Look what I have got!

After waiting patiently for over 7 years, I have got one!

I started off with a 4-oven, white, gas-fired beauty many years ago, then swapped for an elderly cream 2-oven after moving house some years later, then to nothing after moving again.

Now finally, after I have been quietly pining away, we have a shiny, navy blue, second-hand gas friendly, warm, cosy Aga. It is sitting there in my kitchen, with a large kettle on the top waiting to make tea.

Why did I want one? I can’t tell you. But when we brought home the first one, a snip at £500, I ran my hands along the solid iron top and felt like I had come home. All other cookers were mere toys to me; I know I had many people to cook for, so this may have had something to do with it.

I don’t have that excuse now, a mere 4 people live in this house. I can cope with my electric hob and my electric oven half way up the wall in a box. But I don’t like them, I never warmed to them.

When the children were little, and we had that 4 oven Aga, the baking and roasting was done using the instructions as follows:

Hot stuff like roasting – top right

Medium temp stuff like baking cakes – bottom right

Warming plates, keeping food hot and overnight slow cooking – top left

Keeping kids feet warm – bottom left.

All my recipes had cooking instructions written with ‘cook 40 minutes top right’, or ‘bake 20 mins bottom right’, or ‘leave overnight top left’, which meant they were difficult to share with friends who had no Aga.

In the Autumn and Winter the kids would come in cold and damp after school, kick their shoes off, and lay on the rug on the kitchen floor in a perfect semi-circle with their chilly feet warming slowly in the bottom left. This was the ‘cold feet’ oven, and no food was ever cooked in it.

When I was pregnant and I couldn’t sleep, I would creep downstairs for a quiet cuppa. As I was up and in the kitchen I thought I might as well use the heat of the oven and knock up some chocolate flapjack ready for the next day. Have you ever smelt chocolate flapjack as it comes out of a hot oven? The melted chocolate and syrupy sweet aroma is very pungent, and the smell wafted up the two and a half flights of stairs to the top floor, and slowly, one by one, the children would drift sleepily down, rubbing their eyes, asking where that lovely smell was coming from and could they eat it.

And after I’d had the baby, the grab rail that runs along the entire length of the cooker was an ideal aid to enable me to do exercises, rather like the bars ballerinas have while making me a cup of tea or roast dinner at the same time. Wet clothes will dry hanging above it. Cold pyjamas will warm on the rail ready to slip children into before they go to bed. Cups of tea will stay warm if left on the top, while you go and sort something out. Dinners can be put in the warming oven for late-comers, with no need for a microwave.

Come and have a cuppa by my Aga. I think you might like it…

The arrival...