Contemplating life without a real oven

Is there a new countertop appliance in your kitchen after Christmas? Chances are there are a lot of you trying to figure out what’s going to give way on your counter to make room for that new device.

You might not really need that appliance, but the fast talking guy on the TV promised it would be the last kitchen appliance you would ever buy. I own nearly half a dozen of those “last” appliances I’ll ever buy. Some of them are still on the counter.

This Christmas, my wife and I added two new devices to our already cluttered kitchen counters. So far I haven’t moved anything off but I’m taking inventory and contemplating life and meals as the new year looms.

We’ve had a little time to prepare food using our new appliances — an electric pressure cooker and an air fryer.

We have an old stovetop pressure cooker that we got when we were first married 35 years ago and it works fine but this electric job has buttons and an easy clean removable inner pot. So far I’ve made chicken, pork chops and chicken noodle soup all with the push of a couple of buttons. Well, and some chopping and browning.

The air fryer has already had three French fry experiments run in it — one round of frozen fries, one batch of fresh fries and one batch of sweet potato fries to go with the pork chops.

I quickly found out that the cooker and the fryer wouldn’t run on the same power strip at the same time. Fortunately, the fryer has a fan that blows air through it that quit making noise so I was alerted to the problem from my recliner.

A quick count after these two new appliances were added showed that we have 11 electric appliances on our kitchen counters and three or four that have found spots elsewhere. The two most used devices are the microwave oven and the coffeemaker. I’ve long told my wife if I had owned a microwave before I was married, I probably never would have gotten married. With a microwave, freezer and a can opener, any bachelor could survive these days.

Other appliances we have are the NuWave oven that my wife assured me would be well worth the price because the shopping channel folks assured her of it. We used it for a variety of things at first. Now I mostly make grilled cheese sandwiches in it. I’ve used the blender quite a bit but mostly for protein shakes. The George Foreman grill has set idle for quite some time. The slow cooker gets used a lot but is now in danger of extinction since that pressure cooker has a slow cooker button on it. If I move the slow cooker off the counter I might use the food processor that is in the corner behind it more often.

My life in the kitchen has become so convenient, I can’t even fathom how my grandmothers ever made it cooking with kerosene, wood and cow chips.

Halfway through all this Christmas kitchen excitement, reality set in very suddenly when I got ready to pop muffins in the old fashioned oven. Nothing — the stupid thing was dead.

I baked the muffins in the air fryer with pretty good results but part of my life contemplation involves just how long I can survive without a real oven.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]