The Debacle That Was My First Cooking Experience.

After a month of not having facilities to cook in, I was really looking forward to being able to make a meal for our family in the comforts of our own home.We purchased our set of pots from Ikea, and I eagerly waited for them to be delivered to our front door. My husband set up our furniture one Saturday and then we declared our family to be functioning in the new home.  Functioning enough to start cooking.

I decided our first meal in our new home would be spaghetti. Definitely nothing fancy, but a meal we all love. I had also found the spaghetti sauce we used in the United States at our grocery store here, and we were wanting something a little familiar. Little things like a recognizable spaghetti sauce gets us excited here in Hong Kong. Anything I can read that isn't covered in Chinese characters and I'm blindly buying is something to be excited about.

That evening I chopped and diced. Everything was ready to go into the pot. It was all in the pot and I turned the stove top on. But for some reason, the stove didn't respond.

I knew that the stove worked. We use the hot water kettle {that we also purchased from Ikea} to boil our water every day so that it is safe for us to drink. I tried the stove with the water kettle and it turned on without any difficulty.

That's when we discovered we had an induction stove top. Which translated to we have to use specific pots to cook with in order for our stove to even turn on.

For a little while I tried to see if I could get enough heat on the stove top by turning on the hot water kettle and then switching to my pot that held our meal of spaghetti. That wouldn't work. The stove top turned off immediately.

My sweet husband went out to buy me another pot. He came back with the wrong one. He decided he'd bring a magnet with him on the next trip. He came back with a pot that the magnetic would stick to and had a smooth base. But still our stove would not turn on. The pot wasn't heavy enough. After a final trip to a completely different store, we found the right pot.  The pot has to be the right weight, magnetic, and have a smooth base for it to work on our stove.

We were able to eat our spaghetti a day later than we originally intended.