In the year following Thanksgiving 2000, I made no real attempts to acquire a stove that could hold a turkey until we slowly realized that my father had been serious and they really were coming. So, in October we paid our neighbor to run a gas line to our kitchen and I started leisurely looking for stoves.

There’s a little junk shop type of place down the street from us. They deliver and hook up and are pretty cheap. None of their stoves were particularly pretty - but if I needed one in the last minute I could get a gas stove for $100. I being me wanted a nice looking one. I searched Google for "cheap stainless steel stove" and "industrial range" and found that I really didn’t have the money for any of that nonsense. I looked on e-bay and found several beautiful old stoves in Texas or California where the shipping might be another $300. So I left an e-bay search notice for gas range in the NYC area.

Eventually I got a notice that there was a black Chambers stove in Yonkers. When I went to the site for the listing, there was no picture and the stove ran on propane gas. But everyone knows what a Chambers stove is, right? I didn’t need a picture…in fact I was happy there wasn’t one because it might exclude some bidders. I spent the next few days finding out how to convert a propane stove to natural gas. When I finally found out that it was fairly easy (many phone calls and e-mails later) I bid on the stove (black is rare). It had no bids at that point, but I got caught up in a bidding war in the last few seconds and got outbid at $350.

That sucked. A few nights later I was at the bar where Trippy works and I ran into some friends from a little local restaurant. The owner was there and she being a cook herself we started talking about how to brine a turkey, what side dishes really snazzed people and so on. I giggled conversation back to me by saying, "that’s great ! Now all I need is a stove to cook it in!" and got ready to tell the above saga of looking for the perfect stove. Suzy interrupted, "You need a stove? I have a beautiful stove and you can have it because it’s just sitting in my garage. Do you know what a Chambers stove is?"

Well I guess I can make a long story short now by telling you that as I made my coffee this morning I wanted to tell everyone out there that brining a Turkey works great and there is no better stove in the world than my butter yellow Chambers stove.
posted by jenifer constantine on 8:56 AM