Published Jun 8, 2003
I cleaned the oven today, and, um, I don’t really have any amusing anecdotes about that. Spray on, grime off.
Oh, so here’s an idea. Now, a lot of the dirt in the oven came from my pizzas. See, I’m on this wack ass diet that keeps me from eating milk, so I was cheese-free for a couple weeks. No, it’s not some silly celebrity regime. I might be allergic to cow’s milk, corn, and a couple other yummy things besides. So I’m off all those things for a month to see if I feel better not eating them.
As one might imagine, I got tha cheese joneses real quick. Then, suddenly (well, not that suddenly, it took two weeks), I remembered goats made cheese too. Sheeps sometimes even. And after picking through put-near every cheese at Whole Paycheck, I found a couple good-sized hunks of a goat’s milk Gouda. It actually melts down real good, about the right amount of oil and it’s pretty sticky. Maybe a little more watery than ideal but better than I ever would’ve expected.
Okay, but turns out most pizza dough includes corn. So, I get these pizza shells made out of rice, which are a little gummy but plenty tasty. They are, however, real flat, and the tasty cheese (plus peppers, mushrooms, etc.) fall off and tumble to the bottom of the oven where they form little piles of goodness that, after not too long at 500° turn to chunks of carbon that smoke everything I roast or bake with a nasty acrid smoke.
The oven has a clean setting, but I can never get the “now cleaning” light to turn on. So I clean the darn thing by hand with a can of incredibly noxious oven cleaner. And two sponges, completely ruined with deeply copper-colored gunk.
But the oven’s clean, now, for an experiment in braised tofu. Updates to follow.