Fixin' Supper

Tonight’s menu: Red velvet cheesecake from the Blue Sky Cafe in Fletcher, NC. I have a photo of it around here somewhere. Will share later.

We have been eating without a working stove for seven eight days now. Those of you who have been around here for any time at all know that is about to kill me. I realized I should have been logging all these meals.

Day 1: We all went to Chili’s on West End.
Day 2: The 2yo and I ate at home. I think there were nuts and olives involved on my part, but I’m not sure about on his.
Day 3: We ate at Las Maracas. An all-time favorite.
Day 4: We ordered Pizza Hut. I love, love, love the online ordering. I hate, hate, hate when I forget you should not order pizza at dinnertime on Friday night, because everyone else in town does, too.
Day 5: The 8yo spent the night with a friend. The 2yo had various non-cooked nibbles. The rest of us went to Family Wash. It’s always best to do that when the 8yo is elsewhere. Inexplicably, she doesn’t care for this great pub.
Day 6: We ordered takeout pizza from PizzeReal. I love that place.
Day 7: We got takeout Chinese from Dragon Garden [at 4912 Charlotte, never mind what CitySearch says], recommended by my neighborhood listserv. Great food.
Day 8: The 2yo and I had leftover Chinese, Rice-a-Roni and cheese and crackers for dinner. Lest you report me to child services, please know that he also had a banana and applesauce.

Watch for more exciting updates in the days to come. The gas people come Monday, Nov. 12. I am told it’s possible I’ll be able to cook that night, but after what we’ve been through already, I’m going to consider myself lucky to have things up and running before Thanksgiving.

I hope everyone likes Chinese takeout. I think that could be a nice new tradition.

Nashville Gas, the local division of Piedmont Natural Gas, does not provide instructions on their website for getting your house hooked up to their public utility lines. I will do so here as a public service to you*.

1. Fill out the form on the Nashville Gas website for new customers. Someone should call you within 48 hours**.
2. If no one calls you in 48 hours, call*** the Sales and Marketing department at 1-877-279-3636.
3. Ask to speak to someone who can help you determine if gas is available**** ***** ******.
4. Make sure they send you the paperwork you must fill out as a new customer.
5. Return it promptly*******.
6. Ask them how long it will take to run the lines out to your house********.
7. If they don’t come on time, call back to the Sales and Marketing department and find out when they will be coming*********.
8. Once the gas lines are run to your house, you have 90 days to begin using gas service to a water heater or an HVAC unit. Otherwise, you will have to pay Nashville Gas for installing the lines**********. So, have your contractor on call to install your gas lines and your appliances asap***********.
9. Once you have had a independent contractor [usually a plumber or your HVAC company] install the gas lines, they also have to hook up at least one appliance for Metro Codes to sign off on their work. Your contractor should take care of getting the codes sign-off.
10. Now that you have a gas line to your house, and Metro-Codes-approved gas lines and appliances in your house, you are officially a Nashville Gas customer. So now, you must call the main customer service number (1-800-353-6340)************ and request a time to have your meter installed*************.
11. Once the meter is installed, the contractor will probably have to return to do some final work or hookups on your appliances, so be sure to keep him in the loop on your appointment with Nashville Gas**************.

Notes
* As far as I can guess, in my attempts to give Nashville Gas the benefit
of the doubt, they don’t hook up many existing houses to their natural
gas service. I guess their hookup efforts are mostly done with large
contractors building new neighborhoods. Because this process is too
difficult for a regular person like me, with only one college degree,
to successfully manage.
** No one ever called me.
*** I highly recommend you take your lunch hour and go out to your car to call Nashville Gas from your cell phone. Because you are eventually going to get furious with them, and you don’t want to have to subject everyone in your office to your yelling at the helpless, ineffective "customer service" people from Nashville Gas.
**** They aren’t going to be impressed that no one replied to your email form, so don’t bother complaining about it.
***** Under NO circumstances should you leave a message on anyone’s voice mail. You are wasting your breath and time.
****** If you do make the mistake of leaving a message on voice mail, you will probably forget about it for say, three weeks, since it’s now their job to call you, right? Wrong. The person you need to talk to is out with back surgery, and they haven’t assigned anyone to check his voice mail. When you do realize three weeks later you’ve still never heard from Nashville Gas and you call back again, under no circumstances should you mention to the person in the sales department you know your phone call has been lost in voice mail for three weeks due to an employee’s being out with back surgery, which the receptionist informed you of. They will want to quiz you extensively and pointedly about who exactly mentioned that so-and-so was out of the office and why. It will be difficult to re-focus them on the fact that so far, you have been waiting 3 weeks and two days, and no one has yet sent you the forms to become a customer.
******* For all the good it did me, I drove over to Nashville Gas immediately after getting off the phone with them and learning I needed to fill out a form. In the scheme of things, the time saved was negligible. But hey, maybe this list will help you. So, if you’re in a hurry, go fill the forms out in person. FYI, the Sales and Marketing department of Nashville Gas is behind a guard desk and you have to fill out a form to say where you’re going and why, and they will sort of escort you where you’re going. However, they will not answer questions with any useful information.
******** As far as I can remember [this was months ago], it took between two and four weeks.
********* Need I say more?
********** It’s very expensive. You definitely don’t want to have to pay for your gas line.
*********** The way it works is, Nashville Gas is responsible for the line to your house from the gas main [the first thing that happens] and they are also responsible for the meter [the last thing that happens]. Everything in between — hooking your house up to the line they ran for you, gas lines for your appliances, the appliances themselves — must be done by a private contractor, and must be approved for use by Metro Codes.
************ Please note, this number is NOT the same number that you called to get Nashville Gas to run a line to your house. Despite the fact that you aren’t yet paying them anything, and don’t yet have access to their services, they now consider you a "customer," and you must call this line. If you call the other line, the Sales and Marketing department may, say, take three working days to return your repeated voice mails, just to tell you that while they have known you have Metro Codes sign-off for five days now, the install-the-meter-people won’t do anything about it until you call them yourself, at the second number.
************* You [or some adult with authority to act for you] must be home at the time of the installation. The Nashville Gas workers will need to come inside your house to check everything out.
************** Heaven knows they’re not going to.

When I am able to cook again, I can assure you the menu will include squash. Right now at my house, I have

• 3 acorn squash
• 5 butternut squash
• 2 spaghetti squash
• 2 zucchini

I have promised the 8yo she can choose the first meal to be cooked on the new stove. This is all manipulation on my part. Despite my efforts, she eats more junk and less nutritious food than I’d like, and sometimes seems to go for days subsisting on the occasional tub of applesauce.

Any hope of her choosing some of that squash for her meal? Somehow I doubt it.

However, she has — after a lengthy flirtation with the idea — declared herself this week to be a full-time vegetarian. Both her father and I have made an effort to educate her on the fact that that will require her to actually eat vegetables.

Her reply: I like artichokes.

Eight-year-olds can muster up quite a bit of scorn when they try. I then urged her to get a paper route so we could afford to feed her year-round.

 
  At home in the den 

The new stove waited in the den until today, when the plumber got to the point where the stove was ready to go. I certainly enjoy just having the new stove, but I am going to like using it even more. You know we’re not there yet, right? There is no triumph yet. Tomorrow will hopefully bring the codes inspector to approve everything, who will hopefully chat with his friends at Nashville Gas and send them over pronto to install our meter. At which point we will be cooking! with! gas!

We did enjoy the opportunity to bid the old stove goodbye when we ran into the plumber as we were both picking up the kids this afternoon. Sayonara!

  Goodbye, you ol’ piece of junk.

First off, a stove update.

Things are proceeding with the stove. It’s still sitting in my den next to the fireplace, where it looks very nice, if a bit cramped. Work continues on my gas lines, and hopefully in the next few days, Nashville Gas will give us the high sign, and we’ll hook it all up.

Now, I know that getting a new stove and water heater and gas service to your house is not a cause for complaint. Cause for a financial gut-check, perhaps, but I’m just saying, I acknowledge that things must be relatively OK in my life for me to undertake a home-update project like this.

So I hope I don’t come off as complaining here. But is it really necessary for your 2-year-old refrigerator to fail right in the middle of your planned-for-major-financial-purchase-of-the-year??

I didn’t think so.

James, a very nice repairman, is blow-drying my freezer as we speak. Initial diagnosis is "a defrost problem," and given the number of ice chunks he’s pulling out of every corner of the freezer, I tend to agree. Let’s all cross our fingers that’s all we’re dealing with.

We are waiting, waiting, waiting for the new stove. It was supposed to come tomorrow, but the plumber [who is installing all the gas lines, including to my new water heater and YAY to my gas grill] had to resked for next week, so I moved the stove delivery too so as not to be without one at all for several days. Unreliable and old as the current stove is, it does at least cook stuff. Mostly.

The big news here at Fixin’ Supper is that I canceled the cable earlier this week.

"What?" you say. "I know that’s not possible, because all we’ve been getting here all week are links to articles on del.icio.us. What the @#$#@ are you doing, if you’re not watching TV and you’re not blogging??"

Hahaha good point you have there, in the conversation we’re having in my head. Whoever "you" might be.

Well this week the 8yo is here, so I’m sure you realize, this week is all about homework.

I have actually cooked several things in the past couple of days, in a last-minute frenzy, as if I’d miss this awful stove once it’s gone.

* Chocolate peanut butter treats [They probably have a real name but I'm too lazy to go look it up.]
* Roasted butternut squash soup. To.Die.For. Don’t be fooled by the time to make this in the recipe: It takes all day. First you make the toasted spice mix, then the roasted squash and only THEN the soup. Worth every minute.
* Green beans with cracker crumbs. I must have expounded on these before here. [Apparently not. I will share the secret with you soon.] It makes no sense why these are so good, but they are.
* More chicken and rice.

And I’ve spent most of today and tonight reading about the weather online, of course. Someone at work asked me what the heck I’d do about tornadoes, without cable.

Pause.

I thought the whole point of a tornado was to interrupt your cable access, but maybe that’s a unique phenomenon in East Nashville. Of course, as a long-time East Nashville resident, I have both my battery-powered weather radio, and intimate knowledge of every weather website on the web. So whether we’re having a lose-the-power storm or a freakishly-didn’t-lose-the-power storm, I’m all over it.

  This is not the new stove

I have freaked out even me this morning. After two incidents of uneven/burned baking in three days [and not the first ones, either], and Thanksgiving looming, I finally snapped. I already knew the specs I wanted in a new stove:

* Stainless or stainless-look
* 5 burners
* Gas cooktop
* Double oven
* Self-cleaning ovens

I was flexible on anything else, but frankly, when those are your starting parameters, you don’t have a lot of choices under $2000. [Plenty over $4000, but I didn't want the oven to outweigh my equity in the house.]

I ended up looking at a Maytag and a Jenn-Air. I was stunned at how much prices varied on both appliances. Apparently I should be price-checking more items before purchasing, because I ended up with the Maytag, and saved several hundred dollars off the first price I saw. I found similar deals on the Jenn-Air, but it started out around $300-$400 more expensive than the Maytag, and I couldn’t find anything to convince me I wouldn’t just be paying for the name.

I will have to schedule delivery with Home Depot. I’m hoping I can get it to somehow coincide with the installation of my water heater in the next couple weeks — then my plumber will already be here to hook up all the gas lines for me.

Am now going to plan my menu of beans and rice for the rest of the month so that I can pay for the aforementioned purchase.

  I heart my microwave 

For a person who loves to cook, I have frequently operated with some substandard equipment. For instance, my stove. My current stove looks to be at least 30 years old, but I’m guess probably much older than that. It’s something between harvest gold and almond, electric and 40 inches wide with four burners, an oven and a warming oven which doesn’t really work. The real oven is also starting to play out [re: sometimes the temperature just sets itself] so I have picked out the replacement unit. However, I can’t install that until I replace a patio door [in progress] and then my HVAC and/or water heater [next up], because the new stove is gas. Nashville Gas only pays for the first 100 feet of line if you’re installing an HVAC or water heater, both of which I need.

Got all that?

OK, so, my microwave had a similar checkered past, though it was all associated with me. While I can take no blame for the stove, having just bought this house two years ago, the microwave has been my bad for a long time.

When I went to college, my parents gave me an old microwave they had. I dunno, maybe it was from the break room at my dad’s store. I think it had been at the house for a while. At any rate, it wasn’t new. Ah ha, I’ve found on the inside that it was manufactured in February 1988. Amazingly, it did have 1000 watts of power, but it was small and had no turntable.

I kept it for so long because it was a damn good microwave. It was simple: it had a small number of power settings, and otherwise, you set the time and pressed "start." I understand that. My mother is now on her second microwave in my memory that I am unable to operate. Every time I visit my parents, she’ll shout instructions at me from another room, saying, "Press turbocharge and then press 12 and then press vegetable and then press start." I have no idea why that’s how you melt butter. You see what I mean? Her microwave is so complex that it makes no sense.

So I resisted upgrading to a "better" model for several years, based solely on my experiences with my mom’s microwave.

This fall, my trusty old microwave started regularly taking 15 minutes to bake a potato. At that point, you might as well be using the regular oven.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I went down to Best Buy. I was very intimidated, but I at least had several parameters to help narrow my search. My cabinet has a pretty low profile, so I needed something short. I wanted something I could understand. And it had to come in stainless. [In two years, I've managed to get a new dishwasher and a new fridge....soon we'll be matching again!]

Hallelujah, they had a floor model LG on sale. 1200 watts. Turntable. Gi-normous on the inside but short enough to fit under my counter. Shiny stainless. And SIMPLE!

Here’s my only point: when I get started doing something complicated in the kitchen [not infrequent], I better be able to touch it. While there is a bit of an art to microwave cooking, to me, it’s not the same as making a ganache or tempering chocolate. [I don't know why all my examples involve dessert, but if life had more dessert, I'd be better off.]

In other words, microwaving is not part of the sport of cooking to me. So let’s not have it be a pain, either.

I’m pleased to report that my new microwave cooks potatoes in record time, melts butter just like that, and heats up toddler dinners in mere seconds. That’s what I need!

I can’t believe this, but the people at Williams-Sonoma [I'm not linking to them because this is so ludicrous that you shouldn't shop there or visit their site either] haven’t really figured out the Internet. Or even, say, people.

So, I need some new cooking equipment. Various pans and things. So I thought, why don’t I just create a wish list on Williams-Sonoma and I can add that to the Amazon wish list? I have no idea how the Creekmore family conducted the holidays before the advent [ha, ha] of Amazon, but it’s sure made my life easier.

So I went over to the WS site, and there’s the wedding registry….where’s the wish list? Nope… not there…. not there either. I’ll sign in. Surely then I’ll see it. I registered for the site, whereupon I was forced to give them both my home AND my shipping addresses — people, this is NOT necessary for me to have access to your "recipe box" — and lo and behold, there’s NO wish list.

I went to look at the registry. It’s exactly what you think it is: a wish list tied to a specific event. I am going to spell it out for you in the event anyone from Williams-Sonoma ever wanders across this site:

If you’re not getting married, or possibly housewarming, very few people are using this feature. We consumers out here rarely like to just say, "Hey, buy me this stuff!!" [The registry also requires you to have an event date -- and it even deletes your list a year after the event!] What, I’m supposed to pick Dec. 25 as my event?? And what if my family only ponies up for some of the items this year?? And I don’t buy them myself before next year? Next year, ZAP!! That’s silly.

Instead, we like to think to ourselves, "I’m sure wishing I had that lovely Bundt pan. Maybe I’ll buy it someday. I’ll mark it here on this wish list so I won’t forget about it." Then of course, if someone happens to ask you, what would you like for your birthday? Well, then — you have a list all handy you can send them a link to. These are just some ideas you’ve been thinking of, of course.

That is how the social contract works, Williams-Sonoma. Help us help you sell those Bundt pans.