A Year After Arrival

On February 4 2010, I arrived to a gray, cold morning at the Geneva airport to start my residence in Europe while working at CERN. I spent the next month hunting for a decent apartment. Finding housing in Geneva is a pain for everyone right now, with how expensive the city is and stiff competition for any and all housing. Luckily for me, CERN isn't in Geneva, and it is much more practical to live just across the border into France.

I wasn't looking for a particularly nice or fancy apartment. I really only had one criteria: I wanted one with an oven. It turns out that that can actually be a fairly specific request around here. In the realm of tiny single bedroom or studio apartments, a stove-top is considered necessary for a kitchen, not an oven.

I did eventually find one, in a nice little apartment high in a tower and close to CERN, with a view of the Alps on a clear day (and CERN on all but the opaquest days). The range, complete with burners and oven, was in desperate need of some tender care and a good scrubbing, but it was there for me to use.

That was before I started cleaning it. I took occupancy a month after I arrived and was so looking forward to being able to cook for myself. The CERN cafeteria isn't bad, but it gets old about a month of nothing else, especially when one really, really wants to make a cake again. So I moved in and did my grocery shopping and happily dreamed up what I would make first. This fortified me as I tackled scrubbing out the inside of the oven. It looked like it had been used to roast chickens for the last forty years solid without a degreasing.

FYI: This picture was taken after I shoved a dangling piece of metal out of the way and it got wedged into the corner, no longer hanging down into the middle of the oven. Sounds slightly hazardous to use yet? Consider also the exposed strip of white along the bottom of the back wall, where the lower set of heating elements is attached to the inside of the oven. That white stuff is about an inch and a half of exposed insulation.

I gulped and closed the oven and contacted my landlord. I didn't think that oven was bake-worthy. So the cake I was dreaming of went on hold for the next month, until Easter.

So that first weekend in my own place I made myself crepes and stood in my tiny kitchen eating them. I have loved making crepes ever since, and in celebration of making it through my first year I made them again. I even tried to make buckwheat crepes, which didn't turn out at all. The sweet crepes, filled with butter and sugar or sugar and lemon juice or Nutella and bananas, turned out much, much better. Definitely a sweet way to celebrate the completion of a year.

The crepe picture is from 101 cookbooks; none of the ones I made were photogenic enough to share with the world. The oven picture is mine, though.