Monday, November 12, 2007

out of the frying pan, into the fire

You know what happens when you switch to a Raw Foods Diet? Your oven pretty much becomes obsolete. Dead space.

I mean, MyFavoriteKid is still eating cooked foods, but most of them can be cooked on the stovetop or in my toaster/convection oven. For myself, I pretty much only use the stove to heat water for tea or if I am cooking for guests. There really is no need to spark up the oven. Not for one person. Unless I am baking something for MyFK that wont fit into the the toaster oven. Like a few fillets of salmon, for example. His favorite.

So what does a Raw Foodie do with all that dead oven space? Well, some of us use it to store things. Like things we need to tuck out of sight.

For example, when I make food for myself, I sometimes use a fancy food dehydrator as part of my prep. I use my fancy dehydrator to make delights such as this:


veggie burger on onion bread
that was my lunch today, and I don't care what you think, it was damn good


My fancy dehydrator has many large trays. After I wash the gangly things (and their two kinds of liners), which take up much counter space and commandeer the entire dish rack, I sometimes put them in the dead space of the oven until they are dry. At which point I then return them to their proper storage place (*cough cough*).


Do you see where this is going yet?
Do I even need to finish this post?

Probably not, but I bet you at least want to see the pictures proving my stupidity:


inside the oven


melted dehydrator trays+liners w/orange towel



that's the oven rack turned upside down, with plastic drippings

I kind of like that last shot. It reminds me of one of my all time favorite songs, "Fake Plastic Trees". It seems like the meltoid mess might even have a little artistic value . It's quite sculptural, no? Do you think I could sell it to pay for the $100.25 (plus tax & shipping) it will cost me to replace the parts??

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The house got pretty smoked out. Chemical burnt plastic smoked out. Once the danger had passed and I was able to hurl the melted goo out the back door, we opened the whole place up and then left. I took MyFK out for Hawaiian BBQ. He had seafood noodle soup and fried shrimp. I had the 4 cups of IcebergLettuceSalad. Yum.

Our lungs are still hurting a bit, and the air in the house just sort of has a taste to it. I have windows open still, but it is expected to get down into the mid 40's tonight. Not freezing, I know, but I'm not really in the mood to leave them open and crank up the fans, either.


I am so damn glad I just invited the troupes here for Thanksgiving Dinner in a little more than a week. And not a Raw Thanksgiving either--the kind of Thanksgiving that requires a functional oven. Whee.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

HA HA HA HA HA

That is soooooo something I would do.

And that sandwich looks delicious.

Mouse said...

Oh..sh*t. I really hope that your oven can be cleaned of all that goop before Thanksgiving! *hugs*

Lorena said...

I'm totally not giggling, because I have totally never done the same thing (but with a rice cooker).

Hee hee hee <-- not giggling, just ... coffee. Stuck in my throat. Ahem.

Becky in Iowa :O) said...

Oh man I feel for you. I know just how evil that smell can be. When my boy was just a newborn, my father decided that all the nipples needed to be sterilized in the middle of the night. He put them on the stove to boil and of course he fell asleep on the couch. I have never been so scared in my life. I woke at about 5am to the sound of the smoke alarm. My son's room was right next to mine and I grabbed him up in his blankets and ran outside in my jammies. We ended up sitting outside in January for nearly 3 hours while my folks ran a couple industrial fans to clear the house of smoke. yick!!

Janice in GA said...

This is SO like something I would do too. And I do think there's a certain artistic quality to the meltingness. Not that it makes up for the toxic fumes...

alphabitch said...

Ha!!! Not funny when it happens, obviously, but makes for a great story. My mother used to store potato chips and saltines in the oven in the summer, and there would inevitably be a cool day in the early fall where she'd be inspired to bake cookies, or want to use the oven to broil steaks or some such. So she'd set it to preheat and then wander off, busy with something else.

The results were never this spectacular, though, I gotta say.

And I myself once fell asleep with a pressure cooker full of chicken & vegetables on the stove. Over high heat. It was ugly, although it was a new-ish pressure cooker that has a safety feature: a piece that melts and releases the pressure after it's been on the stove too long. I didn't even try to clean the thing out.