Give your oven a big hug

Imagine buying a bag of frozen jumbo shrimp and dreaming about eating it all week.  You finally have a night where you feel like cooking and have the time to cook.  Yes!  The stars aligned last night and I was going to have my shrimp, but it was almost not meant to be.

You see, you can never take anything for granted when you’re not in your own environment.  I’m in a new place, a new country even, and I had never used my oven.  I figure an oven is an oven, how hard can it be?  I should have known better — hello MacGeever.

The recipe for baked garlic shrimp is so easy.  Soooo easy.  Mix the shrimp with salt, pepper, olive oil and garlic.  Then bake for 6-8 minutes at 350 degrees or until pink.  First step — set it to 350 degrees — no problem.  Here’s what I had to work with:

 

Trusty MS-6010 oven

Temperature and fan controls?

Well now.  Let’s start with the icons.  Top heat, bottom heat, and I’m assuming both top and bottom.  Fair enough.  I looked it up online and yep, the saw-shape icon meant “full grill”.  Nice, that’s the one I want.  Now how do I set the temperature?  I’m guessing 1 means “low” and 10 means “high”.  And…which one means 350 degrees?  Fabulous.

So I leave it on the “full grill” and the oven starts to heat up.  I’m just going to play it by ear.  I let it heat up for 5 minutes and then start feeling adventurous.  What the heck does that “fan” knob and that switch do??  I turn the right “fan” knob and nothing happens.  I flick the switch in between the two knobs and a red light comes on and lo and behold, we have air!  Exciting!  I’m learning how to use an oven!

After a minute I open the oven to bask in my own success.  Hmm…I smell something burning, smells like smoke, better just close the oven door.  Thirty seconds later I here a pop.  Oh, there’s no electricity anymore.  I’m guessing the circuit breaker flipped.  Yep!  The master breaker was off.  Whatever, I just flipped it back on and gave it another try.

Lesson #1 – if you get something to finally work, don’t mess with it.  I stopped fiddling with the oven and got on with my shrimp, cooking at exactly 350 degrees of course.  In the end it turned out great.  My shrimp was delicious and no more issues with the oven.

I did discover two things last night, though.  And it’s a lesson I learned previously — if you can’t get something to work or it doesn’t make any sense to you, it was probably designed that way on purpose and for a reason.  So, don’t assume it’s faulty or a bad design — it’s probably you.  Two items:

1. I found out my oven has a button that acts as a stove lighter!  No more matches or lighter thingie.  Excellent.
2. I can’t remember if I mentioned that my bedroom window was missing the glass pane or not.  But again, this was user error on my part.  My bedroom window has two (two!!) separate window panes, both of which slide into the window / wall frame.  I had never seen a design like this before and just assumed that it was missing.  Now I’m slowly starting to understand why things are designed this way.

Anyways, it was nice to eat my shrimp finally.  I’d been thinking about it all week.  I love shrimp.  It’s so easy to cook and not messy like fish.  And it’s delicious.  If I ever get to choose my final meal, it will be fried shrimp and butter bread from Sizzler.