We have a self-cleaning oven. For a while, I thought maybe this meant that fairies came in the night and cleaned the oven for us, but after an extended period of hopeful waiting, this does not appear to be the case. In fact, it involves setting the oven to some dangerously high temperature and scorching the holy hell out of the dirt, then scooping up the ashes. Which is actually a rather appealing solution to housecleaning, don’t you think? Screw the clutter, we’ll just carbonize the shit out of everything and then flush it down the toilet.
You also need to know – as if that won’t become self-evident by the end of this post – that I am not the most diligent housekeeper in the world. We don’t exactly live in squalor, but my threshold for a little mess is probably higher than most people’s.
So anyway, you’d think a self-cleaning oven would improve this situation, even if no fairies come to do the dirty work for you — and especially considering that since I’m no domestic goddess, I will seize any opportunity to NOT make dinner, thus reducing the wear and tear on the oven. But eventually even the most sparsely used oven gets a good coating of warmed-up take-out crumbs and frozen lasagne goo burnt to the bottom and needs a good cleaning.
Despite the fact that the nanny had previously expressed reservations about using the stove because of the ghastly amount of smoke that belched out of it one day when she was preheating it for chicken fingers (and decided instead to feed the boys peanut butter sandwiches for fear of using the oven), the tipping point actually came a while ago when we made homemade pizzas and some of the pepperoni slid off the cheese and ingratiated itself under the burner coils. Now, every time we use the oven everything tastes like charred pepperoni.
So we decided the time had finally come to test the self-cleaning part of the oven. Although I suck mightily at housework, I’m actually pretty good at filing paperwork (I am, after all, a bureaucrat in my day job) and was quite surprised when I could not find the oven owners’ manual anywhere, and setting the oven that high without having a vague idea of what I’m doing scared the crap out of me seemed unwise.
So after an endless amount of dithering, procrastination and just ignoring the problem, the charred pepperoni taste finally compelled me to the GE website, where they said sure you can get an owners’ manual here, just enter your model and serial number. It took me a while, but I found said model number and copied it carefully to a notepad and transcribed it onto the website, which promptly replied “that model does not exist.” I rechecked the numbers, and I hadn’t made any mistakes. It was the right model number, but apparently GE now denied its existence.
This was about as far as I got a year ago (did I just admit it’s been more than a year since I cleaned my oven?) and I lost interest. But by this time we were really, really desperate to clean the oven, so I perservered. And then I had a brain wave, and I went to the GE website and found a model that looked and sounded just like ours – coil burners, lift-top, self-cleaning, shiny white and purty – and copied THAT model and serial number into the “get yer own manual” page. (I’m so clever, aren’t I?) And once again the helpful reply said “that model does not exist.” On the same damn website!
So finally, getting stubborn, I started clicking around and actually found an oven reasonably like ours, and when you click on the product specs, it gives you a link for that oven’s owners’ manual, which was close enough. So I printed it out and read it, and now I know how to self-clean an oven that’s at least mostly like mine. Just to be safe, I read the owners’ manual of three or four other self-cleaning ovens, making sure that the basic instructions remained the same. I am now an expert in the functionality of the self-cleaning feature on standard GE ovens.
That was two weeks ago. Despite my newly garnered expertise on the subject, we still haven’t gotten around to actually cleaning the oven, and the muffins continue to taste like charred pepperoni.
Oh well.
(This post may look familiar to those of you who read Nancy’s blog. Yes, I’m now pilfering my own comments on other people’s blogs for fresh material. Standards are falling like snowflakes around here.)
