crock pottery bliss

On their last visit to South Bend (or on my last visit to North East, I can't remember clearly...and did you notice that my current and my home addresses bear at least one cardinal direction in their names?) Mom donated her old stoneware crock pot to my humble kitchen. She has a newer one and I have none, so the donation was quite sensible, and much appreciated.

I think she told me it was a wedding present to her and Dad. You can tell it's from the late 70s, stoneware done in brown and yellow, with that kind of two-prong plug where both prongs are the same small size. I hadn't used it yet...normally my meat experiences consist entirely of working with ground beef...but I've been wanting stew lately, particularly with the bucketloads of snow making everything colder again, and so yesterday I ventured into the traditional American realm of crock pot cooking.

Easy, of course. But it was a little weird, cooking out of my mother's crock pot. I remember hundreds of meals from my childhood coming out of that gadget. I remember never being allowed to touch it. (Maybe that's why using it alone feels somewhat surreal, like surely there's some dire bit of knowledge I'm missing and I'll ruin the whole thing and burn down the apartment and what if Mom comes in and catches me touching the stew before it's ready?) We'd come home from church on Sundays and the house would smell of simmering beef and potatoes, all from that mysterious gizmo quietly cooking away on the counter without so much as a burner to help it.

So I guess it was a sense of legacy that gave me a feeling of temporal vertigo. (Not to mention that almost every memory of the crock pot involves me looking up at it or crawling onto a stool to peer inside.) It also was a teensy bit lonely, remembering how (in my mother's words) "that pot fed our whole family for years," and now I'm using it by myself and for myself, far from home.

However, the stew turned out marvellously, and what would feed a family of four for two days will now feed a family of one for seven. And it didn't burn down the apartment.