She'd be in heaven with a wood cook stove, but we haven't had one since about 1982. Yet we've, for thirty-five years, always had wood heat, and collected much of the fuel ourselves. The present stove came with the house at Stony Run and sits in a corner of the dining room; it has built-in reflectors driving heat to the front, as it's a model intended for use in mobile homes. Its location is not terribly convenient to the kitchen counters, but better than if it were in the living room. There's a fireplace there, but we've blocked that up and taken the chimney down to solve leak and fire danger issues.
Pictured here is the dishwater heating up, along with lunch. That's a Chiot's Run tomato soup in the canning jar, or almost one: add some flour, some milk powder some dehydrated veg flakes, some spices, and stir. Suzy's is much the better recipe, but then we all know Risa's a bit haphazard.
We have a surplus of watery tomato puree on hand, much of it 2009 vintage, and we're making a run on the bank for tomato soups accordingly. As Risa's prone to burn the bottoms of such soups in a saucepan, leading to a lot of labor at the sink, she's taken to heating the soups in the dishwater. The canning jar doesn't seem to mind, but if you prefer not to risk shattering one by misjudging temperature differentials, try a stoneware pitcher or crock.
In my experiments years ago at our Breitenbush cabin, I found the wood cook stove a far more efficient heat source for the cabin than the various wood heating stoves we used there. The only advantage of the latter was warming up a cold cabin, but it burned through a lot of wood to do it. And there was nothing I couldn't cook with that stove--wish I had it here at this house, where the gas (propane) stove sometimes drives me nuts.
ReplyDeleteHey, I did that too one night, just to see if I could! Put all the leftovers in jars in a big pot of water and heated them on the woodstove. This was back before we had the cookstove (we replaced the heat-only version with a Bakers Oven from Pinnacle, which we love as it is small and fits in the same spot).
ReplyDeleteWe also got one of those cast iron swing arms and mounted it to the side - you can suspend the tea kettle over the stove and keep it warm but not boiling, or hang a dutch oven over the stove top. It was not even all that expensive, and I had it shipped from the US. Came with a bunch of S hooks and all the mounting hardware, too. We use it a lot now that we have the actual cookstove in that spot too - it's nice to keep the tea warm. :)
I try to do as much cooking on our wood stove as I can too. Ours isn't convenient to the kitchen either! I can't wait to get our cook stove in, hopefully before next winter (?)
ReplyDeleteI like Apple Jack Creek's idea of a swinging cast iron arm over the stove. I may need to try that too.