My enormous American stove/oven

I'm thinking by the time I get to America I'll have learned an awful lot about that country, just from various encounters with their exports. Most of the foreigners we hang around at CAJ are American. And the library is too. Costco is too.

One impression I'm getting is that things are enormous over there - shops, portion sizes, people (no insult intended, I've met some very tall Americans) and even ovens.

I have inherited a house which has housed a number of Americans in the past. Sometime a long time ago someone went to the effort of bringing an enormous oven out to Japan. It is still installed in this house. I'm still coming to grips with its size. It is almost twice as wide as my Japanese oven about about one and a half times as deep and one and a half times as high.

It is the first time in my adult life that I've used a gas oven or a non-fan-forced oven. It is also in Fahrenheit. All these years that I've been translating old recipes from F to C, now I have to translate back! Lighting the oven means I have to pull out the door at the very bottom and practically lie down to put the lighter into the back. The pilot light is broken. But at least the oven works. But it is taking some getting used to.

This pizza is 45cm x 45cm. It fits in the oven as is.

I don't yet have any large trays to use in it (mine are all small Japanese sized ones), but a colleague has pulled some out of storage and promised them to me. I'm looking forward to that. Baking biscuits (or cookies) at two dozen at a time is a slowish way to bake for hungry boys.

You can see in this kitchen photo that the oven looks a little out of place in this large Japanese kitchen. But I don't mind. Now I have two ovens, one of which is huge. The other of which is small, but reliable and doubles as a microwave and grill (?griddle for Americans). I'm doubly blessed.

I also have the opportunity to bless others too. I've volunteered to bake periodically for school events. Let's hope my cakes turn out better than my first effort for a young man's birthday last week. That cake looks more like fudge than cake!