Lump of Coal

This Christmas, Santa left me a couple lumps of coal. My microwave oven died. It was the second microwave to die in my kitchen. The first one, an 1100 watt Sharp, died several years ago. I left it in place on its stand because it was too heavy for me to lift without serious risk of back injury. I switched to another oven I had owned for many years — a 900 watt Sharp — and that is the oven that just died. Like the first oven, this one is too heavy for me to lift without straining something. It will continue to sit where it sits.

I’ll have to buy another oven. I don’t have a place to put it, what with the other two ovens occupying both of the available microwave oven stands. I’ll have to clear some counter space beside the toaster.

Losing my microwave oven threw me back to those long-ago days in which our ancestors cooked without using microwaves. I can envision them now, in their modest prairie homes, cooking food with nothing more sophisticated than a glass-top stove with a self-cleaning oven for baking and broiling — and, of course, a small toaster oven for quick snacks like cinnamon toast and jalapeño poppers. Wait, did our ancestors eat jalapeño poppers? No, I don’t think so. They probably stuck to simple things they could find on the prairie, like pizza and snickerdoodles.

I have two toaster ovens; one is in the kitchen, and one sits on end beside my TV chair so I’ll have a place to put my remote control, mobile phone, rocks glass, tablet computer, and other such twenty-first century necessities. That arrangement was intended to be temporary until I could buy a small table, but I keep forgetting to order one from the table store. So there the toaster oven sits, serving a function that its makers would never have imagined. It’s in its box, of course. Drape a bath towel over the box and it looks like a fuzzy, box-shaped table — not a toaster oven.

(I just made a “sticky note” to remind me to order a table. Now if only I had something to remind me to look at my sticky notes.)

So I’ve been cooking for several days without benefit of microwave energy. I’m now in the process of re-seasoning my cast iron skillet. There are some foods that are really suited to being cooked in cast iron. When I was a boy, cast iron skillets were all we used. I cooked many a breakfast of bacon and eggs in a cast iron skillet. I even learned how to cook an egg sunny side down without turning it over.

So that’s the lump of coal Santa left me. That, and — did I mention that some mechanical doodad in my heating system is failing? That’s the other, probably much more expensive, lump of coal that lies in my future. But if that’s the worst that happens, I’ll be well off. Knock on wood.