El Andalous in the Late Afternoon
Chicken doesn’t just come at KFC and, of course, I’d bought a chicken from Spinneys to roast at home. This was going to be my next life challenge – cooking for myself in Egypt.
The first thing I realised was that I’d forgotten to buy potatoes, so it was going to be a roast chicken without roast potatoes, which didn’t seem quite right, but was not exactly fatal. It would just have to be roast chicken and peas. A bit weird, but hey, that’s what today's blog is all about!
I got out the house booklet which I remembered had a description of how to use the oven. The oven is basically just a table-top one that has been put on a shelf in the kitchen. I’m not an overly keen cook, so this didn’t particularly faze me. After all, Sara had said that she’d eaten a Christmas turkey cooked in that oven, so roast chicken must be possible. And that pretty much covers all that I need!
To my complete astonishment, the house booklet informed me that you have to dial the time on the oven and that it has a maximum time of one hour. If you want to cook for more than one hour, you need to reset the timer dial after the initial hour has terminated. How bizarre is that? The rest of the instructions looked fairly self-explanatory.
As directed, I turned on the main switch towards the back of the oven’s shelf. A “beep” rang throughout the room and the microwave lit up. I glanced at the microwave with deep suspicion, but continued.
The next task was to differentiate grill mode from oven mode. In the house booklet, it was perfectly clear which was which, but since the oven is on a shelf in the corner of the kitchen, there’s not much light. All the icons looked pretty much identical in the dark. I fetched my torch keyring and opted for the most likely looking one.
Actually, my torch keyring has been one of the most useful things I brought with me – I’d never used it before. The light in the lounge is quite dim (or it is when you’ve reached 50 years), so if I need to read any instructions at night in small writing, I get it out. I also used it to examine the shower remote control, and the controls on the side of the television, and the setbox. It makes me feel like a bit of a granny, but it’s effective!
I opened the oven door and it flapped right down just like the doors to the letterboxes in Switzerland. Uncertainty waved through me for a moment, as this wasn’t really my concept of an oven door built to keep all the heat in. It seemed downright flimsy to me. After a short pause while I observed and digested this phenomenon, I continued.
After I’d put the chicken in and shut the door (still with doubts as to its efficacy), the next task was to turn the dial for the timer. Again, my torch came to the rescue. It lit up one manufactured indented line that was pointing to around 5 minutes on the dial and another line scratched on by hand pointing to nil. Obviously, this is Egypt and the manufacturer had got it wrong. Rather tentatively, I turned the dial as far as I guessed it could go and took refuge on the sofa.
After five minutes, curiosity got the better of me. I couldn’t quite believe that this bizarre item could function as an oven and I needed to see if it was heating up. It didn’t seem that warm, but it was definitely working.
An hour later, the sound of an egg timer rang through the flat. I laughed. This oven was so antiquated, I felt as if I was stepping back in time!
I inspected the chicken, but it wasn’t as crispy brown by this time as I would maybe expect, so I wondered if the temperature dial functioned similarly to the timing dial; I had in any case been unsure about what temperature to choose. Consequently, I yanked up the heating setting. I decided I could now put the peas on.
Maybe 40 minutes later, it occurred to me that I still hadn’t heard the peas boiling. I dashed over to the hob and found that all the electricity in that corner was off. I had to turn on the main switch again before anything would work.
I’m still not sure whether the system couldn’t cope with both the oven and the hob being on at the same time, or whether the hour’s time limit on the oven meant that everything automatically switched off. Or had I switched the main switch off when the timer went off as a safety precaution? Either way, my dinner was now behind schedule. Not wishing to have any more drama, I decided to cook the peas only after the chicken was cooked, just to be on the safe side.
Despite all this, the end result looked perfect and tasted divine, as chicken always does. And this is how I came to learn how the oven worked.
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