Bryan brought a whole suitcase full of things from my Mom that ranged in everything from a new halyard my Dad ordered to a dozen bars of dial soap. She also included some surprises for Dad and I including two boxed cakes for Dad and two bags of chocolate chips for me. One of my favorite things to bake and consume are cookies. I love them and was anxious to whip up a batch. Because nothing is every as easy as “whipping something up” on the boat, this is the process we have to go through in order to bake cookies.
For dinner that evening I made Betty Crocker’s Beef Bourguingnon for dinner using a 220 volt hot plate we keep plugged in when at the marina, which I might say turned out wonderfully. And then decided to continue and make cookies too. It was a cooking day. I had every ingredient except for vanilla extract, well they don’t sell it in the grocery stores here so I made the dough with everything but that. It wasn’t a terrible loss… does it give more flavor, yes, but it wasn’t like the cookies were ruined without it. Once the dough was complete and edible alone, we decided to make cookies out of it too.
Step one: Light the oven…
The stove on the boat is kerosene. When Dad built the boat he was very conscious not to have anything in the boat with gasoline or any other compressed gas that could blow up at the strike of an accidental match. Something about having an explosion in a steel boat… floating inferno comes to mind. The engine is a Detroit diesel and the stove is kerosene.
In order to light the oven or stove it’s necessary to first pressurize it. You essentially pump air into the tube and this pushes the kerosene through a tube and makes it accessible. Dad “preheats” the burner by pouring alcohol into a small cup at the base of the burner and lighting it. This heats up the tube and burner and makes a big flame that looks like this:
Once that flame dies down a little you actually turn on the burner with a knob that opens up a small gap and lets the kerosene through the tube, where the heat that the alcohol has created turns the liquid into a gas and the gas is let out the gaps and lit. A blue flame tells the chef that the oven is ready for use.
After letting the oven heat up for a few minutes the cookies were ready to be put in and that’s that. There is no real temperature control on the oven or stove. It’s either full flame or not. The unit itself gets warmer as the fire burns and it’s necessary to watch the flame to make sure it’s still blue. Once the blue begins to fade it’s time to add more pressure with the pump because the kerosene has stopped being pushed through.
All of the necessary tools to bake cookies: a lighter, cookie dough, a container of alcohol, Pam, and an air pump. Just like home!
The flame was losing its juice here, but you can see the plate that is put over it to disperse the heat. The oven itself got pretty hot to the touch too.
You can see the temperature gauge: Warm, Hot, Very Hot. This was after about 45 minutes of having it on.
This is just like home! Beautiful freshly made chocolate chip and filbert nut cookies.
They were SO good.
After all is said and done you turn the oven to clean which sticks a small needle through the gap and stops the flame and then close the open gap. With the end of a fork you let the pressure out of the oven and let it cool before touching it. All for a batch of cookies, it was so worth it!
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