Carrefour microwave grill oven...

I was going to write this post on Friday, but then got distracted. I was amazed - and amused - by the apostrophe error in the large poster we saw on our way up the travelator in Carrefour. Consensus amongst those who have seen it appears to be that Xma must be Santa's ex-wife, and that he is selling off all her trees (perhaps in revenge?); if so, then then the punctuation was technically not in error after all...

Then yesterday I remembered that I'd taken a photo of an empty bag of frozen peas, and wondered if I could write a full-length post about such a mundane topic. I think I succeeded... it's a bit of a standing joke in our home that I can sometimes take a couple of sentences that don't communicate much and turn them into a lengthy A4 page that some people might even find vaguely interesting.  

But now, finally, I can reveal the reason we were in Carrefour in the first place.  

The ladies staying in our guest flat recently mentioned that they hadn't used the microwave oven, as it looked a bit too old, with so much of the paint worn away that there was a lot of metal showing. (We had asked them to let us know if any of the appliances or anything else was not working.) 

We can't remember how old that microwave is.. but we had it at our old house for some years, so it must be at least ten.  Probably more. It's done good service. And since we were given a very generous gift by these ladies, we thought that perhaps we might buy a new microwave.  Hence our trip to Carrefour.  We studied the various options, and then thought that perhaps we could move our current microwave - still functional and looking reasonably good, six-and-a-half years old - into the guest flat, and have a new one ourselves. 

Most of the ones on offer were small, and basic, like the one we've been using. But we kept coming back to this one, a Carrefour own brand that has 23 litres capacity (all the others were either 20l or 17l), and a grill (broiler) function in addition to the microwave. Better still, it was in the sale (thanks to Xma, perhaps?) and no more expensive than the others. And it was in a black and metallic cover which would go well with the rest of our kitchen.

So we bought it, and installed it, and indeed it looked good: 

We were slightly mystified by this metal stand that came with it, although perhaps that's only for times when the appliance is used for grill only:

Richard plugged it in and switched it on, and figured out how to set the time:

About five seconds later, the display went blank. Totally black all over. He thought the plug was faulty, took it out and put it in again, and it came on, and let him set it again. Five seconds later, it went blank. Pressing the triangle button made it display... for about five seconds.

We assume this is an EU requirement to save power, but rather a nuisance since having a clock on the microwave, always on display, can be very useful. 

We then looked at the display, and wondered what on earth to do to set the thing going. With our old one, one knob set the time, another the power, and that was it. 

I picked up the instruction guide, which was quite thick and looked hopeful:

Unfortunately, although there were instructions in French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Romanian and Greek, there were none in English.

My Greek is far too sketchy to make sense of instructions for an appliance, so I turned to the French, which, despite many decades since I studied it, still comes more easily to me than Greek. Alas, school French didn't include many of the words, but happily there were lots of little pictures in the instructions so I did manage to understand how to get the microwave part to work... just around the same time as Richard worked it out by looking at the icons on the screen and seeing what happened when he pressed them. 

So. We had worked out how to heat up a cup of previously-made coffee, which is a very important process in our house. 

Today, Richard being out, I decided to use the microwave/grill combined function for my lunch, as I had managed to figure out enough French to see how that worked.  G for Grill, C-1 and C-2 for different combinations of microwave/grill. No indication as to when one would use C-1 or C-2, but I tried them both, and even the grill alone. 

I didn't see any browning; it appeared to me that whichever function I pressed, the result was basically the same. 

Still, the complexity of this appliance reassures me that it's much better to leave our simple, intuitive (if older) microwave in our guest flat for people to use when in a hurry. 

Apostrophe Atrocity!

Truly, I'm not a pedant.  

I can proof-read with reasonable accuracy, and I am aware how punctuation is supposed to be used. I understand the differences between there/their/they're, and your/yore/you're... I hope I use them correctly, too. But anybody can make a typing error.  I'm responsible for what I type (and glad when people mention mistakes I might have made) but it's not up to me to judge or criticise anybody else's use of language, unless they've actually asked me to check or proof-read something. Even then, I hope I would remain placid and friendly about it. 

So...

Incorrect use of grammar or spelling just isn't that big a deal, as far as I'm concerned. If it becomes impossible to understand something, it may be a problem, but we're all different, and - to me - the content is far more important than its fine detail. I suppose I would be annoyed if I read a published book that was full of proofing errors - it shows lack of care for the reader - but in general, on occasion, I  mentally shrug and move on. Life is worth more than a few spelling errors.  

Likewise, while I sometimes find classic greengrocer-style apostrophe errors mildly amusing, they don't cause me intense anger and frustration. However, if you are the kind of person whose blood pressure rises dangerously when you see such things, please read no further. 

Out of all the incorrectly-used apostrophes I have ever seen in my life, this one - which appears twice on this large poster in a big supermarket not far away - is probably the oddest:

A new breadmaker..

Six-and-a-half years ago, we bought a breadmaker. After some trial and error, I figured out how to make pretty good bread.. and gradually we went over to using it almost exclusively rather than buying bread from the bakery. Admittedly Cyprus bakery bread is extremely good, but it's also rather expensive. We worked out that the breadmaker would - effectively - pay for itself in about six months if we used it regularly.

It lasted not just the six months, but another six years on top of that with continued regular use. Richard had to fix the pan a few times - something at the bottom worked loose - but the machine itself was reliable, and we had a lot of bread from it. While I used various recipes on occasion, I eventually developed my own standard basic mostly-wholewheat bread recipe which I made, on average, two or three times per week (depending on how many people we were feeding).

And it continued going strong until last week. I had put on some bread, and added the seeds after the beep while the second kneading was happening... then suddenly some horrible graunching noises started. I peered into the pan, and saw that the paddle was no longer going around.

I stopped the machine, I turned it off, I took the pan out and replaced it... but nothing helped. So I left the dough to rise for the second time in the pan in the still-warm breadmaker, then removed it, punched it down, and put it in a bread tin to rise again, and then baked it in the oven.

It came out very well:

... but this was not something I wanted to do regularly.

Richard said that something in the motor had gone and it would be difficult (and probably expensive) to replace. We thought that six-and-a-half years wasn't a bad life for a breadmaker, so decided that we would buy a new one later in the week.

I spent some time reading breadmaker reviews online. When we bought our Morphy Richards machine at the end of 2005 they were quite rare in Cyprus, but they're much commoner now. I thought it might be useful to have some idea of which were the better machines.

However, I didn't find that I was much the wiser. Pretty much every breadmaker I looked at, on Amazon and elsewhere, had mostly good reviews, and a few bad ones. Some of the bad ones were because of poor instructions, and some were evidently due to impatient people expecting perfect loaves the first time. One or two were due to faulty machines which had been replaced.

So in summary, it appeared that pretty much any breadmaker will produce good bread so long as one is prepared to spend some time and effort working through its quirks... but most of the instruction booklets leave much to be desired.

Fine.

I didn't want to order from Amazon despite fairly good prices, because if by chance anything did go wrong, it would be difficult to replace from Cyprus. And postage costs are high.

Since I refuse to go to Orphanides these days, and Metro doesn't have many electrical appliances, our first stop was Carrefour. And it had exactly two kinds of breadmaker. Both offered long thin style pans rather than the tall thin ones, but one was much wider than the other. We weren't sure that the wide one would fit in the space where we had our old breadmaker.

Besides, the wide one was white (while the other was a smart black that would go with our other appliances) and the wide, white one was also 15 euro more than the black one. Neither were brands that I had looked at online, but both were guaranteed for at least a year. Oh, and the black breadmaker had some extra little pans, intended for baking baguettes.

So we bought the cheaper, smarter, narrower version with baguette pans - it was a Carrefour own brand - and brought it home.

Then we discovered that when the lid was open, it was too tall to fit under our cupboards... so our expected breadmaker slot wasn't any use. That meant that we had to move appliances around... and we decided that the coffee machine would go well in that slot:

Indeed, less than a week later it feels as if it's the correct place, and looks absolutely right. 

The only place without high cupboards was near the sink, so that's where the new breadmaker went: 

The instruction manual explained how the  various buttons worked, but was pretty useless otherwise. So I started with my tried-and-trusted recipe, and it came out pretty well: 

So far, so good.

On Sunday, with our friends coming over in the evening, I thought I'd experiment with the baguette pans.  

Unfortunately, the instruction booklet didn't tell me anything useful.  However, I gathered that I would have to make the dough in the breadmaker - set on 'baguette' setting - then take it out at some point, punch it down, divide it in two, and put it in the little pans.  

I did that, but unfortunately must have pressed a wrong button at some point because the baguette dough rose... and rose... and rose.  The electronic display thing didn't help me much - 'bake' was flashing, but it evidently wasn't doing any baking. 

Then apparently I hit the correct combination of buttons and it started baking. But the huge over-risen dough sagged over the edges, so that by the time I took it out, this is what it looked like: 

When it had cooled a little, I did manage to turn it out of the little pans:

It looked very odd... but, happily, tasted just fine. I made a regular loaf too, which sunk a little, and a banana loaf, which sunk a lot.

So I looked in my favourite book about breadmaking: Fresh Bread in the Morning - and remembered that sunken bread often means that the ambient temperature is too warm. It was, indeed, pretty hot in our kitchen so the following morning when I made yet another loaf for the writers' group that was meeting in our home, I used water from the fridge rather than at room temperature. 

It came out perfectly, although I didn't think to take a photo until after it was sliced: