A tale of Necessity's daughter.

Last Saturday night, my elderly stove suffered a failure of the oven burner. What a bummer!!! When I discovered the problem I was in process to make a pizza, with the crust dough already made and ready to use. What to do... It was a night cool enough to require having a fire in our wood heating stove, so I decided to try a campfire cooking method for the pizza. I heated my #12 LBL Griswold skillet, and pressed the dough into it. I have only one Vollrath piece of CI, and it is a large and very heavy lid. The lid sits down about 1 inch into the #12 skillet, so I determined to use it in my experiment. In the skillet with lid on, on the stove top, I heated the crust, then added sauce and heated some more. I added toppings and returned the pan to the stove top. Amazingly, I got an edible pizza by this method! I don't recommend it, and the whole process needed careful watching to avoid scorching the crust, but the ingredients did not go to waste! I mean if you can cook on a campfire with a Dutch oven, I thought this might work, and it did! The happy end of this tale is that on Tuesday a very talented and dedicated stove repairman reattached the burner to its correct place, and my oven is in great shape again. Losing the use of it was a true nightmare; finding that there are still workmen who will rescue a veritable antique was exhilarating!
 
Did you heat the Vollrath lid before putting it in there? I've "cooked" nachos entirely with the heat held by a pre-heated skillet and a lid before.
 
Good for you Sharon. That’s cookin’! I wish we had an appliance repair man in N. Georgia. The ones here know how to replace parts. That’s all. My major appliances are old enough (17 years) they no longer offer replacement parts for them so they just recommend buying a new one. We even had to figure out how to make our own ice cubes!

Hilditch
 
Thanks, Spurgeon. I don't know about fun, but it classified as adventure in my quiet life!
Yes, Benjamin, I heated the lid by letting it sit for a while on the wood stove. I am lucky to have one with a perfectly flat heavy steel plate for a top--not a beauty, but VERY useful! Mostly I make soup, stews, and such on it in the Winter; the rest of the year I miss it. Nachos are a thought; thanks for the suggestion.
Well, Hilditch, I'm sorry to hear you have a stove which is old enough to be "outdated", but not "antique". I was ecstatic to discover a real repair person for my cook stove, and consider myself very lucky, you'd better believe! I tried searching the Internet for a similar model before my knight in blue work uniform showed up, and the nearest thing I could find was the same model, but different color, on Craigslist in Nashville. Good price, but how the heck do you get something of that weight from Tennessee to Indiana?!
Thanks for all the good thoughts guys; now back to cooking the modern way (with my "antique" pans).:-D
 
Good innovation and thinking "outside the box". Guess it was too late to offer the repair man some of that pizza? As difficult as it is sometimes I try and repair stuff instead of replacing. Older things had a better quality about them and were meant to last longer than a year. My deep well water pump has been going for 19 years but it is American made...Need I say more?
I have the perfect CI piece for that type of cooking...Wagner Ware 1275-1 & 1275-2 Skillet-Oven. Pizza size would have to somewhat on the small size but would make an adequate size for one person....maybe two.
 
Michael, thanks for mentioning your Wagner Skillet-Oven. That sounds interesting, and I'll keep an eye out for one. I do like Wagner CI, but then it's all good when American made (in my oh so humble opinion).
 
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