How Much Do You Want Cookies?

I had told Vince the other day that I was going to make cookies but it’s a recipe that has to be refrigerated, then the dough rolled out and refrigerated again and I just haven’t had any big chunks of time. We kinda get off our diets on the weekend so he knew if I didn’t make them today, chances are . . they wouldn’t get made til next weekend at the earliest.

This afternoon he asked if I was going to make cookies so I told him I’d make something that was easy so I made lemon sugar cookies.

Back up a little . . Friday evening I was baking potatoes in the big oven because I wanted to use them to make twice baked potatoes for Saturday (which I still haven’t made). I put them in the oven and when it was about time for them to be done, Vince was going in the kitchen so I asked him to hit “cancel” on the oven. About an hour later, I went in the kitchen to get them out and let them sit on the counter to cool before putting them in the fridge and they were already cool. I thought . . that was quick.

Today when I went to pre-heat the oven to bake the cookies, it always shows 150 degrees when it starts to heat up. That was normal. I mixed up the cookies, looked at the oven and it still said 150. Hmm . . that’s not right. I opened the oven . . cold as could be. I asked Vince “What happened the other day when you turned the oven off?” He said . . it was already off. OK. We have a problem. I checked the potatoes and they’re about halfway done so at some point while baking those potatoes, the oven died.

Now . . I have a whole batch of cookie dough and no oven.

There’s a stove/oven in the shop but we used the gas line for something else and Vince doesn’t know where the line is (and there was a football game on TV) so that wasn’t an option.

I set the solar oven up. That will easily cook at 350 degrees, which is what I needed for the cookies.

But, today is one of the rare partly cloudy to mostly cloudy days.

When a cloud passes over, the oven drops from about 350 to 275 quickly so that wasn’t an option.

I thought about using the pizza oven on low heat but it wasn’t hooked up to a gas bottle either so that wasn’t an option.

I keep it on the porch in a Rubbermaid type tote but the table where I put it to use it is full of canning stuff since I canned chicken the other day so I just put the Aldi oven on the concrete, baked the cookies and solved that problem.

But, I still have a dead oven. After a while, an error message, E-08, popped up so Vince did a little research. He found something that said to check to see if the broiler would work and it does. Apparently there’s an igniter for the broiler and a separate igniter for the oven. If the broiler works, but not the oven, chances are it’s the igniter, which also has a sensor in it. He found the part online for $25 with free shipping and it will be there 9/26.

I’m super thankful Vince can fix it because my oven needs to be cleaned and I’ve been putting it off til it gets cooler. My first thought was “I’m going to have to buy Easy Off and clean that oven before a repairman sees it” but I don’t mind if Vince sees it.

I’m also thankful that I didn’t have bread or something big that I was fixing to cook when I discovered the oven wasn’t working.

The cookies were kinda big for the little baking sheet I had to use in the small oven but they were delicious – crispy, lemony, buttery and yummy!