Kitchen Nightmares

Obstacle of the day: Working the oven in my apartment

Last night, I decided to heat up some leftover pizza for dinner, something that should really only take 15-minutes, max. Instead, it took this silly foreign girl an hour and half to work the damn oven. Why so long? Because of weird stove symbols, a major language barrier and my tendency to over-analyze everything, even the smallest, most mundane tasks.

The oven I’m familiar with has two knobs for cooking: one to control the temperature, and one with the words “bake” and “broil”. I turn the temperature dial to the usual 350 degrees Fahrenheit, set the other knob to “bake,“ add food and voila! A meal in no time.

So what threw me off last night? You might think it was the fact that the oven temperature knob was in Celsius. Not so! A handy Google search clued me in to set the oven to about 175. Piece of cake. No, the hard part was the other knob – the one with four unfamiliar icons instead of words. Since I had no clue what they represented, I looked for the instructions. They were located inside the oven, of course, because that’s totally where a 10-page printout should be. (Um, good thing I checked before turning it on! Oh wait, I couldn't turn it on.) And, this being Finland and all, they weren’t printed in English. Still, no problem - Google Translate could help me read the directions, which would help me decipher the hieroglyphics on my oven, right? Right. (Seriously, what did people do before Google? I am writing this in a Google Doc now!)

I set the translator from Finnish to English and began typing phrases like ‘undervarme tillkopplat.’ Nothing. I assumed it was because my spelling was incorrect so triple checked as I typed. Still nada. Then I guessed it was because my American laptop is not equipped with special characters like ö, ä and å, which were in every word. Of course. I resorted to staring at the words as hard as I could and willing them to mean something. Didn’t work. (Sadly, it never does.)

In a desperate measure, I started Googling the phrases that weren’t recognized by my trusty translator. The results included PDFs of oven manuals - no help, since they weren’t in English. But something caught my eye in the search results - the word Svenska. Swedish??? The whole time, I had been using the wrong language?!? Oy vey.

So finally I was able to figure out that undervärme tillkopplat meant “during heat coupled” and övervärme tillkopplat meant “of the heat coupled.” Uhhh.... I still had no freaking clue what any of that meant!!! So I did what I should have just done in the first place and chose one of the damn settings. The pizza came out fine.

If I only I could shut off the part of my brain that has to analyze every possible outcome of a situation before just taking action. Goodbye two hours of my life I’ll never get back!