Cooking involves a deadline and hungry people and ingredients that expire in a week. It's stressful. Cooking happens on the stove and on the clock. Baking happens with ingredients that last for months and come to life inside a warm oven. Baking is slow and leisurely.
I don't exactly know what it means to be ready. A cake when the oven timer goes off? Am I fully baked, or only half-baked?
In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.
I always preferred my father's pasta the next day, when he'd put it in a hot oven with heaps of extra cheese. It would emerge slightly burned and very crisp on top.
We light the oven so that everyone may bake bread in it.
The New Age? It's just the old age stuck in a microwave oven for fifteen seconds.
I'm a really good dinner party guest. I am always so appreciative, impressed that anyone has even managed to turn on the oven and cook for me.
A cake is a very good test of an oven: if it browns too much on one side and not on the other, it's not your fault - you need to have your oven checked.
The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to minus 271.3*C - not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.
Orphans, dead parents, lonely children at Christmas, morose spoken word recordings, everything you love about the holidays. Move the turkey over so you can fit your head in the oven.