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.