We have a few appliances that are on their last legs. Our dishwasher gave out last year and we finally replaced it after Kirk repaired it several times. We’ve been wondering about our fridge as it has become rather loud and ice cream actually softens in the freezer. Our teensy microwave that basically only gets used to heat milk for my morning chai gave up its handle on opening one day. We’ve looked hard, but its the smallest microwave we’ve ever come across and there isn’t anything on the market that will fit in its spot. We have always hated our range hood.  But it’s the range itself that has finally driven us to look at new appliances all around.

A couple of weeks ago I encountered an unsettling problem with the oven as well as a simple irritation. The irritation was that if i preheated the oven, the timer wouldn’t function. Well, at least I still have my grandmother’s old bell timer so I could work around that one. But then after I pulled my muffins out of the oven and turned off the oven…. it turned itself back on…. six times! Can’t say I like that new feature much.

Last night Kirk cooked dinner and about a half hour after we had eaten and were sitting in the living room we heard a strange noise. Kirk went into the kitchen to investigate and discovered that the range hood fan had turned itself on. Figure that one out! That was a new symptom.

To fix the range will cost over $600, and we’ve already fixed it twice before. Time to look at new appliances with a serious eye.

So we have more or less settled on a package of GE Profile appliances. Our tough one is the fridge as we have a very limited amount of wiggle room. Can’t  be more than 31″ wide (therefore no side by sides or double door fridges), can’t be more than 66″ tall, and we want a bottom freezer this time. Seriously limits us in our choices, but we did find options in Kenmore, GE, LG, and Kitchen Aid.

With respect to the range, we want one with true convection, self cleaning, a solid cooktop (I hate pans that aren’t level) with a bridge element and a warming zone, and the controls on the front. I never understood having to reach across hot pots to turn things on and off. I think this is why the controls on our current range keep going wonky.

Now we come to the range hood. Since our microwave is starting to disintegrate, we considered an over the range microwave range hood combination until we discovered that we could get this little wonder with a convection/microwave. This would get rid of our range hood, our microwave, and our countertop convection oven all in one fell swoop.  Three appliances replaced with one, and cupboard and counter space freed up? How can we refuse?

So that took us down to Kenmore and GE Profile. I think we have more or less settled on the GE.

Where does religion come into play here? Just wait, I love this part.

So last night I was wondering if the GE appliances could be programmed for either F or C temperature readings. I have a lot of European cookbooks that provide ingredients in weights and cooking temperatures in Celcius and I always to prefer to cook in the actual measurements and temperatures that a recipe was printed in. The answer was yes, it would read in either. But as I was scanning the features I ran into this, check out the tenth line under “Controls”

What?

So I went on the hunt. And I found a blog about this “Feature”on Mano Singham’s Web Journal Entry on this topic.  I’m guessing that the video at the bottom of his blog post has probably incited some vicious debate on YouTube.

But, in the meantime, we have to cook our way through our freezer so we can order some new appliances….