New Stove

My stove oven has been on the fritz for some time.  The oven would heat up, but very erratically, cutting itself off, no temperature accuracy.  We thought the control panel needed to be replaced, but upon further inspection (pulling out some wires), we discovered that some of the wires were burnt.  Fire hazard!  So for the past week I have had no stove at all.  I did use my crockpot and electric skillet, but my enthusiasm for culinary creativity petered out after a few days of this.

The repairman finally came, but lo and behold, he took my stove away and left me with a brand new one!  My husband (good man that he is) surprised me with this:)  Now maybe this wouldn't be that exciting to you, but I cook a lot (there are seven of us who eat regularly, not to mention various drop-in teenage friends).  And I have never had a new stove in my life -- I just always used whatever stove was already there.

Here she is, a Maytag smooth top electric stove:

She has a lot of features I wanted:  large oven window, self-cleaning, variable burner sizes, delayed bake.  Plus some that I will have to figure out, like a choice to use a convection bake.  I feel like she has a slightly retro look, with her tall white back.  I love how shiny she is --

I'm not worried about maintaining the top because I cooked on a ceramic stove for the past seven years (and it was a used stove), and its top still looked brand new when I got rid of it.  A nice thing the installers did was to make sure the stove was level and that it was even with my countertops.  A little perk that I haven't had -- my old stove was an inch or two shorter.

I'm not one to give my appliances names, but I do feel confident this stove is a SHE.  Maybe she does have a name that I will discover later ;) Anyway, her first test was to cook black beans and rice.  She did fine. The oven was inaugurated by baking two beautiful German Chocolate pies.  I used the regular bake setting after reading online that convection is not the best for pies.  This is all that was left this morning:

(A side note:  I painted the plate behind the stove several years ago at one of those paint-your-own-pottery places.  I was going for a peppermint ;)