How to OIL an OVEN

HOW TO OIL AN OVEN

I am a husband who bakes. Admittedly, it may not be a cake or casserole it is more likely to be some roots I dug up somewhere. I picked up this pastime by looking around at healthy elderly people. They made or make cookies, cakes, meats and made their own medicines from scratch. I have great respect for doctors and modern science but I also, don’t think it is nuts to be aware of medicinal value of plants that can be obtained without a prescription. Some people think it is quirky to make some “mountain medicines” and put faith in ingesting unknown and unseen chemicals in little chemical pills. I put faith in both with a healthy bit of suspicion of both.

So recently I was baking a new “recipe” and wondering if it would work and what the side effects may be. There are some hazards to, otherwise, harmless process of infusing oil. The worst danger isn’t making the formula too strong or using the wrong material by accident. If you ask my oven it’s the big dorky oven mitts. There I was dressed for chef’s work, work boots, blue jeans, flannel shirt (plaid), leather belt (with big buckle with knife and big buckle) and camouflage baseball hat (so falling hair can’t be found, of course) stooping, over the oven with my big flowered oven mitts on.

I had opted for the small pint jelly jar with decorative etching, and carefully prepared the roots. It happened to be a root reputed for being extremely corrosive to skin which needs carefully prepared (in mountain temrs that means, “Without rubbing anything sensitive”). A mixture was prepared, put in the jar and the baking begun. Why, I decided the small jar shouldn’t have a solid flat platform, I don’t know. After, agitating the mixture every fifteen minutes for about two hours my big goofy hands in my big goofy mitts finally fumbled the jar with the boiling hot, acrid, corrosive, oily mixture in it, spilling it all over the oven and the heating element, while getting it out for the final cycle.

Smoke billowed from the oven and filled the kitchen, my wife bellowed from the rooms where she was (most likely) cleaning yet another mess I’d made earlier, a canary fell over in its cage and when I opened the kitchen door to the outside, two bats and a UFO crashed as the smoke wafted towards the skies. I’m sure it was all a coincidence. I had lost the actual recipe and warnings about the medicine and had been going from memory. I do remember there was something about the medicine being used for lung ailments among other things. The down side was that I wasn’t making the lung medicine I was making the one that was for “external use only”…or something.

Once, I got the air cleared in the house (and swept up all the fallen birds and insects) I had to go about cleaning the stove. (Did I mention I clean stoves too?) I tried spooning out the oil to salvage as much as I could. It was a careful operation because infused oil can go rancid if everything doesn’t remain sterile and accidental splashing could have eaten an eyeball. Once I got as much as I safely could I had to mop up and discard the rest, which really was a shame. Between finding the root, procuring it and preparing it I had hours of time and the skin from several fingers and loss of sensation in my lips invested in the work by the time I spilled it.

If there is a downside to corrosive, medicinal plant collecting is that it is all about timing. If you, say, spill a batch containing all of your material and it is the end of the proper collecting period you could be out of luck for a months or even a year or more. Last year, a favorite plant was only up a short period during which I didn’t have a chance to collect any. This has left me very low on available supply for that particular remedy. So, recognizing the value of old traditional remedies and modern chemical ones, which are, relatively, ready on demand (imagine a doctor telling you that it’ll be a three months with a headache because he or she has to wait for the “Tylenol plant” to come into full bloom) is an advantage of modern medicine. That and a lack of smoke…

See you along the stream