What the heck's an Oprah?

The thing about growing up on The Mountain without electricity was that we didn’t have certain things. No TV, telephone, or air conditioning. No light switches. No doorbell, no stereo, no curling irons.

What we did have was books. Once every two weeks, our mom would pile the four of us kids into the car and off we’d go to the public library.

To this day, I remember everything about that library. The smell of paper and binding and glue. The short shelves in the kids’ section. The colorful bean bag chairs. The sturdy, hollow ker-thunk of the librarian’s check-out stamp.

We were allowed six books each. I always finished picking mine first. I knew what I liked and I’d return time after time to the same authors, the same sections, and same series.

Our library had tinted front windows that gave it a sort of mysterious fairytale-cave patina. I’d find a quiet spot, and hunker down with my stack of treasures, feeling all cozy and snug and somehow wealthy, as though having a fresh stack of books in front of me was like Scrooge McDuck counting his gold. I’d go through my pile, sorting them and re-reading the covers and stacking them alphabetically, before choosing the one I’d read first.

Back home with our big cloth bags of books, my older sister and I would race to the two best reading spots – comfy chairs near both the wood stove and the big front windows. My little brother and sister would pile their books out onto the floor and read there. One thing was guaranteed – on library day, our mom could count on peace and quiet for the remainder of the afternoon.

In this way, our childhood was spent reading hundreds and hundreds of books. Classics and popular fiction and books about how things are made and mythology and fairy tales and biographies and historical fiction and everything we could get our hands on.

We didn’t watch soap operas, Dynasty, Oprah and Donahue. We didn’t tune into ABC After School Specials. We didn’t watch the evening news.  

And we didn’t miss a thing.

The breakfast of champions.

I learned to cook on a wood cook stove, like Ma Ingalls, but with feathered hair and hot pink corduroy pants. It was 1988 and I was discovering that when it comes to burning, all wood isn’t created equal.

First of all, a cast iron wood cook stove is a moody monster of a thing approximately the size of a Sherman tank. We called ours The Beast.

Once you build the fire in The Beast’s guts, the temperature on its cooking surface ranges from Satan's own inferno to the cool side of the pillow. You learn the geography of the cook-top. North side? Good for a simmer. Southwest side? Flash fry your eyebrows if you get too close. When you’re juggling three pans atop The Beast, it was best to get familiar with its various climates, lest you burn off all the knuckle hair you’ve worked so hard to grow.

Secondly, WOOD MATTERS. You quickly learned to recognize bad cook stove wood and good cook stove wood. The bad: madrone, oak, anything with even .01% humidity in it. The good: pine. That’s it. Just pine.

Dry pine wood is the best. Dry pine with pitch in it is like a magical combustible wand. Pitch is super flammable, and it catches and burns like some poor schmuck’s dongle after a date with Lindsey Lohan.

When you have to wait for the fire to kindle, catch and get to burning, then for the stove top to heat up (a process, when related to a cast iron surface the size of Montana, takes approximately three hours), cooking turns into an all day thing. Anything that could speed up the process, even if it’s a spot of pitch the size of a silver dollar, was like winning the lottery.

Third, in our kitchen, we didn’t have anything even remotely resembling Teflon-coated pans or fancy-pants Pam olive-oil spray. We had cast-iron frying pans. They weighed forty pounds apiece and got hot enough to melt tires. We never washed them, but wiped them out in a cleaning method called “seasoning”, also known as “building up an industrial-grade resistance to food-borne illness” (see: building character).

Near The Beast, we had a coffee can full of “drippings”, i.e. bacon fat and other greasy cooking run-off that was like molten lava when hot, but silky smooth and oddly creamy when cold. “Drippings” kept things from sticking to the seasoned pans, and also made everything taste like bacon, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing.

So, the cooking equation of my youth went something like this: using pitchy pine wood, ten pounds of bundled newspaper, eye of newt and the prayers of a baby unicorn, build a fire in The Beast. Heat up a cast-iron frying pan until it glowed red like the surface of the sun. Add a heaping mound of “drippings” which would instantly begin to snap, crackle and explode tiny incendiary devices all over any skin the cook was stupid enough to leave exposed. And six hours after you started, you had a fried egg.

Mmm, breakfast!