My good friend Christen and I spent the first two weeks mostly either eating out or cooking together in her apartment since it was closer to the grocery stores than mine and had a larger kitchen. So the first time I tried to use my stove and oven was about 3 weeks after I moved in. It’s not that I dislike cooking, I just rarely make the effort if I’m only cooking for myself, but without a microwave oven to make single-serving frozen dinners, I’m now learning.
Lesson 1: to use the stove, you have to turn on the electricity. In Ireland, in an effort to save energy and probably as a bit of a safety measure too, you have to flip the large red switch in the kitchen to get power flowing to the stove or oven. This fun fact took me only twenty minutes to figure out as I pondered why not one of the burner on my stove top heated up when turned on (laugh all you want).
Lesson 2: to use the oven, you not only have to turn on the electricity and set the oven to the temperature you desire, but you also have to turn on the timer. Note that when the timer expires, the oven turns itself off even if the temperature is still set. I learned this lesson when I gave my brownies 10 more minutes to cook in my head, but not on the timer, and twenty minutes later, still had brownies that were really more like brownie batter at the center. Luckily, brownie batter tastes just as good as cooked brownies in its own way.
Lesson 3: just like heating the oven requires turning on the electricity, heating the shower requires flipping a switch as well. I have taken waay too many cold showers (not so bad in the summer, less pleasant in the fall after you’ve come in from the rain and all you want is a hot shower to warm you up). Empowered with this new knowledge, I aim to change this in the near future.
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