The weather was still summery, but the hot still air that had hung over us on Tuesday (Janet: “This is like living inside someone’s mouth.”) had been replaced by strong gusty winds.
It became more and more blustery outside as the day progressed.
In the morning, Emily and I put the second-to-last layer on the oven: one of pure mud over our mud-and-alfalfa insulation layer.
We decided that allowing it the whole day to dry would certainly be sufficient and that we would be able to apply the finish plaster and dig out the sand by evening.
The Upward Bound students, overseen by Janet, made six beautiful loaves of Angie’s fluffy white bread.
The first loaf disappeared within a few minutes of coming out of the pan it had been baked in.
Charlotte was my sous chef for a day of Indian-style food.
The multi-component meal kept us busy right up to 6 pm, a rarity here.
Charlotte started with a spicy cabbage salad. The two enormous heads of cabbage required a quadruple batch of the dressing recipe in my black book.
I worked on getting the curries underway, first frying the onions and toasting the spices, then adding diced potatoes and carrots, corn, peas, and coconut milk.
The chicken thighs baked slowly in the oven, to later be torn up and stirred into the curry.
While things were simmering away I prepared a triple-batch of naan dough, using all whole-wheat flour instead of my usual half-and-half blend.
I also added fresh garlic in addition to the usual few tablespoons of sage, giving the bread a new flavor dimension.
When it came time to cook the rice noodles we were serving alongside the curry, I discovered that the package instructions were strange, ambiguous, and poorly translated.
It seemed that one could cook these noodles simply by placing them in cool water for two minutes, but because I wanted to serve them hot I boiled water as I would for wheat noodles and stirred until the noodles were tender, which really did only take a few minutes.
When they were cooked I noticed the noodles had a peculiar aroma, which Charlotte described perfectly: “smells like plants!”
They tasted, however, as pleasantly bland as all rice noodles do.
For dessert, Charlotte had been wanting to learn to make lattice-top pies.
We mixed the last gallon-size bag of rhubarb from the freezer with strawberry jam and the usual pie spices, which didn’t seem too different from using canned pie filling.
When they first came out of the oven, however, the pies seemed even soupier than I was used to seeing fruit pies come out, despite our incorporation of corn starch into the filling. We tried pouring liquid off but it wouldn’t work, and our turkey baster kept getting clogged with rhubarb.
We were worried that we would have to serve dessert in bowls, but the pie thickened up considerably to normal fruit-pie texture as it cooled. Success!
We had a fun afternoon in the kitchen, too, moving through music ranging from the Grateful Dead to Yonder Mountain String Band to The Black Keys and back.
After dinner was over we were ready to put the final coat on the oven.
Everything was going great as we smoothed the finish plaster and began pressing in periwinkle shells and colorful rocks.
I dug out the door and Emily and I took turns digging out the sand form, which came away cleanly from the dome of building mud (our wet-paper release film had worked great).
Suddenly the oven began to slide. The dome held together beautifully, but it had nothing to sit on- we had not built onto the foundation sufficiently, but for the most part simply pressed mud onto sand and mud onto mud.
When it collapsed and split into segments, people seemed to come out of the proverbial woodwork, crowding around, asking questions, offering prescriptions for how to repair it. I became defensive, irritated, then disconsolate.
This is it for the oven; it’s done.
Once everyone who had been uselessly standing around left us alone, Elisabeth, Charlotte, Aidan, Emily and I began to plan.
We knew the problem was that we had built our sand form too big for our foundation.
We separated all the layers of the dome and put them into the bins we had carried mud and sand up to the building site in.
We used the tarp I had brought up to protect the oven from rain to mix sand and water, and built a smaller form.
The oven being smaller wouldn’t really be a problem at all, especially considering it was mostly for novelty purposes and we didn’t plan to bake any more than a loaf or two of bread at a time in it.
We covered the form with dampened pages from a Rolling Stone magazine.
Then, layer by layer, we rebuilt the entire oven as the sun slowly descended in the sky, ending up right back where we were, ready to dig out the door.
We even decorated with a beautiful spiral of rocks and shells pressed into the plaster.
Knowing it was likely to rain overnight, we carefully covered the oven with a tarp, placing all of the rocks we had left over from building the foundation around the perimeter, along with bins full of extra soil and sand.
Emily, Elisabeth and I took a victory shower, filling buckets from the water heater and dousing our hair and skin with yogurt containers.
It was refreshing to clean the silt and sand out of our hair and our pores and to stand under the moon with the breeze blowing over our skin. The warm water was so pleasant we didn’t want the experience to end.
Once we were clean to a satisfactory extent we headed inside to heat some water for tea.
We socialized with the others in the dorm, who were waiting for it to be dark enough and late enough for a petrel walk, which isn’t fruitful unless begun after 11 pm or so.
Elisabeth and I were reading in bed by 10:30, and falling asleep to the sound of the petrels that burrow right outside our house by the time the others had set out in search of the birds.
I awoke during the night to the sound of low rumbling thunder and falling rain.
The storm had finally blown in, it seemed.
It became more and more blustery outside as the day progressed.
In the morning, Emily and I put the second-to-last layer on the oven: one of pure mud over our mud-and-alfalfa insulation layer.
We decided that allowing it the whole day to dry would certainly be sufficient and that we would be able to apply the finish plaster and dig out the sand by evening.
The Upward Bound students, overseen by Janet, made six beautiful loaves of Angie’s fluffy white bread.
The first loaf disappeared within a few minutes of coming out of the pan it had been baked in.
Charlotte was my sous chef for a day of Indian-style food.
The multi-component meal kept us busy right up to 6 pm, a rarity here.
Charlotte started with a spicy cabbage salad. The two enormous heads of cabbage required a quadruple batch of the dressing recipe in my black book.
I worked on getting the curries underway, first frying the onions and toasting the spices, then adding diced potatoes and carrots, corn, peas, and coconut milk.
The chicken thighs baked slowly in the oven, to later be torn up and stirred into the curry.
While things were simmering away I prepared a triple-batch of naan dough, using all whole-wheat flour instead of my usual half-and-half blend.
I also added fresh garlic in addition to the usual few tablespoons of sage, giving the bread a new flavor dimension.
When it came time to cook the rice noodles we were serving alongside the curry, I discovered that the package instructions were strange, ambiguous, and poorly translated.
It seemed that one could cook these noodles simply by placing them in cool water for two minutes, but because I wanted to serve them hot I boiled water as I would for wheat noodles and stirred until the noodles were tender, which really did only take a few minutes.
When they were cooked I noticed the noodles had a peculiar aroma, which Charlotte described perfectly: “smells like plants!”
They tasted, however, as pleasantly bland as all rice noodles do.
For dessert, Charlotte had been wanting to learn to make lattice-top pies.
We mixed the last gallon-size bag of rhubarb from the freezer with strawberry jam and the usual pie spices, which didn’t seem too different from using canned pie filling.
When they first came out of the oven, however, the pies seemed even soupier than I was used to seeing fruit pies come out, despite our incorporation of corn starch into the filling. We tried pouring liquid off but it wouldn’t work, and our turkey baster kept getting clogged with rhubarb.
We were worried that we would have to serve dessert in bowls, but the pie thickened up considerably to normal fruit-pie texture as it cooled. Success!
We had a fun afternoon in the kitchen, too, moving through music ranging from the Grateful Dead to Yonder Mountain String Band to The Black Keys and back.
After dinner was over we were ready to put the final coat on the oven.
Everything was going great as we smoothed the finish plaster and began pressing in periwinkle shells and colorful rocks.
I dug out the door and Emily and I took turns digging out the sand form, which came away cleanly from the dome of building mud (our wet-paper release film had worked great).
Suddenly the oven began to slide. The dome held together beautifully, but it had nothing to sit on- we had not built onto the foundation sufficiently, but for the most part simply pressed mud onto sand and mud onto mud.
When it collapsed and split into segments, people seemed to come out of the proverbial woodwork, crowding around, asking questions, offering prescriptions for how to repair it. I became defensive, irritated, then disconsolate.
This is it for the oven; it’s done.
Once everyone who had been uselessly standing around left us alone, Elisabeth, Charlotte, Aidan, Emily and I began to plan.
We knew the problem was that we had built our sand form too big for our foundation.
We separated all the layers of the dome and put them into the bins we had carried mud and sand up to the building site in.
We used the tarp I had brought up to protect the oven from rain to mix sand and water, and built a smaller form.
The oven being smaller wouldn’t really be a problem at all, especially considering it was mostly for novelty purposes and we didn’t plan to bake any more than a loaf or two of bread at a time in it.
We covered the form with dampened pages from a Rolling Stone magazine.
Then, layer by layer, we rebuilt the entire oven as the sun slowly descended in the sky, ending up right back where we were, ready to dig out the door.
We even decorated with a beautiful spiral of rocks and shells pressed into the plaster.
Knowing it was likely to rain overnight, we carefully covered the oven with a tarp, placing all of the rocks we had left over from building the foundation around the perimeter, along with bins full of extra soil and sand.
Emily, Elisabeth and I took a victory shower, filling buckets from the water heater and dousing our hair and skin with yogurt containers.
It was refreshing to clean the silt and sand out of our hair and our pores and to stand under the moon with the breeze blowing over our skin. The warm water was so pleasant we didn’t want the experience to end.
Once we were clean to a satisfactory extent we headed inside to heat some water for tea.
We socialized with the others in the dorm, who were waiting for it to be dark enough and late enough for a petrel walk, which isn’t fruitful unless begun after 11 pm or so.
Elisabeth and I were reading in bed by 10:30, and falling asleep to the sound of the petrels that burrow right outside our house by the time the others had set out in search of the birds.
I awoke during the night to the sound of low rumbling thunder and falling rain.
The storm had finally blown in, it seemed.
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