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friend got for Mom for Mother's Day.
Mom's cooked for better than five years now with nothing but a
microwave, two small burners and a tiny convection she got a few months ago. The
oven managed to survive the holidays but gave up the ghost a few weeks ago. You can
imagine the dissapointment that Mom was going through at this point. Her eyes broke my heart and my eyes broke hers and we didn't even really
react. She just came down the hall, sat down and said, "The element
just went out in the oven. No broiling or baking, just the light
works." She looked so defeated. But being who she is and "what" she is
by the next day she was looking for ways to use the crock-pot more.
Then, a few days ago, she gets a phone call from her friend who asks her to go to this home depot page and check out an oven for her. Now I haven't asked Mom
about what must have gone through her heart while she was helping a
friend shop for a new range while she's been without for so long. I
know that at 19.5kbps waiting for a webpage to load can be torture in
and of itself. I'm sitting there the whole time across the room crocheting and watching tv. That is, reading tv really. It's a bit tedious trying to count
stitches, crochet and keep up with closed captioning at the same time.
I'm too possessive of my tv time to boot, I'm not proud of it, just
aware of it. Never mind. So I'm sitting there a bit peaved that I'm
being distracted from doing several things at once and sighing a little
too audibly here and there.
Then all of a sudden she screams. She screams loud. That's never pleasant in a cozy space to begin with. But before I can give a proper "What in the world is wrong with you?" she manages to convey that the pretty range on the monitor is hers. All bought and paid for, delivery included. A blessing disguised as a best
friend.
From Mom's point of view she's looking at the webpage quietly commenting
on how pretty it is, so as not to disturb her annoying daughter when
she hears, "Happy Mother's Day! That's Yours." on the phone. I can tell you from my
point of view Mom's eyes were never more wide than at that moment
when she was silently asking me, "Can you believe this?" and "I'm
serious, she's serious, it's seriously mine!"
Isn't that the way life works? I can't for the life of me even tell you what television show I was so miffed about watching now. Fiction is a grand illusion that holds our attention with a greedy fist about the collar. Life just slaps you
upside the head while your watching some random television show. Life points over your shoulder and suddenly you feel like an idiot.
That's when the inventory panic started. Is there enough flour,
hortening, butter, rosemary? Have all the large baking pans migrated
to the shed? Whatever happened to the glass rolling pin? Good Lord
help us now, there's not enough cornstarch and only a pinch of baking
powder left. Yes, we have minced garlic in the fridge, but haven't we
got a single clove? This celery seed looks old, we're going to need a new
bottle of that and how many boxes of instant pudding do we really need?
How can we actually not have any cocoa powder or unsweetened chocolate
at the same time? Oh no, there's no celery? How can we possibly bake
without celery and that's certainly not enough onion to get through the
weekend. Where did Grandma's recipes go? Hold this mixing bowl while I
look for the cookie cutters, will ya? Oh no, we didn't replace the wisk
for the kitchenaid. What happened to the one cup measuring cups? No,
the measuring cups aren't in the dog or cat foods now, he's moved up to
coffee cups rotfl. Uh oh, we didn't replace the scratched cookie sheet
either. All we have are our little cookie sheets and there's only two
bread pans, that won't do. But look, I found the angel food cake pans,
where's the spring forms?
After the first of many shopping trips we had a few ingredients for some long missed favorites. We started out simple with a favorite coffee cake. That didn't last
twenty four hours. Then I was absolutely itching for chocolate chip
cookies.
Not just six cookies at a time but two whole cookie sheets and
three tiers of wire wracks, boxes for sending some off. So many cookies
that the other end of the house smells like christmas and this end
smells like a bakery. So many cookies that the school house cookie jar
with the little jingle in the lid chimes for a week like church bells.
We were high on a mountain top of anticipation.
The first time you make cookies in a new oven you are liable to come out
with a pan of over-cooked cookies, especially if you take the timer with
you and leave the room. But after that first batch we had it down to a
science. Absolutely perfect chocolate chip cookies baked with real
butter and Nestle's Tollhouse Chips. Every cookie soft as marshmellows and bursting with just the right flavor. Mom's little secret addition to the
dough and my nose half an inch from the glass for the last 45 seconds,
and a brand new cookie sheet were our talismans of culinary magic. All of this assured precious bits of heaven drawn from the utopia of Mom's new "large capacity" oven.
By now the kitchen was back lit with an angelic glow that can only come from a mother and daughter cooking together, not in a rush to get a holiday meal out in time. But rather because they are having fun together and celebrating a blessing. You know the glow I'm talking about. The glow that's always accompanied by sinister music on the silver screen.
That's when we fell off that mountain top I mentioned earlier.
I have to admit that I'm the one that put the cookies and their open container on top of a tall plastic tupperware thing that was sitting, or rather perched on the 2 1/2 inch counter edge. In my defense I only intended to leave it there for a moment while I grabbed a box off the table to send a few cookies to the friend who installed the new wiring at cost. My intentions were pure, they just weren't very well thought out.
Now we still had the dozen we had set aside for my brother, and we had the slightly over-done dozen that we had set aside for when the good ones were gone. But every other cookie found itself butter-side down, so-to-speak, on the kitchen floor. Now in Grandma's house this wouldn't be an issue. I Fear our house however is practically a zoo. Four dogs and four cats is good reason not to place things close to any edge. And yes, Miss Can't Yoube Morecareful was responsible. But the circumstances that led me to such a tragic place were beyond my control ;-P
Apparently the men were thinking about eating the cookies, but not cooking the cookies.
My brother and Mom's hubby took the old countertop-range out of the island that day before they realized they weren't able to fill in the hole with countertop from the where the new range is. We were faced with not just less counterspace but negative
counter space. That is a giant hole in the island. One can now search
through the pots and pans while standing up and looking down into the
counter top.
In our haste to cook something, anything before Tuesday, which is when my brother will return to fix the counter. We piled things up on chairs and one sink. This left precious little room for actually laying out hot cookies on racks and accompanying containers. The cookie jar was abandoned for a cake pan lined with wax paper because it could be moved around obstacles with more ease. I somehow had managed to convince myself that it would be fine to perch the cookies on the edge of the GIANT black hole. And fate conspired to tip the cookies away from the hole rather than into the hole where we could have plucked the cookies from the various pans, dusted ourselves off and sighed with relief. Instead, I threw myself at the mercy of Mom. Who, if I do say so myself, handled the whole thing with grace. But I'm convinced she was giggling inside a little too. I didn't actually hear any giggling, but I thought I saw a sparkle in there somewhere?
For Mother's Day my brother decided to take Mom, his wife and mother-in-law out for dinner. I was a little disappointed. I wanted to cook something for her. So we decided to do a breakfast instead. Since we sleep different hours than everyone else we decided it didn't actually have to be "breakfast" food. She opted for more coffee cake, she had already made herself a devil's food cake (her favorite). I made a marvelous chicken pot pie with homemade stock and celery seed crust. I have to blow my own horn and say it was the best I've ever made. Mom said it was "heaven" and that made me smile.
Okay, maybe its just been a really long time since we had pot pie, and maybe we don't use the exotic ingredients on the food channel and perhaps nirvana can't be found inside a chocolate chip cookie. Although, the Nexus may be in chocolate chip cookie dough. But we had fun and we enjoyed the cookie dough as much as the cookies. We laughed more than we usually do, and we put in more time smiling in our two-butt kitchen in one weekend together than we have in all of the last year.
Mom's mother's day gift blessed us all, cause my mamma can cook somethin fierce when she gets the notion. My birthday isn't until September, but I'm already thinking about what I want for breakfast, her crepes are good, so are her waffles. She makes an awsome omelet and she'll do pie instead of cake. Maybe she'll make that...
