I’ve been rather busy lately.  Yesterday I spent the morning at Granville Island, where I bought a glass octopus Christmas tree ornament and a book of vegan baking recipes - and then spent the afternoon baking.  This is a major challenge because I don’t have an oven.  What I do have is a little microwave/oven como unit, which is inadequate on several fronts:

1. The inside is the size of a microwave, so fitting a cookie sheet in there requires application of non-Euclidean geometry, or a trip to the store for a smaller sheet.  This makes baking hard because you have to put your stuff in there in several “heats,” which is less than optimal because the leavening ingredients are working as soon as the wet ingredients mix with the dry and to have them sit on the counter for twenty minutes while the first half of the cupcakes bake is bad for your outcome. But making the recipe in one-third batches to time completion of the mix with availability of the oven is bad for my mood.  We suffer the consequences of the former.

2. It doesn’t get very hot, but brazenly lies about it anyway: “DING! Oven is now 375.”  Pfff!  I use an oven thermometer but it’s not much help because the turntable rotates when the oven is on, and if you open the door the heat promptly rushes out, so I have to try and read the tiny thermometer numbers through a dark glass door as it spins around inside.  It’s not good enough for delicate baking like pastries and cakes.  And the back corner is way hotter than the rest, which you’d think would be solved by the turning of the turntable, but even the smallest cookie sheet is too big to actually rotate.  It just bangs around inside as the turntable goes left, then right, and the tray catches on the walls.

3. It occasionally goes through a phase where it screams while it turns, which is quite alarming.  I don’t know the source of this but it seems worse then there is either nothing in the oven at all, or something heavy.  WTF.

I’m thinking of asking my landlord if we can get an oven installed, but as Husband observed the landlord is a pretty reliable “no” man.  No dog, no cat, no balcony renovation, no replacement floor in the hallway closets.  So I’m doing the best I can with what I have.  Yesterday I made date squares (which need fiddling - the crust was too dry) and sugar cookies (which are a real pain to do in heats!).  I made royal icing and iced some of the cookies, which was way too much work for the return.

I also made some baked potatoes that I tried my vegan sour cream on.  I don’t think this sour cream would pass for real, since it’s made with tofu and there is a tofu-y taste, but we like it.  It’s creamy and tart and has the perfect texture - plus it’s full of protein and all that tofu goodness.  I scooped out the flesh from halved baked potatoes and mashed it with the sour cream, salt and pepper, and chopped green onions.  Then I refilled the skin shells and they are ready to be rebaked.  Tonight we’ll have those for dinner with a spinach salad and a green bean and mushroom stroganoff, which will also get some sour cream on it.  I’ll try and get pictures of this process.