss. Our new heating (debt be damned) is working well and I’ve just about stopped sticking my foot out of the covers on a morning to tentatively touch the radiator to see if the heating has come on. Sitting in my kitchen is a REAL cooker…it’s shiny and new (and still needs to be wired in, but hell after 7 years I can wait a week or so) and I know that it will soon be battered and scratched – well with a houseful of animals it’s bound to. I have a pile of cookery books that are about to get dusted off, and the first thing I’m going to cook on the hob is a stir-fry while at the same time baking a cake in an oven that works independently to the hot plate. I’m then going to have crispy fried eggs, omelettes and grilled bacon., oh and muffins.

I am finally being liberated, at a huge cost, but sometimes you just have to do it. It’s a sad fact that in the south an Aga or Rayburn adds to the cost of a house as they are desired by the country set, but here in the north they are a way of life for many and for cooks like me they are a nightmare. You need a cooker if you have one, or you need to love the beast.

I’m finally free but will probably put on a stone in weight after dusting off my decade old cook books. It is a compromise I’m willing to take.

Advertisement

~ by donaldsonsdiary on March 2, 2010.