The Toaster Oven is My Friend and Other Lessons I’ve Learned in Suburbia

I cooked a three tier chocolate cake in a toaster oven last week. It was my daughter Nicole’s eleventh birthday and a few days before her party, my regular oven decided to break. In addition to filling the house with gas fumes when it coughed its final breath, my oven left me with no way to make the food or cake for the birthday party. Panic started creeping in. I had 35 kids from her homeroom class and assorted aunts and uncles and cousins descending on the house and no way to feed them.

Normally, I would never have agreed to host a party this big for a kid’s birthday. Last year she had a few girls sleepover, I made pancakes in the morning and they were done. But this year I was riddled with guilt. I’d dragged Nicole around in the car for the last 6 weeks while her sister, Natalie, performed in a show out in Thousand Oaks. Nicole endured hours of endless car rides and late nights and waiting a Starbucks for rehearsals to end, rarely uttering a complaint. So when she asked for this extravaganza of a birthday, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. But now my oven was broken.

I revamped the party menu so I could cook everything on the stove – pasta, spaghetti sauce – it would work with a little salad on the side. But there was still the cake to bake. I called my friend and neighbor Lyn and asked her if I could use her oven. She kindly agreed, but when it was time to finally bake the cake, it was the night before the party and it was late…very late. I didn’t want to knock on her door, pans in hand. I was about to give up and call the bakery department at Ralph’s to order a cake when the Kitchen Aid toaster oven I’d bought my husband David last Christmas caught my eye. It had been sitting on the counter barely unused for almost a year. I got it for him almost as a joke because he’d always complain about using the microwave and reminisce about how he used a toaster oven all the time in college. Well, I think he has used the toaster oven twice since last year. He must have realized that he doesn’t have much need for it since he’s moved beyond his college diet of broiled cheese sandwiches.

I took the largest of the cake pans and stuck it in the toaster oven to see if it would fit. When it did, I was giddy with the idea of trying to cook the entire cake, one layer at a time, in a toaster oven. Now it wasn’t just a cake that needed to be made, it was a challenge! Nicole wanted a s’mores cake. It needed to be three tiers of chocolate cake with fudge filling and dark chocolate frosting. On top, a glob of marshmallow fluff which would ooze down the sides and be covered with graham cracker crumbs and shavings of dark chocolate. The cake turned out beautifully and I was bursting with pride that I’d actually pulled it off. Who knew you could bake a cake in a toaster oven? That necessity mother of invention thing is powerful stuff. On party day, I couldn’t help but bring people inside and show them the toaster oven cake.

Over the week it took to get a repairman out to fix the regular oven, I cooked everything in that toaster oven, my new best friend. I beamed when I talked about it to the point that my family tired of hearing me announce what was for dinner only to follow it up with the phrase, “And I made it in the toaster oven!” I cooked pot roast and meat loaf and a roast chicken. I cooked 4 frozen pizzas – one at a time, of course. Each time I pulled a dish out of the toaster oven, I felt like some type of new age domestic diva. Who needed Viking or Thermador or some other high end appliance? With just my toaster oven, I felt like I could conquer the culinary world. We had bonded, like new friends who instantly seem like old trusted ones.

Just as I started eyeing the toaster oven to see if I could cook my Thanksgiving turkey in it, the repairman came and replaced the simple but expensive part which had caused the whole problem – the starter. Now my regular oven worked without gassing us and I’m back to my old cooking routine. But now every time I pass the toaster oven, it’s bittersweet. I miss it, but I also happily remember the fine meals we shared together. Who knows, maybe I’ll cook my turkey in it anyway, just for old times sake.

So Many Reasons to be Thankful

November and the impending holidays always trigger more frequent conversations with my daughters about being thankful. Back when grocery stores would give away free frozen turkeys for purchases over $150 (they don’t seem to do that anymore), I would cook up two or three (because how many turkeys does a family really need???) and all the accompaniments – gravy, mashed potatoes and stuffing, plate them, drive around my neighborhood looking for homeless under overpasses or by the freeway exits and handout the plates of food the day before Thanksgiving. I did it for several years before I was married and had children, but last year my husband, David, suggested that it wasn’t the safest idea. I really hadn’t had a problem and the response from the homeless who I gave the food to was always one of surprise and gratitude with the one exception of the woman who complained (and in retrospect, rightfully so) that there was no beverage to accompany the meal. So this year, I will be content with taking my daughters to pack food boxes for a shelter to hand out, rather than doing our own makeshift meal delivery.

But I struggle with how to teach my kids about need and want, particularly when they are surrounded by messages that confuse the two. Do they need an iPhone? A flat screen in their bedroom? Real Ugg boots? No, they want those things, but they certainly don’t need them. And yet in their world – being hit by ads, tv, music lyrics and friends who have and encourage them to want the same - they believe they are deprived without them. I had to bite my tongue from snapping at Natalie when she came home and rattled off a list of things that another child at school had, wants of hers which she considered needs that I refused (and in her mind stubbornly and maliciously so) to provide her with. They included a European vacation over winter break, horseback riding lessons and a credit card at Justice. Not that I could have done any of those things right now anyway, but even if I could, I wouldn’t. Yet, her seven year, old credit card toting friend had all those things and I was the mean mommy keeping my second grader from having them. Natalie complained that we must be poor because she couldn’t have those things. That’s when I regretted that I wasn’t making them come with me to take turkey to the homeless. Then they’d see what poor really was.

It also feels like what kids think they need nowadays has changed drastically since I was young. Maybe I’m having selective memory, but I don’t think I ever coveted lines of credit in elementary school. So, I’ve ramped up the being thankful discussions and all this talk about it inspired me to come up with a small list of my own:

Here are ten things – in no particular order - that I’m thankful for beyond family, health, friends and shelter:

Bubble wrap and the fact that popping it still makes me laugh

That JJ Abrams cast black people as leads in a television drama series that isn’t about race, even if NBC was silly enough to cancel it

Playdates that don’t end in children (or parents) crying

Dark chocolate

My ten year old telling a boy who asked her, that she was too young to be anyone’s girlfriend

Having ten minutes alone in the bathroom without someone under five feet tall knocking on the door and needing me from something

That even with my bad back, I can still touch my toes without bending my knees

Feeling energized after arguing politics

Getting old enough to realize that whatever it is, isn’t as bad as it seems

Being able to appreciate (and mostly accept) myself and those around me for who we are