Member-only story
Measure Your B.S. with a Spoon
The art of the no-measuring method
A sweet-smelling upsurge of air is released from the oven as I open the door to retrieve my cookies. A whoosh of heat momentarily pulls back the two strands of strategically placed whisps from either side of my otherwise ponytailed head. The oven mitts are Christmas themed, red and forest green with embossed pictures of Santa and his reindeer.
I have made the perfect cookie. Yes, sure, some of them are a little charred around the edges and the ones located in the middle of the pan look as though they haven’t been baked at all, but by my eleven-year-old brain’s approximation they are perfect.
“Don’t burn yourself, kiddo,” Mom shouts from the front room where she is stoking our wood-burning oven. The oven, not the thing I’m baking in but the wood-burning one, is square and black and heavy, with a connected tin pipe that pokes out of the top of our double-wide trailer’s roof.
I want to know what it would be like to eat off of this olden days stove. I might set a pot of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup atop its surface and allow the raw heat that radiates outwards to do its job.
Dad says this stove is not for cooking. It’s for warmth. I still think it would be a neat experiment in colonist life.
