At first it was a game. I tapped button after button, tapped and held each sensor, slid my finger along the touch-screen slider… all the while hoping to get the stovetop to heat up. But as I tapped and fiddled, holding my hand above one of the burner surfaces and sensing zero heat, my game turned into more of a breakfast emergency. I needed to make our oatmeal before Erik got out of the shower, or at least in time for him to make it out the door. Even though the stove was happily beeping and chirping at me with every tap, I was getting no heat whatsoever.
I set the built-in digital timer. Nothing. I tried another burner. Still nothing. There was a pause button on the stove, which I didn’t understand but I pushed it, and then reset the whole thing. Nothing.
Finally, exasperated, I googled the stove brand and found the manual.
“Amica induction hob with touch sensor control,” it began.
“Once you have read the instructions, operating your hob will not be a problem.”
Comforting.
I kept going. “The instructions should be followed carefully to avoid any unfortunate accidents.”
Decidedly not comforting.
Skimming past a lot of installation instructions, I finally found what I needed. A line drawing of a pot on a stove. And the words next to it blew my mind.
“Electric oscillator powers a coil placed inside the appliance. This coil produces a magnetic field, which induces eddy currents in the pot when it is placed on the hob. These currents make the pot real transmitters of heat, while the hob glass surface remains cool.”
Whaaaat? Why have I never heard of this technology before? (Apparently this is available even in America; I just googled it. Do you know anyone with one of these?)
Then I got to the juicy bit, labeled “pan detector.”
“If a pan is not placed on a cooking zone or the pan is unsuitable, the Y symbol is displayed. The cooking zone will not operate.” Aha! No wonder I wasn’t getting any heat on my hand. This stove will only work if there’s a pot on the burner. Or if you have a bionic hand, I guess. They say these stoves are also risky to use if you have a pacemaker. Hey! I just thought of an alternate Star Wars plot. All they had to do was give Darth Vader an inductive stove with no instruction manual!)
Once I got cooking (which is a unique experience because the pot buzzes rhythmically due to the magnetic pulse), it turned out to be much faster than regular electric. I was heating some milk for coffee (no microwave here) and it frothed up and boiled over in seconds. All over the stovetop. Two mornings in a row. Good thing the glass surface is easy to clean.
The next household technology that’s giving me a run for my money on this trip is the laundry. Everything in this European flat is small and “economy,” including the two-in-one washer-dryer in the bathroom. You put your clothes in with soap, and an hour later they come out clean and dry… well, sort of. Actually the dryer is ventless, so the clothes come out boiling hot and steaming all over the place. You have to hang them up lightning fast, or else they wrinkle up like tissue paper from last Christmas (and sometimes they come out like that anyway).
Don’t get me wrong; I’m still very glad to have a washing machine. I lived without one for years in Eurasia and so doing my single load of laundry was a Friday night activity that could stretch on for hours, singing in the bathroom while I hunched over the tub rinsing, wringing, rinsing again and then hanging everything on the clothesline for the neighbors to scrutinize. I’ll take whatever help I can get.
But Erik’s wrinkle-free polo shirts have been coming out of the wash in wads. I feel compelled to iron them, because as my mom used to say, “I want to send him to work looking like he has a wife at home.”
Yesterday I spent an hour with the mini economy ironing board, working out the wrinkles from a week’s worth of shirts. Fortunately there’s great wifi in our flat, so I listened to a Bible Project podcast about trees in the Bible and pondered some good things while I worked.
Then I made another major household-technology-related mistake. I baked meatballs.
Everything had been going so well. I was proud of myself finding ground turkey and ground beef in the store, translating “parsley” and finding it, avoiding a sure culinary crisis by discovering that despite the visual similarity, cumin seeds are NOT the same as fennel seeds (which they don’t seem to have in Poland at all so I left that part out), and rolling my little meatballs just like home.
Then I put them in the oven (which is a convection oven! How neat!), set the built-in digital timer that I had learned how to use (without even consulting that part of the manual, thank you very much) and went on my merry way to work on something else.
20 minutes later my senses started ringing alarm bells in my brain: what’s that sizzling sound? What’s that SMELL? I opened the oven (cue large cloud of smoke and steam followed by panicked search for oven mitts, of which there are none, and wrangling pan out of oven with dish towel, narrowly avoiding “unfortunate accidents”).
I forgot that convection ovens cook way faster than regular ovens (so many physics lessons this week)!
The meatballs weren’t quite singed, but they were pretty close. Erik came home and got blown back at the door by the intense smell. He made some vague comment about how “it smells like dinner in here.” Bless his heart.
We went out to eat that night. Actually, we would have gone out anyway (the meatballs were for spaghetti the next day). But when we came home, we realized how much the flat still reeked. Including all of Erik’s polo shirts which I had so carefully hung up to avoid re-wrinkling them. I’ll probably have to wash them all again in that little power machine. Time to go find the next episode of that podcast!