Thanksgiving Warning: No "Oven Clean" Button
A holiday oven disaster day cautionary tale
Happy Thanksgiving Week Everyone… the following is adapted from a blog post on my website but is as helpful today at diverting disaster as it was last year. Writing Prompt: it is also an example of how to use your everyday events as a writing prompt. Fans love to hear personal stories. Consider everyday events as content to add to your writing regardless of your overall theme,
I Didn’t Know It Was a Mortal Sin
The horror. The panic.
Two days before Thanksgiving, I did the unthinkable. What has been referred to as a “mortal sin.”
The sin of initiating the “self clean” feature on an oven before a major holiday.
It’s the Pig’s Fault
I am a 50 something year old woman and I have prepared my share of holiday meals. I have never, ever, heard of this particular sin. To clean one’s oven seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do before a major holiday. And so on Monday, after a weekend party where sauerkraut juice puddled in the bottom of my Wolf range - see picture of pig for which the sauerkraut was a key accompaniment - I turned the Wolf oven telltale red knob to “clean.”
Oh crap, in my haste to cross something off my to do list, I forgot to remove the racks from the oven as the Wolf oven manual instructed. You see, in a Wolf range the self clean sequence will discolor the racks. Never mind that racks are already discolored because they are dirty, the clean sequence will surely ruin my beautiful range and so I quickly turned the red bevel knob to the off position. Problem solved.
Problem not solved
Problem not solved. You know when you quickly stop your laundry washer cycle because a sock dropped to the floor and you can quickly add it back in? Or perhaps you spy a coffee mug that didn’t make it to the dishwasher so you quickly open the dishwasher midwash and throw that coffee mug on a rack with the rest of its fellows and your dishwasher lovingly resumes? Well, not so with a Wolf range. You see, once you select “clean” to self clean, the oven immediately reaches ungodly high, dangerous temperatures and the dangerousness of the high temperatures automatically locks your wolf oven.
I was wrong
I thought that quickly turning the knob to the off position would stop the cycle and after the oven cooled for a bit, I would simply be able to open the oven. I was wrong. So wrong. The cycle had started you see, and nothing, nothing could stop it. Well actually the cycle did stop but somehow disrupting the cycle was bad, very bad. The oven was confused and felt it was still hot, so hot that it needed to stay locked .
The horror sinks in
Ok, I locked the door. It won’t open. I tried I few things:
*** I pulled on the door, really, really hard. Nope, not helping at all
*** I flipped the breaker on the range. You are pretty impressed that I knew to try that aren’t you? Well, rats, it didn’t work. Still locked
At this point I’m picturing the divorce papers. “No irreconcilable differences, your Honor, she broke the oven two days before Thanksgiving.” The court finds in favor of the plaintiff! Game over
*** I start to look online. Is there a you tube video or a Mom blog post describing how to cure a locked wolf range? Frigging nothing, if you can believe it. A few q&a sites that basically say if you do this, you are screwed. So not helpful.
I break down and call for help
I don’t just call for help, I call EVERYONE for help. I call Wolf customer service and I call three local appliance stores. It’s the Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving now. I had hoped that if I left the oven overnight on Monday my prayers would magically unlock the oven door by Tuesday morning. Upon rising in the morning, no luck. The oven fairies had not visited. Still locked.
I asked all the stores for a service call without much hope. It’s now less than 48 hours before turkey time. Low and behold, one appliance store took pity on me and sent a service technician before 11. My incessant begging surely helped.
We will call the technician who came to my home, the “wolf oven” whisperer. He pushed some buttons and turned a few knobs before returning to his truck for a much needed special instrument. I don’t know what he would technically call the instrument but I would call it a wire hanger. No kidding. Somehow he was able to unlock the obstinate Wolf door with a wire hanger!
Thanksgiving (and a marriage) was saved
Woo hoo. The Wolf Oven whisperer told me to “never, ever , ever use the self clean function on the Wolf range.” If I ever did use the function to “never, ever stop it...let it run its course.” “But really never, ever use the wolf oven clean function.” “Simply turn the oven to 400 and run it for an hour to burn off the sauerkraut juice,” he said. “After the oven cools down hours and hours later wipe it out, He instructed.
Alls Well That Ends Well
This story has a happy ending but I truly hated the horrific stress caused by rushing to self clean my Wolf range. In the future I will never, ever touch the self clean knob on my stove. Ever Ever Ever. Also, I learned my lesson. Slow down and don’t rush. The old saying is true “haste makes waste” or “haste makes a locked oven” in my case.
Finally, ala Carrie in Sex in the City, I had to ask myself, why in the world would Wolf have a self clean mode that is so inflexible? Said another way, where is the big bold warning in the self clean section of the Wolf oven manual screaming at the user : YOU CAN NOT START ONCE YOU STOP...DOOR WILL LOCK AND RUIN YOUR MARRIAGE. Now that’s a warning that would have gotten my attention.
Do you have any oven stories? Ruin a holiday? Please share it in the comments.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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