Plain and Simple

“She grew up and then moved.” That’s what I gave as the reason for cancelling my daughter Elly’s 6-month teeth-cleaning appointment. The dental office doesn’t take kindly to casual cancellations. But it was the truth, plain and simple; part of the housekeeping I had to do that day: pay some bills; clean out the pantry; close the books on 22 years of being Elly’s mom. I explained to the receptionist that she couldn't keep the appointment because she lives somewhere else now, and she’ll be making her own dentist appointments (if she remembers), in a city of a million dentists (if she can find a good one, like the one who’s been cleaning her teeth since she was 3?, 4? She never really did like him anyway).

I don’t mean to sound so dramatic about it. It’s not like I can’t see her or don’t talk to her several times a week. It’s not like I haven’t gone through it before, with Anna; but Elly is my youngest, and I won’t have to go through it again (but I would if I could).

So, it’s on to cooking--cooking is a good antidote to feeling bereft. Besides, I have a new oven. Those of my readers who know me, know that for 35 years the only cooking I’ve done has been conducted on a stove that looks like this

It started in Vermont, in the Northeast Kingdom as it's called, where we rented a house on 90 acres. It came with a wood burning cook stove in the kitchen. There was no other cooking implement, and after we got the hang of using it we fell in love with the thing. It represented a way of life (a lifestyle, at a time when the word was first coming into usage, mind you) we aspired to, one that included a lot of the ideas of warmth, hearth, home, family, hospitality. Lots of friends and family came and we always had a wood fire going. It was so-------Vermont.

When we bought our first house in Massachusetts, we looked-up Dave Erickson who has a business in Littleton, MA restoring old, wood cook-stoves. We would sometimes make a day of it and go out to visit his place just to oooh and aaah at the vast array of antique stoves in various states of rust and dilapidation in his chilly enormous red barn. The completed ones, the ones that had been restored to all their shiny-chrome and handsome black-ness, were showcased in a room of the defunct train depot from which he ran his restoration business, and where he lived upstairs. This was before Dave had been discovered by "Chronicle" and "The New York Times;" a time when you could almost always find him in the back, welding, or sand-blasting, or re-nickeling one rusted-out hulk or another. He told us he learned the skills from his Dad who worked with him at the time. He picked-up the stoves for a song from the backyards of old folks who threw the stoves out there for lack of anywhere else to put them when times changed. They were happy to have him haul away the eye-sores. What he did with those old stoves was a wonder to behold-—transformed them into sparkling jewels, with workable ovens and burners and warming racks and fancy, shiny accoutrements. These things didn’t come with any manuals, so Dave would even accompany his babies to their new homes and put them through a test drive with the new owners.

We've had one of Dave’s wood cook stoves ever since. We cook on it and heat the house with it. When we moved to a larger home, first thing we did was call Dave and purchase another one. Using a wood cook stove kind of gets under your skin and starts to feel like anything else is a cop out. It was fun feeling smug.

The stove in the picture is what we have now-- an antique combo—gas and coal sidecar model. Two gas ovens up top (no pilot), 5 gas burners below (lit with a match), and a wood box that could burn both wood and coal. We actually burned coal in it a few times—a very few times; it gets very, very hot. Heating with coal became a definite casualty of “global warming.” Of course, using a wood cook stove for cooking and for heating one’s home means always having a wood pile around too. Finding places to store 2 cords of wood, easy in Vermont, became a challenge in suburbia. But we were up for it and still do it.

But after 22 years cooking with the Victory Crawford I was ready for a change. I was tired of never knowing when the oven temp was just right, tired of the uneven baking results, not being able to fit standard-sized pots and sheet pans in the small ovens, waiting 20, 30 minutes for the oven to pre-heat, burning my hands on the hot door. Plus I was cooking more and more and enjoying it less and less!

Enter Electrolux…

This baby can bake, de-frost, broil, dehydrate, slow-cook, proof bread, uses convection technology and can get up to speed in no time at all.

The funny thing is that it takes almost as much time to figure out how to use it as did the Victory Crawford; and no one wants to huddle around it in the winter. It kind of beeps and purrs and flashes in a non-friendly way. I have yet to put it though all its paces but we did have neighbors over the other night and used the oven to cook an entire dinner. Everything was fine except that although the chicken looked done, it wasn't. A couple minutes in the microwave fixed that. I'll get the hang of it soon enough.