The Easy Bake
Oven was an iconic toy that had its heyday about the time I was a kid of the proper age to have one (there is an updated version you can still buy your little girl today, but they are styled with neon colors and goofy curves, more like a fashion accessory than an oven). I never did get one, though it wasn't something I particularly wanted. One of my friends had one, and she fired it up one time when I was at her house. It was powered by a light bulb. There were special little mixes you had to use, and tiny pans . . . the resulting cake was small and unremarkable. It was gone in two bites and tasted meh. I remember thinking the whole thing was a pretty cheesy outfit.
But the idea of it . . .the cultural meme of it . . .somehow it worked its way into my consciousness so that years later I yearned for what it represented. Perfect domestic competence, smiling, sunny neighborhoods full of well-adjusted people and perfect lawns, happy wives who lived to cook for their families, the distillation of the whole American love affair with consumer goods. The actual thing was a crappy toy. The idea of the thing was a shining metaphor for an idealized life that never was.
I often joke that it was my unrealized longing for an Easy Bake Oven that fuels my love affair with camping stoves and ovens. But it isn't an unrealized desire for a toy that makes me swoop, magpie like toward, say, the Camp Chef Outdoor Oven.
But one of the most important firsts was the lighting of the oven. I was more than a little nervous about this, probably because of an incident I read about in Wyoming Wife, by Rodello Hunter. The book is long out of print, though it can still be found through second hand book dealers. It tells the story of a New York writer who marries a Wyoming outdoorsman and goes to live with him in that state. They have a travel trailer, and they take it out so her husband can go hunting. Presumably she waits for him back at the trailer while he is out hunting. You don't get the impression she likes that trailer very much. She talks about how difficult it is to make the bed, and darkly mentions an episode when the oven "blew up" as she tried to light it.
The oven has probably been used some in it's life, but not very much.
Time has left its mark, but only in the form of some corrosion from moisture. The inside looked mostly untouched. There were a couple of mouse turds, some powdery dirt and tufts of insulation that look like they had been pulled from the opening at the back that provides ventilation. I used a spatula to reach in there and clean that stuff out as best I could and wiped it with a paper towel, but I couldn't get it all and Biela said to just let it burn off.
The dial has a setting for Pilot Off, Oven Off, and then the progressive temperature settings you'd expect. There's no Pilot On setting, so Biela just cranked it up to the first oven setting and told me to jam a match in there. We'd located what looked like the only possible location for the pilot light. And so, saying a little prayer for the repose of my soul (and KD's, and Biela's, and Baby Bear's), I cringingly applied the Aim N' Flame. And instantly the pilot light gently lit. No fiery death scenes, not even a scary whump! Once the pilot was lit, we turned up the knob and waited a bit, and the burner slowly, almost ponderously, lit in a rippling progression from front to back.
I slammed the door shut and still wondering if it would burn down the trailer, reached for the Jiffy corn muffin mix. At the Dollar Tree I'd picked up a muffin tin and also a plain 8 x 8 cake pan. I opted for the simpler approach and used the cake pan for cornbread to go with the black eyed peas I'd made for luck in the new year.
The only way we could tell that the oven had reached the proper temperature was when the main oven burner went out. It seemed to take a long time, but that was probably only because I was being such a worry-wart. There was the smell of old dust and junk heating up, like the smell of the furnace when you light it on the first cold day in the Fall after it has lain idle all summer. It wasn't pleasant, but I turned on the vent fan and opened the door. Biela said there was nothing for it but to let it cook off.
And then, wonder of wonders! I opened the door to check the burner, and it had turned off. KD's oven had reached it's set temp, which meant everything was still working right. I hastily slid in a pan of cornbread batter, and we set a timer. Once again, a simple, cheap, homey pantry mainstay seemed like the way to go for the inaugural cooking event, which is why I picked the Jiffy mix. It wasn't long before KD began to smell like fresh, warm cornbread instead of baking mouse turds. I checked it when the timer went off and while it wasn't as browned on top as I like, it was obviously done and I didn't want to burn the bottom. Because it is such a little oven, the rack is pretty close to the burner and there can be a tendency for the bottom to get done quicker than the top.
But it was a success! I pulled out the pan and let it cool a bit, and then cut it into pieces to serve with dinner.
Something really baked in my real little oven. I was amazed and delighted. My Christmas morning toy was not a cheesy outfit but a real, working item.
From there the possibilities were endless. After cooking three of our six chicken quarters in the pressure cooker for Little Christmas, there was the issue of what to do with the remaining three
But the idea of it . . .the cultural meme of it . . .somehow it worked its way into my consciousness so that years later I yearned for what it represented. Perfect domestic competence, smiling, sunny neighborhoods full of well-adjusted people and perfect lawns, happy wives who lived to cook for their families, the distillation of the whole American love affair with consumer goods. The actual thing was a crappy toy. The idea of the thing was a shining metaphor for an idealized life that never was.
I often joke that it was my unrealized longing for an Easy Bake Oven that fuels my love affair with camping stoves and ovens. But it isn't an unrealized desire for a toy that makes me swoop, magpie like toward, say, the Camp Chef Outdoor Oven.
It is an echo of that seductive promise of utopia that was stealthily inserted into all those Saturday morning TV advertisements. In the end it didn't matter that the reality was a pallid joke compared to the exciting promise of the ads that ran between cartoons. The essential message had found a home in my imagination and would always be there, waiting to come out at just the right moment.
And so, I look at KD's little oven, and my heart melts. Her kitchen is my play kitchen. I feel like I am about 8 years old, playing with pots and pans and wooden spoons filched from my mother's real kitchen. I am seized with the desire to cook colorful meals that look like the illustrations that were in my sixth grade health textbook. And then there is the fact that I had an oven which I liked very much and cooked many meals in and on, but it is gone, irretrievably gone. Having another oven of my very own, that is important in a way I can't fully articulate here.
And so, I look at KD's little oven, and my heart melts. Her kitchen is my play kitchen. I feel like I am about 8 years old, playing with pots and pans and wooden spoons filched from my mother's real kitchen. I am seized with the desire to cook colorful meals that look like the illustrations that were in my sixth grade health textbook. And then there is the fact that I had an oven which I liked very much and cooked many meals in and on, but it is gone, irretrievably gone. Having another oven of my very own, that is important in a way I can't fully articulate here.
The first meal of ramen in the parking lot of the Walmart has been followed by many other firsts. First coffee, first pancakes (Kodiak Cakes Flapjack and Waffle Mix http://www.kodiakcakes.com/, they are absolutely wonderful, and healthy too. Cook up beautifully, and mix up just with water. Beats other pancake mixes all to hell).
Friend Soup Bone, who put a lot of himself into KD when he kept her for me for the year before I was able to pick her up, more or less forbade me to cook bacon in her. He said it would make the trailer smell. Well hah! I have cooked bacon! I didn’t think to get any pictures of the historic moment, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. I can report that the venting fan ran and did a great job, and I carefully cleaned up all the grease. As far as I can tell, there’s no bacon smell now. Although, frankly, I fall into that group of people who might actually consider a bacon-scented air freshener. Bacon gives life.
But one of the most important firsts was the lighting of the oven. I was more than a little nervous about this, probably because of an incident I read about in Wyoming Wife, by Rodello Hunter. The book is long out of print, though it can still be found through second hand book dealers. It tells the story of a New York writer who marries a Wyoming outdoorsman and goes to live with him in that state. They have a travel trailer, and they take it out so her husband can go hunting. Presumably she waits for him back at the trailer while he is out hunting. You don't get the impression she likes that trailer very much. She talks about how difficult it is to make the bed, and darkly mentions an episode when the oven "blew up" as she tried to light it.
Wyoming Wife is one of my favorite books. I guess the anecdote about the trailer oven stayed with me as much as those Easy Bake ads did, because when it came time to light KD's oven, I was pretty nervous. There were no instructions, although there were plenty of old RVers here at the Slabs who could help me. But I kept putting it off (kinda like the water heater, but worse), until my campers came to join me. Then Biela came over to help me figure out how to light it. We did some web searches for instructions and found one or two helpful tips, but in the end we had to just stick our heads in that little oven and figure it out.
The oven has probably been used some in it's life, but not very much.
Time has left its mark, but only in the form of some corrosion from moisture. The inside looked mostly untouched. There were a couple of mouse turds, some powdery dirt and tufts of insulation that look like they had been pulled from the opening at the back that provides ventilation. I used a spatula to reach in there and clean that stuff out as best I could and wiped it with a paper towel, but I couldn't get it all and Biela said to just let it burn off.
The dial has a setting for Pilot Off, Oven Off, and then the progressive temperature settings you'd expect. There's no Pilot On setting, so Biela just cranked it up to the first oven setting and told me to jam a match in there. We'd located what looked like the only possible location for the pilot light. And so, saying a little prayer for the repose of my soul (and KD's, and Biela's, and Baby Bear's), I cringingly applied the Aim N' Flame. And instantly the pilot light gently lit. No fiery death scenes, not even a scary whump! Once the pilot was lit, we turned up the knob and waited a bit, and the burner slowly, almost ponderously, lit in a rippling progression from front to back.
I slammed the door shut and still wondering if it would burn down the trailer, reached for the Jiffy corn muffin mix. At the Dollar Tree I'd picked up a muffin tin and also a plain 8 x 8 cake pan. I opted for the simpler approach and used the cake pan for cornbread to go with the black eyed peas I'd made for luck in the new year.
The only way we could tell that the oven had reached the proper temperature was when the main oven burner went out. It seemed to take a long time, but that was probably only because I was being such a worry-wart. There was the smell of old dust and junk heating up, like the smell of the furnace when you light it on the first cold day in the Fall after it has lain idle all summer. It wasn't pleasant, but I turned on the vent fan and opened the door. Biela said there was nothing for it but to let it cook off.
And then, wonder of wonders! I opened the door to check the burner, and it had turned off. KD's oven had reached it's set temp, which meant everything was still working right. I hastily slid in a pan of cornbread batter, and we set a timer. Once again, a simple, cheap, homey pantry mainstay seemed like the way to go for the inaugural cooking event, which is why I picked the Jiffy mix. It wasn't long before KD began to smell like fresh, warm cornbread instead of baking mouse turds. I checked it when the timer went off and while it wasn't as browned on top as I like, it was obviously done and I didn't want to burn the bottom. Because it is such a little oven, the rack is pretty close to the burner and there can be a tendency for the bottom to get done quicker than the top.
But it was a success! I pulled out the pan and let it cool a bit, and then cut it into pieces to serve with dinner.
Something really baked in my real little oven. I was amazed and delighted. My Christmas morning toy was not a cheesy outfit but a real, working item.
From there the possibilities were endless. After cooking three of our six chicken quarters in the pressure cooker for Little Christmas, there was the issue of what to do with the remaining three
we still had in the cooler. These were from the batch delivered to us by our neighbor who didn’t have freezer room for us. Mia kara Biela suggested Shake ‘N Bake and cooking them in KD’s oven. I was a little dubious about this, but we couldn’t think of anything better. I wasn’t in the mood to fry them, so I went along with her idea, and I'm glad it did because it turned out awesome! The chicken was good, but more satisfying was how well the oven performed. A few days ago there was a discussion around the evening camp fire about how RV ovens tend to burn everything. But KD’s oven does not seem to have that problem. Because it is small and the rack is necessarily close to the bottom of the oven (and thus the flame), you have to take some care to watch the bottom of things like cakes and quick breads, etc., but raising the pan up on an inverted pie pan seems to do the trick.
I set the oven for 400 and it came up to temp. I didn’t have a good baking pan that would fit all three leg quarters, so I decided to do them in my trusty cast iron skillet. I have a collection of these and use them regularly, but the one I find most useful for camping trips is the 8-inch. It is small enough to fit well on the burner and still is large enough for most cooking I do (usually for about three people). The chicken fit perfectly in this pan. We shook them up in the bag with the coating and popped them into the pan, then into the oven. Biela asked Siri to set a timer for 45 minutes, and then I crossed my fingers.
Pretty soon we could hear them sizzling, and then we could smell them cooking. Right on time, we took them out of the oven, and they were beautiful. I even got my plates to look like the pictures in the health book.
This was followed a couple of days later with baked butterfly pork chops (we Shake N' Baked those too.) They were awesome. Tender and juicy, and they came out of the pan (once again my cast iron skillet) with no sticking and no mess.
Pretty soon we could hear them sizzling, and then we could smell them cooking. Right on time, we took them out of the oven, and they were beautiful. I even got my plates to look like the pictures in the health book.
This was followed a couple of days later with baked butterfly pork chops (we Shake N' Baked those too.) They were awesome. Tender and juicy, and they came out of the pan (once again my cast iron skillet) with no sticking and no mess.
The plan for tomorrow morning is to make cinnamon rolls, and later, strawberry shortcakes. There have been a few broad hints from certain parties about pizza. I'll keep you posted.
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