First full week of cooking on the wood stove

Now that the weather has cooled off I have been doing all the cooking on the wood cook stove. One meal was fried chicken with fried potatoes and vegetables.


Fried chicken on a wood stove.  It doesn't get any better than this!  I got the chicken fryer at an antique mall.  Unfortunately, I have not gotten any family heirloom cookware.  The two teapots are purchases, the tall one from a flea market, and the shiny 2 gallon job online.

 I actually fried the chicken the day before, as I had the chicken all thawed and ready to go, but didn't have time to do a whole meal that day, so I went ahead and fried the chicken that day (Tuesday) and then fried the potatoes and warmed the vegetables in the microwave (shudder).

The chicken was fried the day before, so it got warmed up in the microwave, and now it is sitting on its little warming trivet on the stove backsplash while the potatoes are frying.  The vegetables were warmed in the microwave, and they are just sitting there keeping warm while the potatoes finish frying.

Notice that I removed the lid and put my frier pot directly over the fire to get it hot and keep it hot while the potatoes were frying. The next meal we had on Thursday was baked cod, in the oven, and rice cooked on the stove top, and canned vegetables that I heated up on the stove top. I was pretty nervous about using my good Farberware aluminum bottomed pan on the wood stove, but it worked just fine, I think the only serious concern would be if the pan boiled completely dry, so I made sure it didn't. I had trouble getting the water to boil for the rice, (a watched pot never boils), so I had to keep adding water as it was evaporating faster than it was boiling. It finally did boil enough to put the rice in, but I think it was about an hour before it did boil. I think that if I had built a quick hot fire with small sticks instead of the big chunks I was using, it would have boiled a lot faster. Next time.

Well, here's the meal.

It was very good.  The only real problem was that it took way too long to prepare. The next meal, Friday, was homemade pizza. I made up the dough in the automatic electric breadmaker, as it works great and I can do other work while it is mixing and kneading, although I do enjoy making my own bread from scratch from time to time. First, I cooked the pork sausage. Then when the oven got up to about 350 degrees I baked the crust first. That way it isn't soggy in the middle from the toppings, and it bakes faster. I learned from a food fair many years ago that if you flip the crust over it's a lot easier to put toppings on. The bottom of the crust is flat. You have to try it. It works!



This is an easy pizza.  Pork sausage, mushrooms, tomato paste, diced canned tomatoes, mozzarella, cheddar cheese.  Baked for about 15 minutes at about 350-400.  I turned it around about halfway so that it wouldn't be burnt on one end and raw on the other end.  The edges got a little dark, but it was still very good!

 On Saturday I made bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast. I spent some time and burned a lot of energy cutting more wood out back. There's a really big red oak tree downed by the back fence that I have been wanting to cut, so I worked on that for a couple hours until I got the chainsaw into some rocks and ruined the chain. Once you burn the chain on a rock, sharpening it with the file doesn't help. I have another chain for it down in the bottom of the truck toolbox, so I will have to dig it out and switch chains. It's fairly new, as I sharpened it only a couple times, and it started cutting sideways on me so I bought a new chain. Later I learned that this can be corrected simply by sharpening more on the opposite side. I cut some of the sections of oak short so they would be easier to split. I got a little electric wood splitter last year, it actually works! I never could get my great big hydraulic wood splitter to work, so it is just sitting out by the back fence. It is supposed to run on the tractor hydraulics, but my tractor doesn't have integral hydraulics. It has a hydraulic pump that goes on the PTO shaft, but that doesn't work very well with the wood splitter. So, I split a couple of sections of the oak, but it sure was hard to split. I think it is as tough and stringy as elm. Some of the pieces I had to finish off with the axe. But at least now I have enough small split pieces so I can get the stove hot fast. The bigger round stuff is good for keeping the oven hot once it gets hot. The damper is a slide in the back of the stove that slides over and partly closes the opening to the flue pipe. It works great when the stove is cold, but once it gets hot the iron expands and it sticks, so I have a little hammer that I use to open and close the damper when the stove is hot. I am sincerely hoping and praying that my banging on it doesn't break the iron! Maybe it would be better to use a piece of wood in between to absorb some of the shock from the hammer. Hmmm. The pigs finished off the two bags of feed I bought for them three weeks ago, so Saturday I bought four more bags. It filled the pig feeder to the top with some left over. I also refilled the 55 gallon drum I have for the pig's water. So that should keep them fed and watered for a while. I am still only getting 2 eggs a day. I think some of my hens are holding out on me. I will have to follow them around and see if I can figure out where they are hiding their eggs.

Baking with the cookstove

Saturday was cold, wet and rainy, so after finishing paying bills on the computer I decided to give the cookstove a try at baking. I got a box of brownie mix, as I figured that would allow me a rather wide margin of error. I got the fire started and then after about 30 minutes the oven was not getting hot, so I packed the firebox with wood and went out to get another egg from the hen house. When I got back the smoke alarms were going off, the upstairs was filling with smoke, and the oven temp was up over 450 degrees. I finished mixing the egg into the brownie mix, figuring that the oven would start cooling down some, but it didn't. So, I opened the "check draft" on the front of the firebox and when that didn't seem to do anything to the oven temp, I went ahead and put the brownie mix into the oven. When I opened the oven door, smoke billowed out into the room. I guess when I fired up the stove the first time, I didn't get the oven part hot enough to burn off the blacking, so now it was burning off. I opened all the windows and doors upstairs to let the smoke out of the house, it didn't really get cold inside because the stove was giving off so much heat. The brownie mix was supposed to bake for about 23 minutes but after 15 minutes it was browning quite dark, so I took it out and put it on a rack to cool. I let the fire burn out over the next 2-3 hours and I recorded the temperature inside the oven with a store-bought oven thermometer and the temperature that read on the front of the oven to see how close they were, and wrote it on a post-it note so that in the future I will have a better idea what the oven temp is without having to open the oven door.

You probably cannot see the temp gauge on the oven door, but it was reading well over 450 degrees.  If I had had some presence of mind, or if my wife was at home she would have suggested that I leave the oven door open for a while until the temperature dropped down to the desired temp of 375 degrees.  But if my wife were at home I wouldn't have been doing this, anyway.

So I taped the temperature conversion chart I had made to the back of one of the cabinet doors so that next time I do some baking I can see what the actual temperature is in the oven.

You can see that the back left is dark, that is the side closest to the rear of the firebox.  It probably would have been more evenly browned if I had remembered to rotate the pan halfway through the baking.

Anyways, I was very pleased that I could get the oven that hot with only fairly small sticks of wood. I was just using some pieces of junk wood that I had piled out by the back fence. In the future, at least during the winter, I plan to use regular firewood (oak, maple and walnut). I still have lots of small trees that were taken out when they made the driveway through the woods, plus several large trees that are down out by the back fence that need to be cleared. I think I have enough down trees right now to keep me in firewood for several years before I need to start cutting live trees.

Here come the pigs!  They always come running when I go out there, to see if I have anything good for them to eat.  Their dogloo is back under the trees on the right.  Most of the chickens stay in the pen, although the Americaunas manage to get out and back in again every day.

I have some barn metal that I plan to use to make a larger shelter for the pigs, as they will outgrow their dogloo pretty quick. I would guess that they weighed about 5 pounds each when I got them the 10th of September. Right now they are probably about 10-15 pounds each. They have gone through one 50 lb. bag of feed and are well into the second 50 lb. I built a pig feeder for them last week modeled after the one I saw in the store. It probably will hold about 300 lb. of feed, so that should be big enough to feed them when they get big. The plan is to castrate the white boar pig, and raise him and the female for eating, and get a large black for breeding. I figure the cross between the black and white pig I have, and the Large Black pig will give me good growth and hybrid vigor. We shall see.