When I first turn on my oven, the ghosts of spilled-over pies, sauces, and other drippy little accidents send their charred aromas wafting through the house. I occasionally brush out the blackened dust, but that’s about as far as I go, these days, with ‘cleaning the oven.’

Yes, I do have a self-cleaning oven, but it’s as lazy as I am.

Seriously though, I’m afraid of the ‘self-cleaning’ dial. Have you SEEN how high the temperature of that thing gets?

And if the goal of it is to turn all the spilled turkey grease, cheese sauce, and pie juice to charcoal, well, I do that anyway. Over time.

The scents of blackened miscellanities don’t last very long; just until they’re replaced by fresher spills or stronger aromas.

Right this minute, for example, the whole house smells like fresh-baked bread. I like to give all my aunts a loaf of bread for Christmas every year. It’s the only time I see most of them.

Tomorrow, whatever I put in there will have to compete with the scent of burnt crumbs and butter.

I will say, that when I fix Polish sausage and sauerkraut for Hub, I make bloody sure it’s in a huge pan with a tight lid, with no chance of a spillover. That stuff reeks, fresh in the pan, and I’m taking no chances of a toxic spill in my oven. Blackened apple pie juice is one thing, but blackened sauerkraut? Men in white suits and gas masks would have to clean my oven. And if that happened, I’d have to clean all the hardened food off the top, around the burners, before “people” saw it, because that stuff appears in the night and takes me by surprise. I looked closely at my stovetop just today and thought, ‘Where did all THAT come from? I know I cleaned this thing. . . . what’s today’s date?”

Hub eating over the stove when nobody’s home might have something to do with that. Yeah, he thinks nobody knows. He could give Hansel and Gretel lessons in trail-leaving.