Half-baked oven plan in flames

I hate it when she’s right.

I told my friend Jan that I was going to clean my oven — just set the self-clean dial and wipe out the bottom later.

She e-mailed me back, “It won’t be that easy. Not with you, not with your oven. It will be much more complicated, and it won’t be pretty.”

So pooh, what does she know about my oven?

I took out the shelves and cleaned them up a little, pulled off the knobs and polished them and set the dial on clean.

Nothing happened.

I turned it back to bake and saw the little red light come on, but when I switched back to clean again, the light went off. Back to bake again, red light on. Clean —light off, bake — on. This time, I opened the oven door to see what was going on. Little flames were dancing between the broken ends of the baking coil in the bottom of the oven. I shut everything down real quick.

Then I called the manufacturer’s 800 number and got them to ship a new element. But later I got to thinking, gee, a week is a long time to be without an oven. So I drove down to the local appliance center, where they said such a part is a generic thing and sold me something to try.

Drove the element home, called my son-in-law, who came down with a couple wrench tools and, in about 10 minutes, had the new unit in place. We tested it for heat, which seemed to be working and decided it really didn’t matter that we couldn’t make the oven light work.

When I turned to the clean setting this time it worked, so I was feeling all virtuous about fixing the problem for less than $30. At least it’ll be down to $30 when I return the piece I ordered from the manufacturer. Surely they will refund my money. Surely.

While the oven was cleaning, I started a batch of bread in the bread machine. Somewhere along the process, I realized the blade which kneads the dough had snapped in two. The owner’s manual includes no address or phone number or parts number for ordering new blades. The thing was made in China. Not good.

I figured I’d finish the loaf by hand and bake it in the oven, which was clean and cool by now. The loaf was rising as I turned the oven to bake. Nothing. No red light, no warm element, no click. No matter how many times I tried, that oven was deader than a door nail. The top burners worked fine, but the oven held its chill like an arctic cave.

Well, people don’t have to have an oven. I thought about women in China who cooked everything in a wok or over a charcoal fire. I thought about pioneer women who cooked over an open fire in an iron kettle hanging from a tripod. I thought about a friend I used to have who went a full year without using her oven once. (We’re not friends anymore, but it doesn’t have anything to do with ovens.) I went to bed thinking that I could improvise and get along fine without an oven.

The next morning, I went down to the appliance store that sold me the baking element and bought a new stove with an oven. That baby is clean. So is my bank account. I ended up with a clean oven, but it wasn’t simple. It wasn’t pretty. Jan was right.

I hate when that happens.