THE CHRISTMAS DINNER EXPERIMENT [OVEN PRIDE]
The biggest and most highly anticipated meal of the year in our household is without a doubt the superbly indulgent Christmas dinner. Normally cooked by my husband, last year I took up the challenge and decided I would become the yuletide chef and create our celebratory feast from then onwards.
Our oven will be one year old by the time Christmas rolls around and I’m very fond of it. Although we’ve been careful not to slop food inside the oven and spill cheese off the pizzas too often, it’s used pretty frequently throughout the day and it definitely hasn’t been cleaned for quite some time.
It’s recently had chestnuts bouncing off the insides and quite honestly the thought of trying to scrub the inside of a gas oven with my boys leaping around in the house and trying to help wasn’t very appealing and I hadn’t got a clue where I’d actually find the time for it when they weren’t around [which is never]. Plus – and this is a big plus – it was just going to be us for Christmas dinner and so there would be no fear of anyone getting a glimpse of our shamefully stinky oven by accident.
Delightedly, Oven Pride asked us to try their oven cleaner before the big day to see whether having a cleaner cooking vessel had any impact on our food in any way. The challenge was quite simple – cook a Christmas dinner, eat it [how awful], clean the oven using their products and then cook the same dinner, and eat again [the hardship of it].
So here is our stinky oven, in all its lack of glory…
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So here is our stinky oven, in all its lack of glory…
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Cooking and eating the first one was easy – and the meal was delicious – then as I waited for the oven to cool down that evening, I took a look at the Oven Pride packet. The instructions were pictorial, which made things much easier for me because as soon as I see a list of instructions on anything, I’m thrown into a mild panic.
Everything I needed was in the little box – even protective gloves – and we applied the solution to clean the oven cavity and the grills before bedtime to give it time to work as effectively as possible overnight.
In the morning we awoke to a much happier, sparklier oven that didn’t emanate garlic and burned cheese perfume whenever we lit it up – and one that I wouldn’t mind my mum seeing either. It was such a lovely feeling to have achieved the results we had without being wrist deep in suds with tennis elbow on the way.
See for yourself… The beautiful, sparkly, effortlessly clean oven. I just wish there were Oven Pride products for boys’ bedrooms too.
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See for yourself… The beautiful, sparkly, effortlessly clean oven. I just wish there were Oven Pride products for boys’ bedrooms too.
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That afternoon we settled down to our second Christmas pre-dinner [as we took to calling them] and although I was so, so skeptical about any amazing difference from the oven having a few less crumbs on the floor of it, the change in taste really was quite noticeable – everything tasted so much more like it should. It was akin to the difference between eating strawberries that are in season and imported mass grown berries. Everything tasted as it should and even Jensen said the carrots were really tasty.
I’ll definitely be incorporating Oven Pride into my cooking ritual for big meals from now onwards – having a sparkly oven makes me feel happy, and if the food tastes better then my family will be happy too!
Disclosure: Oven Pride compensated us for preparing the meals and provided their products for the experiment. My opinions are my own.
