Cheesecake Murdered My Oven and Other Ridiculous Theories

It was Captain Cheesecake in the kitchen with the raspberry goodness that did it.

Perhaps you too felt the disturbance in the force on Monday, June 23rd, 2014.  When a thousand voices cried out and were suddenly silenced.  What were those voices saying?

No.More.CHEESECAKE!

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Cheesecake killed my oven.

That’s right, you read correctly.  My oven was put to an untimely demise by evil food.

It started with sweet potato fries that wouldn’t cook.  An oven that took way too long to heat.  When I gave up and said screw it because I couldn’t wait any longer.  We ate sweet potato fries that were not quite done.  Disgusting?  A little bit.

(On a side note, I give up pretty easily on most activities in the kitchen, especially if it involves washing dishes, so that’s no surprise there.)

Then there were other signs that I continued to ignore following the chewy and slightly squashy sweet potato fries.  Finally, upon smelling a weird but not quite traditional “gas that might kill us all” smell during cooking our Sunday dinner, I decided to call the utility company Monday morning to check it out ‘just in case”, and took off for work.

By the time I came back home for lunch, I was greeted with this attached to my stove:

That’s bad. Very very bad.

Apparently my oven is so dangerous it must be put to death.  The guy from the power company talked to me at length about how I shouldn’t try to cook anything because I could blow up.  He seemed really, really concerned about me blowing myself up.  He kept reiterating it, because it must have seemed like I enjoyed living dangerously, suggesting that we might want to turn off our gas as a precaution.

Ha!  My utility company really doesn’t know me all that well.  I’m kind of sad about that.

The one saving grace was that we are at least permitted to use the stovetop.  That’s good news, considering I just wrote about boxed macaroni and cheese for a friend  (Note:  Click on that link with caution… the inmates there are a little rowdy and might not be for the faint of heart, lol.)

I thought about that fact that my house has it out for appliances.  Most that enter it don’t last too long.  But the oven?  While not beautiful or fancy it certainly lasted a long time.  Ten years.  It was the only appliance that made the ten mile journey from trailer to house.  The trip that included casualties such as a computer desk flying out of the back of the truck and shattering all over the county road and a vacuum cleaner that decided it no longer wanted to suck.

This oven, it was a survivor.  And after a whole ten minutes of thinking about it, I got to thinking that all those cheesecakes that Evil Genius has been making surely contributed to its demise.

You delicious evil cheesecakes you.  YOU did this.

But moving on, one can survive without an oven, right?  Is it so bad not having the option of chicken nuggets, frozen pizza, or enchiladas whenever we want?  It’s nothing the world’s smallest toaster oven can’t handle, correct?

Or cheesecake…

Ironically enough, the same week as the oven’s death was proclaimed loudly from the rooftops Evil Genius’s workplace decided to have a cook-off.  Employees were instructed to bring what they made best.

Coincidence?  Perhaps.  Conspiracy to make sure that the Cheesecake King didn’t get to continue his reign?  Well you just never know.

Not to be defeated, Evil Genius decided to pull out the long banned recipe.  The thing that is forbidden in our household that is rarely spoken of: The Evil Peanut Butter Bars.  He carefully crafted these spectacles of sin while I sat in the living room, crying over a laptop that wouldn’t start.  Lost photos, work lesson plans, and an 800 page work of fiction that I had been working on since early this year.

I blame the cheesecake.

On Saturday we will attempt to go pick out a new oven that we both agree upon and hopefully won’t have the word Chefmate or Hotpoint anywhere in the name.  And additionally I will hope to find that a new power cord will revive my poor little laptop, or you might be hearing another voice crying out in agony.  That would be me, being strangled by my husband…

Just in case you wanted your pants not to fit, here’s the recipe that will make that happen. No baking required.