Month in Review - August 2009

If a blog is supposed to be an on-line diary then it isn't much use unless there are regular entries. Nothing is more frustrating than following someones blog where nothing happens for weeks at a time. That is of course unless they have a good excuse.
Well my excuse is that we have been moving house. In fact we have been on the move since the middle of May. Three months camping in other people's houses with one saucepan and a rice cooker and far more boxes of 'essentials' than we really needed have finally come to an end.
Although still surrounded by unopened boxes, with no door to, nor shower screen in, the bathroom and a potential vegetable garden which is a wasteland I am at least using the 'perfect' kitchen which we spent so many hours designing.There probably isn't a perfect kitchen - there can never be enough bench or cupboard space. And by the time you factor in all the limitations of size, plumbing, electricity and gas connections, and then add up the cost most ideals of perfection suffer a fair degree of modification. Nonetheless I am thrilled with the result and especially my new stove.
My criteria for the perfect stove were simple

• gas cook top with plenty of burners and room for big saucepans


• electric oven - preferably two ovens so that it would be possible to cook a roast dinner and a sponge cake simultaneously (this is not something I plan to do often but I need to know that I could)


• a separate grill! What has happened to the separate grill? I still fondly remember my mother's eye-level grill on our gas stove at home. And even my Early Kooka had a separate grill.


• something which looked attractive - practical but not too agricultural - and was easy to keep clean


• and of course something which would fit the space we had available. It needed to be reasonably compact - I didn't want to take up valuable cupboard space to get an extra oven and I couldn't afford to give up bench space for extra burners.

Believe it or not there is such a gem - a Falcon Toledo 90! It is gorgeous- looks fabulous, has the best simmer settings ever and works like a dream.

But the news this month isn't all good. I had had my heart set on doing a postgraduate diploma in Gastronomy at the University of Adelaide but because of all the house moving I had put this on hold until next year. So it was very disappointing to discover that the course has been discontinued. Lack of interest? Lack of financing? Who knows but they are not accepting any more enrolments and I am on the lookout for some other intellectual stimulation.