Wood Cookstove Cooking for the Family Reunion

Since Nancy and I live on the home place for my father's side of the family, we host a family reunion every so many years.  My dad's brothers and sisters and their families all come, and we have a great time being together, playing together, visiting together, and, of course, eating together.  My dad also had nine aunts and uncles on his mother's side of the family, and that branch traditionally had get togethers at our home when my grandparents lived here, so we invite his first cousins as well.  If I have counted correctly, we only had 39 guests at our maximum on Saturday night, but we planned on about fifty.  We actually ended up with enough food for 100, I think.

At any rate, we used the cookstove in the summer kitchen to cook corn on the cob for the crowd, so I wanted to show you a few pictures of what we did. 

My brother slow roasted a hog that he had purchased at the 4-H premium sale at our county fair.  He had lots of help and interested onlookers, and it smelled fantastic all day.  He set up the borrowed cooker next to the summer kitchen so that water was nearby.

Supper was scheduled for six in the evening, so I started the fire in the stove in plenty of time to get water boiling for the sweet corn.  We had four pots of corn cooking at once.

Lids removed on the pots to the right for the photo only.

Once the sweet corn was cooked, I pulled it out of the pots and put it in a stainless steel bowl.  The bowl was put on a cast iron trivet and sort of rested above the reservoir and the far right side of the cooktop.  The stove was putting out plenty of heat to keep the corn hot, and I poured a little bit of the water from one of the pots that the corn was cooked in into the bottom of the bowl just to create steam to keep the corn moist.

The large cooktop of the wood cookstove certainly came in handy for cooking for a large crowd!