AGA

So, until we came to England, I had never heard of an AGA.  If you know me, you know I love to cook and bake.  When we first looked at this house, the agent explained that the AGA would be shut off by the owner before we moved in because it's very difficult to cook on.  The AGA mill is about 1/2 mile from our house, and she said that they teach classes there on how to cook on it.  When we moved in, the landlord himself was waiting for us at the house.  When he gave us the tour of the house and how it worked, he explained everything including the AGA.  He is a chef and has a catering company, and he took his time to really explain the AGA to me so that I could use it.  We also have an electric stove/oven, which has a grill in it.  The AGA we have looks like this:

The two ovens on the right are the actual ovens.  The top one is very hot, and the bottom is not so hot.  The stoves on the top left is very hot, and the right is not as hot.

So far, I have used all of them and it just takes some getting used to.  The top oven (really hot) will cook a pizza in literally 3 minutes.  The bottom one is where I have cooked a roast and a pork shoulder and they were in there for hours and came out great.  The stoves have a basket you can use to toast items such as crumpets, bread, and Eggo waffles.   We love this!  You can put a piece of bread in the basket, close it in the left (hot) stove top, and it's completely toasted in about 30 seconds.  Leave it in for 1 min and it's black and burned to a crisp.

For our Christmas dinner, I am going to do the turkey in the bottom oven and leave it there for about 7 hours.  I'm hoping it turns out ok!  This definitely gives me plenty of cooking space to do our big Christmas dinner with all of the fixings, as we will be having 6 adults and 3 kids eating that meal!  I'll post results later!

Here is the website with AGA info www.agaliving.com