The Christmas Party

Christmas 2011

Here is a post I wrote and never uploaded for the Christmas Party I was so excited about

So about a week before Christmas I host a Christmas Party.  I have to admit that I went a little decoration crazy.   

I was mostly trying to decorate with red, white and silver.  All of the glass ornaments hanging from the red cloth draped over the mirrors are the no mess glitter ornaments that I had made a few weeks before (see post below).  

The spread was pretty simple, though this wasn't done on purpose.  Two nights before the party I was making some zucchini bread and zucchini muffins and suddenly I noticed sparks in the back of my oven.  The heating element on the bottom of my oven had one spot and it was glowing orange and sending out sparks.  So I immediately turned off the oven and removed all the muffins and bread from the oven.  Luckily the muffins were finished, but the five mini loaves of bread all had to be thrown out, because they had not cooked through before this happened.  This is the moment I started to freak out, I had a chicken wellington wreath shaped entree I was planning to make for the main course, and a bunch more baking to do between this and my party.  So the next day at work I call every appliance part place I can find and they all tell me that they can absolutely get me my part, as long as I can wait about a week.  UM, NO!  Then I finally find a place (in a suburb that is of course on the other side of Dallas from where I work), but they had one in stock and would be open until 7pm...I was saved.  So now it is the night before the party; my husband and I drove all the way across town during rush hour to find this little hole in the wall shop that did have the exact part I was looking for, and all I could think was 'alright, if we get home get this fixed I can get right back to it and still have like 4 hours of baking time'.  We get home to repair the oven, now before you replace the heating element you have two options; the first is to pull the oven out and unplug it or second to use the fuse box to shut off power to the oven.  In my house we had two problems with this our oven and stove top was built into the existing counter and even if we pull out the bottom drawer you can not see the plug, the other problem is that not one of the circuit switches in our box turned off the oven light.   I know what your thinking, flip the master circuit breaker and boom easy, that is what I thought too.  In my house if you turn off the master breaker switch every light in the house goes off, except the one telling me that my oven is on. 

Long aggravating story short, I didn't have an oven for the Christmas Party.  I did however make some great crock pot recipes, some awesome crock pot hot chocolate and for the rest I either made no bake options or gave in and used store bought.  Either way it was a great party.

**Months later I would discover from my electrician that as long as the oven isn't turned on it is safe to change the heating element.  Oh well, now I know**