Easy-Bake Ovens

A writer in the unaffordable kitchen

I went to Kroger to get groceries today, $94.00 USD only filled two large full canvas bags full of food.

It was a doomed grocery shopping trip from the get-go, as I fought the few carts that were like dogs humping and inseparable and gladly took the “wonky wheel” cart a leaving shopper offered me. The carts insisted on being modern art. My sabotage to end the art installation of steel and caster wheels failed.

There were slim pickings as usual and the store was in Thursday A.M. restock, but it also meant markdowns and I scored more lamb chunks (for the same price as lean ground beast? I take the lamb!). Grabbed 5 sale multicolored bell peppers, four expensive bananas (weeping for my once-cheap always in various states of ripening daily potassium treat) having looked at every bunch that was already too yellow, as I prefer my bananas with a sickly tint of green remaining and not sweet and mushy—most bananas were also blemished showing bruises forming like an abuse survivor.

I skipped over the fruit fly visited and moldy meager stock of red onions after a deep dive and search for a good one despite needing an onion. I forgot lunches entirely.

Old Bay Seasoning, a Doppelgänger default seasoning and one of the three to five herbs/spices/seasonings, other than the salt and whole black peppercorns that preexisted me in the apartment, was out of stock.

I think about food prices and I worry. I plan meals based wholly on what I can afford and is on special. Salmon on sale and lamb is cheap- once luxury treats— but becoming more routine in recent months.

Grabbed discounted ground beef - 2 lbs for $13.45 with a sell-by date of tomorrow- meaning it’s my particular variation of meat loaf (no ketchup, no mustard, no breadcrumbs, no eggs, just herbs, seasonings and beloved Worcestershire, no bacon strappy lingerie to tart it up, no gravy of any sort, served medium, more minced steak loaf or giant hamburger/ hamburger steak than the standard ketchup and bacon mummified smothered sauced well-done cliché bland food atrocity called “meat loaf” in the US) and mashed potatoes tonight.

On-trend hime haircut circa 1976- the Easy Bake I wanted and never got.

Unpacked groceries- a wedge of Brie and store brand oyster crackers as a treat for me and a new La Columbe ready to drink medium brew “bright and mellow” cold brew bottle on sale to enjoy and replace the reused bottle that got to close to the burner and warped from the heat. (Doppelgänger!).

We reuse, reduce recycle jars, bottles, even plastic packaging (rare Amazon mailer bags are used to clean the litter box) and at $4.99 -and already brewed and full of special luxury coffee, not our 8 O’Clock Coffee original whole bean default coffee or the French Market white canister coffee and chicory blend (cheaper than red can by half for a while now- $5.49 at last purchase)- a new coffee carafe bottle to decant the room temperature coffee remaining in the stovetop coffee percolator at the days end was justified by me as a good deal/splurge. Yes, I literally stood there in the aisle doing mental gymnastics and calculations to justify the purchase.

As I checked out, a man whose cargo pants pockets and legs were very liberally and obviously filled with groceries stuffed down his legs like the original version B-movie ”Street Trash” walked past and set off the alarms and the three employees may as well have done rock, paper and scissors to see who was going to follow him out and confront the shoplifter. Someone did go after a brief debate and risk calculation. I don’t know the outcome.

I’m not ready to try Sylvia Plaths “Tomato Soup” cake recipe quite yet. I am fighting a personal Great Depression, at times. My iPhone 6s Plus apps are all failing, and it’s becoming a phone and text device only. I can’t afford one that runs iOS 16. I am victim of planned obsolescence by being poor and not a consumer. It’ll be a brick soon, as practical as the landline I grew up with. I need an 8 or newer, but 8’s are next to go, so an iPhone 11 is wiser but also 230 bucks or so that I don’t make. I’m anachronistic- no Affirm/no Klarna- not able or probably eligible of taking on any additional monthly expense either, plus 38% interest? I am screwed and stewed like those tomatoes in “tomato soup cake”. Apparently people upgrade phones every two years routinely. I use things until they are hard forced out of service. Mend and make do isn’t working anymore.

Oh back to that strange cake- It’s a spice cake, a mid century retro egg-free Great Depression “Magic Cakes” where alchemy occurs and the result is greater than the sum of the ingredients. Egg free is a good thing currently. Requires shortening though, and canned soup and I don’t buy those. I’d want more dried fruit, nuts, prefer pistachios, add ginger, sweet spice/pumpkin pie spice in excess. I like a good spice cake. Serve topped with ginger preserves instead of cream cheese or buttercream.

I’m not an icing/frosting person. I also find any excuse to use ginger preserves, lingonberry preserves and not eat white spackle-adjacent foods. Same with cottage cheese and sour cream. Not allowed in my home. They squick me. I have an irrational fear of cottage cheese. I once ran screaming out of my house in 2003 when the wasband came at me with a spoonful of curds and whey. Okay, I’m a bit cottage cheese phobic. I know why and while I can be around it now- it unsettles me. I can’t look at it. No mayonnaise/mayo-mockery lives in my fridge or permitted in my universe, either. Thankfully, Doppelgänger also absolutely hates mayo. Colorful condiments only!

No commentary

Little day camp commandant watching the ovens as they turn cake mix into hockey pucks. As a bad Jewess, image deeply unsettled me.

Here’s a very bitchy kitschy kitchen poem-

.

Poets and the Easy Bake Oven
Pixie Bruner 


You can’t suicide wiith an easy bake oven

An airfryer as a means of achieving possible fame 

and tragic poignant asphyxiation is impossible.

We no longer beatify contemporary poets for suicides

or even validate your parking.



We do not ask these poets which tools,

We ask why they built and say it gets better across the board.

You aren’t supposed to think of posthumous studies of your poetry.

You are only supposed to feel, fall, fall over, and to feel again,

rising up like an idiotic simile-filled Angelou in a box.



With a million rows of pharmaceuticals,

named by Scrabble tiles pulled ham-fisted

random vowels replacing consonants for complication.

the panacea for daily existential dread

Bitter tablets make reality more flatteringly lit

and help make the words prettier, less sharp.



If one doesn’t pill fix you, surely another will,

Tablet and capsule roulette, time release depot injections,

every follow-up appointment a new pill is put into the cylinder until one clicks 

Red blue green white capsule and peach-scored tablet goodnights

your way to stability with a glass of box whine. 

Fie fi for dumb - now you’re blotto, now I’m numb.

You didn’t romanticize it enough. Jesus wept!

What sort of monster is this woman?!



Log in every day without fail and dump your trauma

Like a dog with IBS and an irresponsible owner,

You don’t ever have to pick the crap up.

You parcel it out into petit fours

spackled in buttercream metaphors,

and raspberry angst similes,

a napoleon of  hypebole.



There shall be fondant flowerbeds to consume-

lovely chapbooks of the the standard-issue traumas you have perfected 

and you will be loved by young women readers

who attach to your diagnosis 

like remoras for their entire Id-entity.



You are not an imposter,

You are a trickster Goddess.

All readers want are your poems, your over-self-awareness 

not the viscera of the victims you wrote them with.

Even the other poets are sick of your self-negating autopsies.



A poet with a strong sense of self 

must bide their time, be profilic

hustle with their images like a streetwalker

in sequins and sensible shoes to run.

Sell off all their parts, develop their unusual niche specialities,

take the beatings from critics and editors like bad tricks 

and move on to the next block.



Sweetie, you can’t kill yourself with an Easy Bake Oven.

But I’m really really dying to watch you try