Ok, so we have this oven in our kitchen. It's a Dacor brand oven. It was put in when the people who owned our house in 1992 redid their whole kitchen. lt probably cost some money when it wazs installed back then but it's a crappy oven now. Instead of having words on the dials like "Bake" or "Broil," the folks at Dacor in 1992 decided that obscure pictograms would be better; things like a square with a line at the top and the bottom. What does that mean to you? To me it meant bake, ao I baked everything on that setting. When I finally found the manual three months later, I discovered I had been baking everything on "Preheat."

Another irritating feature of this oven is a little knob you turn to change the temperature or set the timer. The same knob does both, showing the results on a little LED screen. But the knob doesn't work so well, and sometimes when you turn it, the temperature jumps from 100 degrees to 550 degrees. Turn it back the same amount and it goes to 525, turn it less and it's back to 100.

But those minor irritations are nothing compared to what happened today, when the oven refused to open up and give our biscuits back to us. The door was permanently locked for safety! We eventually had to call a rescue squad to use the jaws of life to liberate our batch of biscuits. They were, of course, burned. CURSE YOU DACOR!

Keep watching my home page for more Dacor oven updates.