(Picture is of my kitty, Grimace)

We got our new appliances the other week and they’re all very nice, high-tech stainless steel. Our oven is convection and has a flat stove-top. We’ve since realized none of our pots have flat bottoms anymore and it’s amusing to watch them wobble all over the place. I’ve been in the kitchen every day since started SCD and let’s just say I’ve had some “fun” lately.

I decided to do some bulk baking in our new stove. I put in a bunch of chicken and artichokes, squash, and meatballs to bake at the same time. Well it seems the top rack was a little close to the coils and when I went to take stuff out, I burned the oven mitt. I pulled the stuff out of the stove and my brother and his friend start yelling “YOU’RE ON FIRE!! YOU’RE ON FIRE!!”. I immediately panic thinking my hair is on fire, so I start swatting at my hair with the oven mitts (after putting the dish safely down). “NO NO! DON’T TOUCH YOUR HAIR!!!”. Turns out *I* wasn’t on fire, but my MITTS were (they could have been a little more specific). Somehow I managed not to get my hair caught in the flames, tossed the oven mitts to the ground and the flames went out. Phew. Dinner happened to be delicious that night, thank goodness.

Fast forward a few days and I’m really getting used to our nice new fridge. It’s really big, fits everything comfortably and of course does not fit under our old cupboards. So our fridge is moved to the side in the middle of nowhere with no counter next to it. (We will be getting new cupboards soon.) So I go to take out some recently made chicken stock in order to put it into ice cube trays to have frozen cubes which are more convenient. I take the bowl of stock out and turn around to walk over to the counter.

I hear a little bell and mad galloping sounds but do not react quickly enough and trip over my cat (she’s bad, so we keep a bell on her to warn ourselves) spilling all of the chicken stock over the entire kitchen floor. Of course part of the kitchen floor is new and unfinished, so any spills on it could stain it forever. I quickly run to get the mop and start mopping up. The cat is licking up the chicken stock simply in heaven. I start mopping, she starts attacking the mop, which is removing her precious meal from the floor. When I finally finish, kitty decides it will be fun to jump in the bucket I’m using. Of course there’s water in the bucket so she freaks out and jumps out, spilling the gross bucket water on the floor. I mop up again, trying to be thankful that at least I’m getting a workout? I don’t know how else to look at this lightly. One hour of cleaning so far..

After mopping up I took a small bowl of water and soap over to the new section of kitchen floor. I spend one full hour on my knees dabbing soapy water and then clear water and then dry towels, trying to get any stain out of the flooring. I’m successful! At least to the naked eye, who knows what’s trapped in that wood now.

I hear licking sounds and know the cat is on the counters. Sure enough, she’s helping herself to some delicious dirty dishes. Finally I catch her and toss her outside. That’s what happens when kitty is bad, outside in the snow she goes. I clean the dishes by hand since our new dish washer is not installed. My hands at this point have been wet for about 2.5 hours. They start cracking a little. I finally finish and decide to pull some meals out of the freezer so I don’t have to do anything else in the kitchen that day.

I let the cat back in. She’s purring and acting all sweet and cuddly. Good thing she’s a cute cat..

My parents have been doing renovations in the kitchen and have ordered our new appliances. I’m looking forward to them after cooking on an ancient stove for so long (pictured here). The timer was broken when we moved in (16 years ago) and there’s no way to clean it properly so it doesn’t smoke and set off fire alarms every now and then. The stove top is particularly annoying, since it takes forever to heat up and underneath the elements get dirty so easily yet are hard to clean.

I’m excited about the new stove which will be a flat-top stove and convection oven. The oven is self-cleaning and has a probe for cooking meat. It also has a really nice slide-out rack for getting heavy pans and such out of it. Oh and finally we will be getting a hood fan! We’ve needed this for a long time, hopefully no more fire alarms when cooking! It’s a bit of an inside joke here that dinner’s not ready until the alarm goes off.

The fridge will be nice too. Freezer drawer on the bottom, so no more frozen packs hitting me when I open it up. The drawers for vegetables and fruit are a bit bigger, and the shelves are adjustable. Our new dishwasher will be much much quieter than our one right now, which is nice for answering the phone in the kitchen and putting the dishes on at bedtime. It also has a cutlery rack on the top instead of bottom shelf, which allows for putting more large dishes in the dish washer.

Lastly one of the best things I’m looking forward to is the microwave. It’s a microwave plus an oven! It can bake, broil, microwave, or do a combination of oven and microwave. I don’t like using microwave to heat things up but don’t have many options other than the full oven. This will be nice, like a toaster oven in the microwave. It also has 2 racks to heat up 2 plates of food at once.

With all these new fancy gadgets, I’m not going to want to move out! I have actually started looking into buying my own place, but that means leaving all these new appliances. Hmm..

So the kitchen in my house is currently under renovations – sort of an SCD nightmare if you ask me. My family has always done a lot of renovations to this old house and we usually just do it ourselves (as in my mom and dad do it, while my bro and I complain) so this time is no different. Right now the cupboards, stove, dishwasher and microwave are out of commission while the fridge is pushed aside but still plugged in. Doesn’t make for easy SCD eating, since I usually cook most of what I eat and don’t eat prepared foods. I plan on using the crockpot tomorrow for a meal.

So last night I ended up eating at a restaurant and for the first time ordered an SCD-legal meal (as far as I know). The picture here shows what I got. The restaurant was a burger place which has lots of specialty toppings and burger patties. So I ordered an elk burger with eggplant, avocado, salsa, and mushrooms. It came with a side order of sweet potato fries which I gave to my friend. The burger was delicious and I wish I could have ordered two! It’s amazing how filling bread is, since I think before this night I had never actually finished a whole burger before. It was a pretty tasty and satisfying restaurant experience.

Here’s hoping the renovations go smoothly and I have my stove back soon..

I bought myself a crockpot a couple weeks ago and it has been used quite a bit in my house. So far I’ve made a lamb stew and some chicken stock. The pic is of pork ribs in a tomato sauce my mom cooked up last night. I have to say it’s been a nice addition to the kitchen.

I love it for a number of reasons:
1. Meat cooked slowly gets nice and tender and flavorful
2. It’s super easy, just chop up few things, dump it in and voila
3. It’s nice to come home to a delicious smelling house with food all ready to eat
The crockpot I got is a Rival 3-quart slow cooker from Walmart (costs 20$). Not big enough to make full meals for 4 people, but great for small meals or just for meat. I’ll be looking up plenty of crockpot recipes in the next little while.