Help the Farmers! Just Say No to Self-Clean!

So, we went all summer without rain. Or at least, without very much rain. And then WHAMO, the skies opened up on Southeastern Minnesota and Wisconsin last month and caused major flooding and damage to many communities and farms. The devastation to the farms is unbelievable and my friend and fellow Urban Farmgirl, Knittymama, decided to do something about it to get the help flowing. She's running a contest to raise funds for Sow the Seeds, an organization that's helping out these organic farmers (read all about their heartbreaking flooding woes here). See her blog for details on the contest and please consider digging deep in your pockets to help out - even if you're far away and and even if you only come up with a few bucks. Where would we be without our farms and without generous, helpful people who make the world seem smaller each day? (Donate and enter by September 29th to win yarny prizes!)

In other - and much, much less important - news: the oven is fixed! Hooray for baking! We dined on the second vegetable pie that was in the freezer last night and I reveled in my easy-peasy, dishless dinner prep. LOVE my oven.

Wanna know what was wrong? Apparently this thing went out:
It's the thing that sets the limits on how hot is too hot (I should have put something in for scale, it's about as long as my thumb). We'll call it the Limit-Detector-Thing or LDT for short. The LDT went out after I used my self-clean function on the oven and it determined that the self-cleaning temp of about 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit was too hot. Okay, whoa on the temp. Let's just have a minute to let that sink in...1,200 degrees...My husband says that Venus is only, like, 900 degrees. That's scary hot and it was right in my house.

Apparently, it's not okay for an oven to go that high, yet they install the self-cleaning trick anyway. Why? Marketing. Nobody wants to clean their ovens. So we all buy these ovens (or buy the houses they are in, as in our case), happily thinking that we never have to actually scrub the oven after gross grease spills, only to discover that in a full 50% of the cases of self-cleaning attempts, this little LDT will fail. Let's have another minute for that one to sink in...FIFTY PERCENT...

So the moral of the story for me is that I should a.) never use my self-cleaning function of my oven on a day that I am preparing dinner that needs to be cooked in the oven since there's a 50/50 chance that it will conk out on me and dinner will be much delayed and met with bad moods all around, b.) be super careful about wiping up the spills in the oven as they happen (and have cooled, of course), or c.) a combination of the two. Oi.