As you might have gathered from my posts this year, I haven’t done any cooking at my place for literally months. There are several reasons for this. For a start, Goon’s flat was literally three minutes from conveniences such as a tube station, a decent supermarket (well, decent in the sense it wasn’t one of those dodgy 24-hour corner stores) and was on a busy road so getting back home late at night didn’t cause any safety issues.

Then there is the fact that, although my flatmates are very nice people (in contrast to the nutters Goon ended up with), the flat itself left a bit to be desired. The plumbing is dodgy, it’s impossible to turn the shower on without a wrench and the storage space situation is ludicrous.

For example, this is our fridge, BEFORE I attempted to put my groceries in there.

That’s supposed to hold enough for the occupants of two double rooms and one single room. Potentially five people could live here permanently. In practice sometimes there could be six staying in the flat at one time. Help!

And, while the kitchen looks pretty there are more storage issues. You’d think from that photo that there was a good deal of space. But the cupboard under the sink is a dummy, the one to its left has the washing machine in it and the one on the far left houses the fridge. There’s not a lot of room for crockery and glasses.

And finally, I thought I’d mastered electric ovens but now I need to master an electric oven with no legible temperature markings.

The last of these little problems caused me a bit of trouble when Goon asked for a roast chicken for dinner on our first night in the flat. I got myself down to the amazing Whole Foods market in Kensington, picked up a lovely free-range, corn-fed bird, whose skin I stuffed with sprigs of tarragon. I also smeared some mustard under and over the skin and stuffed the cavity of the bird with onion and smoked garlic. When I came to put the bird in the oven, I had no idea where to set the dial so I thought I’d pop it in at the highest temperature for ten minutes to crisp up the skin then go for the number that looked like 160 C and hoped for the best.

I noticed that this oven got way hotter than I expected. After just a few minutes the skin of the bird had obviously crisped up a lot, so I turned down the heat early. I set it to what I thought was 150C but the bird still cooked in under an hour!

The next day, flatmate Ken gave me an explanation for what happened. The unreadable markings on the oven apparently went all the way up to 250 C. That’s a good 30C hotter than I wanted for crisping my skin. Also, when I turned down the heat it got left at 180C, not 150C. No wonder it cooked so bloody quickly!

Fortunately, I checked the oven just in time so we got a chicken, which was not quite as juicy as I’d have liked, but hadn’t yet reached the stage of being overcooked. The skin was nice and crispy though and the mustard gave it a good flavour and suprisingly dark colour. But, five minutes longer, and we would have had one dry and possibly inedible bird!

And then came the final problem of the evening. While my two flatmates appear to be better cooks than any of Goon’s ex-cohabitants, our kitchen is mysteriously lacking in decent knives. This was the only one that we could attempt carving the chicken with.

It’s a good knife, but rather old and in need of sharpening. Plus it’s not really big enough to carve a chicken. Goon did his best but we ended up with a rather messy chicken, hacked straight down the middle.

Hopefully things will get easier as I learn the use this oven of doom. In fact, I imagine I will learn to use it properly just in time for me to move out of this flat in September. Ah, the joys of student life. Thank God it’s nearly over.