Our oven/stove has been having trouble after trouble lately (fair enough, it's about 25 years old), so today we decided to bite the bullet and go buy a new one. We went to three different places looking for an electric range. The thing is, we didn't want the glass-top flat-top kind, because we like to use heavy cast iron pots and skillets, and those will scratch up the glass. Also, I do a lot of bottling, which involves boiling a large pot for several hours at a time, and the glass ones just won't hold up to that kind of use.
However, we discovered that each place we visited only had one coil-burner oven on display. Fine, we'll take that one---except every element now has a sensor on it that will turn off the heat if the burner reaches boiling temperature.
Wait, let me get this straight. You can't boil anything on the stove? No, it's a safety feature, in case Granny is forgetful, so it turns it off for you when it reaches a high heat. So how do you boil an egg or a pot of soup or make mashed potatoes? You don't. No one cooks anymore. Or else you'll have to replace the sensor burners with regular burners. Except those only come in one size, apparently, which don't fit GE ranges (which of course is the only one we could buy).
Someone (probably a man, let me bet) has designed a range that can't cook. I suppose any self-respecting Italian nonna uses a gas stove, but we are trying to get off of fossil fuels, and it would cost a lot to have natural gas installed into our kitchen anyway. So it has to be electric. So the new range arrives on Tuesday, and I don't know if I can boil anything on it. And I don't know whether my special, expensive canning coil burner will fit it at all. (Canning is so intense it melts regular burners. Canning burners sit higher so air can get under them.)
We also tried to buy muriatic acid for the pool today and were told that they no longer carry it because Health & Safety told them it's too dangerous. So demented Granny can't cook an egg and we can't treat the pool because someone is looking out for our safety. Thanks a lot.
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