Let's get cooking

How to cook in Spain: If you live in a new build, you have a built in cooker, if you live in an older house, you cook outside. Apparently.

I needed a cooker. We had procured a calor gas one for a while, but it was easier to use the barbeque on a daily basis. Only one ring worked properly, and the seat on that meant that the pan got so hot, everything in it burned. The oven was used only one, and it took 1 ½ hours to heat up a pizza from the fridge (and that burnt on the bottom)!

I actually wanted one with a ceramic hob (easy to clean) and a separate oven and grill. Hmmm. Not in Spain. We looked everywhere. Beautiful built in units available but all with single ovens, or normal cookers – with single ovens. In the end, we ordered one through the well known ‘catalogue’ store, and arranged for our removal company to bring it out to us. This was fine, as we also had a few other large items that we wanted shipped out. However, we had to travel to Alicante to actually pick them up. Not too bad, but it turned out that we had to meet the wagon at 7am, so we had to leave at 5am!!

We picked up the goods, along with another person awaiting their delivery, and brought it home. A few minutes of unpacking and fitting of plug, and I had a cooker. Yipee. A quick trip to the shop, and I had all of the ingredients for my first proper Sunday dinner in months. A few hours later, there I was watching in glee, as the chicken and potatoes turned golden brown. Sitting on the settee, I could smell the dinner wafting through, then suddenly ‘bang’, ‘crash’ and the sound of shattering glass. Oh no. Either the ceramic hob had shattered, or the glass door on the oven. We raced to the kitchen, to be greeted with the sight of smashed wall tiles al over the floor. Three of them had simply popped off the wall, hit the fridge, and shattered all over the floor. Further investigation revealed that a few more were loose, so we pulled them off, and settled down again. A little later, another pop and bang and several more had shot off the wall. We decided that the kitchen had never been so warm and the expansion of the walls had caused them to come off. Oh well. I didn’t like the tiles anyway.