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question, so she grabbed an extra package of pasta, bringing the total to ten pounds.
     "My God, it will take an army to eat this much. I'll be making cold spaghetti sandwiches for weeks and the hands will riot and Luke will tear a strip off me big enough to cover the south pasture."
     Carla frowned at the last package of pasta, then decided she could always take the leftovers to the bunkhouse for the hands who wanted a midnight snack. Arms bulging with packages of spaghetti, she went back into the kitchen. There she dumped the pasta on the counter and went back to the freezer. The hamburger came in five-pound freezer packages that were frozen as solid as a stone.
     She unwrapped a brick of ground meat and dropped it into a cast-iron frying pan that was so big and heavy it took both hands for her to lift it up onto the stove. A box of wooden matches sat on the stove itself. She lit the burner beneath the frozen meat, covered the pan and went to work on the sauce. Several forays to the pantry resulted in a can of tomato sauce the size of a bathroom sink, an equally intimidating can of whole tomatoes, and ten fat onions.
     After rummaging in the cupboards near the stove, Carla found a kettle the size of a laundry tub. She set it aside for cooking the noodles and found a slightly smaller cousin to hold the sauce. She nearly had to turn the kitchen inside out to find a handheld can opener that worked. As she wrestled with the awkward can and poured a river of tomato sauce into a big pot – too quickly – she discovered how the kitchen walls had gotten their splatter patterns. She wiped up what she could reach, lit the burner under the sauce and went to work peeling and chopping onions. Between bouts of crying she prodded the hamburger, prying off bits of meat as the frozen block slowly loosened.
     By the time the hamburger had thawed and was browning with the onions in the huge pan, nearly an hour had passed. A determined search of the kitchen had turned up no oregano and no whole garlic. A geriatric bottle of garlic granules was available, but she had to hammer the plastic container on the counter to knock loose a little of the contents.
     "What on earth have the cooks been feeding everyone?" Carla asked in exasperation. "No herbs, no spices, no—" The clock caught her eye. "Uh-oh. I'd better get dessert going or there won't be any of that, either."
     Carla ran up to her bedroom suite, tore through four boxes until she found her cookbooks, and raced back downstairs. The recipe for cherry cobbler said it fed eight. She doubled it, spread it into the smallest baking pan she could find – which was half the size of a card table – and discovered that the pan was way too big for the contents.
     "Oh well, men always like dessert. I'll put it in their lunch along with the cold spaghetti sandwiches."
     She mixed up two more double batches of cobbler, poured them into the pan with the first batch and lit the oven. Even after doing six times the normal recipe of cobbler, she still had half of the huge can of cherries left over. She set it aside, saw that time was getting away from her and went back to the spaghetti sauce.
     The meat and onions were browned and the pot of tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes was finally coming to a boil. The size and weight of the frying pan made draining the meat and onions an awkward process – especially using a kitchen towel as a pot holder – but she finally managed it. Next she had to dump the meat and onions into the pot of sauce. In doing so, she discovered another way to decorate the walls. Muttering, she mopped up and told herself that she would have to learn to manhandle a heavy pot and a gallon or two of sauce without making a mess.
     "Speaking of gallons, I'd better get the spaghetti water on," she muttered, pushing back her hair with her elbow because her fingers were only slightly less messy than the walls.
     By the time Carla filled a huge pot with water and lugged it to the