Meals out of a Ham

Since there are only two of us in our household, when we bake a ham, there is a lot of leftover meat.  Nancy doesn't like leftovers as a general rule, but she doesn't mind having leftover ham because we turn it into so many other very different dishes as we work to finish it.

The first thing she always asks for is a ham pot pie.  I've never heard of anyone else making one of these, so maybe they are a creation that is unique to us.  The process for making this pie is almost identical to what I do to make a chicken pot pie, which I have written about in this previous post.  I make gravy out of the drippings from the bottom of the roaster, adding some heavy cream and mixed vegetables.  Nancy cuts a few slices of ham into chunks, and everything goes into the meat pie pastry that I blogged in the other post.  The only real difference other than the type of meat and the color of the gravy is that we like to cover the top of the meat filling with Swiss cheese before adding the top crust.  Also, because of the salt that is already in the ham and the cheese, we add no additional seasoning to the gravy.

The Swiss cheese (two different kinds) on top of the
meat filling, waiting for the top crust to be added.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of taking a flaky
meat pie out of the oven of a woodburning cookstove. 
Loaves of golden brown bread and meat pies just make
a woodburning cookstove cook's heart sing.

The finished potpie removed from the oven to the
countertop for serving.

Ham pot pie.  Delectable!

The next meal might be something really fast.  One of the things I like is ham and sweet potatoes.  In the picture below, I had just used a can of sweet potatoes, some pecan syrup leftover from sweet rolls, and a couple of slices of ham placed on top.  I covered it and let it boil until all was hot. Some leftover green beans were warming in the small saucepan up next to the stovepipe.

Nancy's other usual request is ham and scalloped potatoes.  For years, I would occasionally attempt homemade ham and scalloped potatoes with no good results.  Then, a couple of years ago, I ran onto a video from Brenda Hall of the Youtube channel Appalachian Cooking with Brenda.  I now make scalloped potatoes and ham just the way she teaches in this video.    

If you've ever made scalloped potatoes, you know that they take a long time in the oven to get the potatoes cooked through.  Brenda starts her potatoes on the stovetop to shave some of that oven time.  This is a particularly efficient thing to do on a wood cookstove because while the oven is coming up to temperature, you can use the hot cooktop to get the meal jump started.

The pot of homegrown potatoes beginning to cook
in milk on top of the cookstove.  The secret here (as
Brenda continually reminds you in her video) is to 
keep them moving so they don't scorch.

You can see that this boiled over in the oven.  This was the first
time that I've had a really smoky boil-over in the oven of a
wood cookstove.  I shouldn't have filled the dish so full!  After
I saw what was happening, I added the foil and the pie tin to
catch any further spills.

After cutting the ham for the scalloped potatoes, there was not much meat left on the bone, so the hambone and its remains went into the soup kettle that was about half full of water.  I brought it to a good quick boil while the scalloped potatoes were in the oven.  Then, I let it simmer and reduce on the back of the range overnight.  This resulted in about an inch or so of some intense ham broth that was perfect for ham and bean soup--the final dish that came out of this particular ham.

The hambone boiling on the back of the range with the scalloped potatoes
resting on the open door to the warming oven.

Now, I don't know about the rest of the world, but in my particular area of Iowa, ham and bean soup is made with ham broth, Navy or Great Northern Beans, a paltry little bit of onion, carrot, and celery, and a whatever morsels of ham were left on the bone.  I've made that soup before, and I'm told that mine was pretty good, but to me it tastes like dirty water.  By that I mean that it has a distinct lack of flavor and doesn't do justice to the ham, the beans, or the vegetables.

You can see from the photo below, that my version of ham and bean soup is totally different.  I used all of the traditional ingredients, but my beans came in the form of two cans of Van Camp's Pork and Beans, some ketchup, some potatoes (sometime I'm going to try adding pasta instead of the potatoes), and pearl barley. This, for me, is much more satisfying and delicious!  Again, the ham and its broth along with the canned beans and ketchup are salty enough that I added no further seasoning of any kind.

Now, there is one other dish that we love to make with leftover ham, and that is ham balls.  These are a favorite dish in the southern two tiers of counties in Iowa, but an "immigrant" from Mount Ayr brought these up to our area fifty years ago, and they remain a family favorite.  They really deserve their own blog post, though, so you'll have to look for that in the future.

In these days of high food costs, I think a ham is money well spent because of the number of different meals that can be made from it--even the bone was a source of joy to our dog after we had picked it clean of the meat that we could use.  Further, each of these dishes is extremely easy to make on a wood cookstove since no specific times and temperatures are needed for any of them.

Please use the comments section below to let me know what you do with leftover ham.

May your kitchen cookstove fire be burning brightly!

Cooking on the Hayes-Custer in the Summer Kitchen Again

Nancy has pronounced me crazy.

My insanity is not news, however.  My longtime, loyal readers and certainly those who know me personally had no doubt arrived at this conclusion long ago, so that is not the reason for this blogpost.

The reason for this blogpost and the reason that Nancy has pronounced me crazy are one and the same.  She made her proclamation when she saw me hauling a large skillet of cauliflower out to the summer kitchen a week ago Saturday.  

"You're cooking out there?" she said incredulously.

"Yes," I responded.

She looked at me strangely.

"I've told you how much I don't like cooking on that gas stove," I said, shrugging.

"You're crazy," said she.

Guilty as charged, I guess.  I've said before on this blog that no method of cooking compares to cooking on a woodburning cookstove, and now that I don't have to give it up for the summer, I don't plan to.

I had posted on May 22nd that we had turned our electric water heater back on.  However, we had some cooler weather after that, so I fired the Margin Gem again for a few more days.  We left the electric water heater on, but we used the valves in the basement to alternate using water heated electrically and water heated by the Margin Gem.  Once the first of June rolled around, however, the weather got quite warm again, so I have not had a fire inside the house since then.

I've put a two-burner electric hot plate on the reservoir of the Margin Gem in the house kitchen--something that was done quite frequently in history judging from the pictures I've seen.  I've used this for only very light cooking here and there.  Any serious cooking and baking has been hauled out to the summer kitchen.

I really think this Hayes-Custer is quite fuel efficient.  On just a few sticks, I can do quite a bit of cooking and baking.  Speaking of baking, I think it does a beautiful job of it.  In the picture below, I left the goods in the oven about three minutes too long (my fault entirely), but isn't everything a beautiful, uniform golden brown?  I didn't have to rotate anything during the baking time, either.

Bread and rolls coming out of the oven on the Hayes-Custer.  Notice how 
small a fire was required to keep the oven hot.

Oh, and I wish someone would explain something to me: Why do I like cinnamon rolls that are made out of bread dough so well?  I make very good cinnamon rolls using my own variation of my aunt Meme's recipe.  For Monday Market baking, I mix up 15 batches of those rolls, five batches at a time.  People stand in line to buy them.  But, when I'm baking bread for just Nancy and me, I sometimes make one loaf's worth of the dough into a pan of cinnamon rolls.  That's what I did in the picture above.  And I love them!  They have less fat and less sugar in the dough; they are not nearly so light.  In fact they're downright chewy, and I savor every bite!  But why?

Anyway, the picture below is my first ever attempt at tater-tot casserole.  It was very good, but I'm just not a huge fan of tater-tots.  I would like to try it as the recipe originally said, which was to make it with sliced potatoes.  We'll see.  Didn't the Hayes-Custer do a nice job of browning the tater-tots, though?  Nancy doesn't like vegetables to be in the casserole, so the two saucepans over the firebox have home-grown peas and sweet corn from our freezer in them.

During Covid-19 quarantine time, I learned to make hamburger buns from scratch.  The ones that I made on Tuesday of this week were the best batch ever.  The secret?  I think it was the fact that I used bacon grease in them instead of Crisco or vegetable oil.  I've never done that before.

The buns didn't taste like bacon at all, but they were very tender.  They look a little brown on the top, but they were actually just perfect.  I made them for the barbecued shredded pork that you can see in the smaller saucepan directly above the oven.  I made the shredded pork out of some that I had canned on the Margin Gem back in 2017.  The sandwiches were very delicious.

When I start a fire to do some cooking in the summer, I try to take advantage of the fire as much as possible in order to be more efficient.  The black saucepan on the warming shelf has hardboiled eggs in it that are being timed before their cold water bath.  The saucepan over the firebox was water coming to a boil for cooking pasta for a salad.

The last picture is of yesterday's breakfast--and supper and today's supper actually.  The pancakes and part of the bacon were the breakfast.  The rest of the bacon and the chicken breast hidden inside that small cast iron skillet on the back of the range all went into the aforementioned pasta salad.

Breakfast cooking on the Hayes-Custer wood cookstove.

There has been much more cooking done on the Hayes-Custer already this summer, but not every occasion has warranted a picture.  As you can see, the stove has been busy, and I must say, it's been very cooperative too.

I've got a series of posts using this stove coming up, so stay tuned!

Aebleskiver on the Wood Cookstove

Granny, my grandmother on my dad's side, was 100% Danish, but I don't think she ever made Aebleskiver (or Ebelskiver), and I'd be willing to bet that her mother never made them either.  You see, my great-grandmother had ten children who lived to adulthood, and I'm sure there was no way she would have been able to make enough Aebleskiver at one shot to stave off their hunger.  I've never heard anyone say that Granny ever made Aebleskiver either, and that would be because she did everything in a hurry, and you just can't hurry these.

Literally translated, "Aebleskiver" means "apple slice," and I suppose that one could make these little things with an apple slice in the middle, but that is not very common anymore so far as I know.  What we southwestern Iowans call Aebleskiver is really more of a pancake or waffle that is shaped like a ball.  In order to make them, an Aebleskiver pan is required.  These are almost always made of cast iron with seven half-sphere wells in them.

A little anecdote about my pan: I bought this several years ago from an antiques vendor at Carstens Farm.  They had it priced at just over half the amount I had recently seen on one at an antique store, and the label called it an "egg cooker."  I happily plunked down the money for this heavy "egg cooker," but then had to carry it around the rest of the evening.  While Nancy and I were in line for Staley's chicken, someone came up to us and asked why I was carrying around an Aebleskiver pan.  I explained that I had just purchased it, that it had been labeled as an egg cooker, and disclosed the price I paid.  His eyes got big, and he said, "You stole it!"  'Fraid so, folks, and I have to confess that I don't feel guilty about it either.

Special note for wood cookstove cooks: New style Aebleskiver pans are constructed slightly differently than this vintage one.  In later pictures, you will be able to see that this pan has an apron around the outside which traps heat and fixes it so that the bottoms of the wells don't actually rest on the stovetop but are lifted ever so slightly above it.  For cooking on a wood cookstove, this is the style of pan that I feel is preferable.  The reason is that I often have removed a lid from over the firebox and placed the pan directly over the fire.  The apron around the edge of the pan prevents smoke from entering the room and also prevents cold room air from being sucked into the stove around the pan, creating very unevenly heated wells.  

1. The Aebleskiver pan needs to be very hot, so I start the process of making Aebleskiver by building a hot fire and putting the pan on the stove directly over the fire.

2. Even if you are lucky enough to have a well-seasoned pan, you are going to have to grease it between each set of Aebleskiver that you bake.  A very experienced Aebleskiver baker from a neighboring town told me that when her church has their annual Aebleskiver supper (a humongous fundraiser and social event there), they grease their Aebleskiver pans with a mixture of half lard and half white Crisco.  This really is important because the type of grease used definitely affects the flavor of these.  Hence, I put equal parts of the two fats in a dish up in the warming oven to melt.  If they are melted together, it makes it very easy to spoon some into each well.

(At this point, astute readers are saying to themselves, "Wait a minute, you just said that these took a lot of time and that it was impossible to make them for a crowd.  How can a church have an Aebleskiver supper?"  Well, I've only been present once many years ago, but let me tell you, these women have this thing down to a science!  They pull the electric stoves out of their slots in the kitchen cupboards and station a lady on each side so that each person is taking care of two Aebleskiver pans.  If I remember correctly, they have three stoves, so they are cooking twelve pans at once with six ladies dedicated to just turning Aebleskiver.  Others are engaged in providing the batter, etc.  It is an undertaking of epic proportions.)

Now, I'm going to share two different Aebleskiver recipes.  The first one comes from Bessie Ford, who was a cousin of my great-grandpa Doc.  By the time I met her, she was a quaint old lady who lived in an even quainter one-story house on the edge of Missouri Valley, Iowa.  She had no children of her own, but she had a nephew who lived somewhere fairly close, and she would have him and his family come down for Aebleskiver suppers.  This is the recipe that she used:

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

3 egg yolks

2 tsp. sugar

2 cups buttermilk

3 egg whites

Bessie's recipe makes very good Aebleskivers that are as light as feathers.  The internet is full of Aebleskiver recipes that are very similar, if not identical, to this one.

However, the next Aebleskiver recipe is my favorite.  It is the one used at the aforementioned local church supper, and--try as I might--I've never found a similar recipe anywhere.

5 cups flour

4 1/2 tsp. baking powder

2 tsp. salt

6 egg yolks

2 TBLSP. sugar

1 cup heavy whipping cream

4 cups rich milk

6 egg whites

No matter which recipe you decide you wish to try, the method is the same.

3. Mix your flour, leavening, and salt together.

4. Separate your eggs and beat the whites to stiff peaks.

5. Beat the sugar into the yolks.

6. Beat the liquids into the egg yolk mixture.

7. Combine the egg and dairy mixture with the dry ingredients.

8. Fold the stiffly beaten egg whites in last.

9. By now, your Aebleskiver pan should be hot.  I put about a half teaspoon of the melted shortening in each well.  I find it works best if the oil is so hot that it is just about to smoke.

10. Fill each well almost to the top with the batter.  I find that the gravy ladle that goes with our everyday silverware set is the perfect size for this task.

Here I am starting to bake the first Aebleskiver.
You can also see a Poffertjes pan on the stove.
We tried making Aebleskiver in it, but it
didn't work out, so we abandoned that idea 
early on and just used the Aebleskiver pan.

11. By the time you have finished filling the seventh well, it is very likely that the batter in the one you filled first will be ready to turn.  Using an ice pick or similar weaponry, gently lift one edge of the half sphere by catching it with the point of the pick and pulling up a little ways.  This will result in some more of the uncooked batter from the middle to pour out and form some more of the edge.

12. Repeat step #11 until you have perfectly round Aebleskivers, letting them cook long enough to be sure that they are not doughy in the middle.

13. Once they are done, they can be immediately served, but you may find yourself wanting to collect a few before sending them to the table so that more than a couple of people can eat at the same time.  This is where the warming oven of the wood cookstove really shines.  I like to put them in this stainless steel Wilton bowl that Nancy and I were given as a wedding gift.  The bowl is designed so that you could boil a vegetable side dish in it on the stovetop and then take it directly to the table to serve.  It is the perfect thing in which to store hot Aebleskiver in the warming oven before taking a bunch of them to the table at once.

Aebleskiver can be served in a number of ways.  Some people roll them in sugar or cinnamon sugar, or they could be dusted with powdered sugar.  My preference is to eat them with syrup.  The ones in the picture below are accompanied by red raspberry syrup made by a family a couple of counties to the east of us.

Don't think that syrup is necessary, however.  When we had all of my family here for an Aebleskiver supper after Christmas, the bowl of leftover Aebleskiver was sitting on the kitchen table waiting for me to bag them up for the freezer while everyone was leaving.  As they went by on their way out the door, my five-year-old twin nephews each grabbed one to-go and ate them plain.  I took that as a high compliment!

Aebleskiver freeze well in a plastic zipper bag, and microwave nicely when you are ready to eat them again.  Enjoy!

Book Review: "The Prepper's Cookbook" by Deborah D. Moore

It's been a quite a while since I've posted a book review on this blog, but I recently read a cookbook that has been in my collection for perhaps a couple of years: A Prepper's Cookbook: Twenty Years of Cooking in the Woods by Deborah D. Moore.  I don't remember where I found this little gem, but it is available from retailers online.  Originally, I purchased this because the advertisement I saw said that it contained information on how to cook on a woodburning cookstove.  It does indeed.

Situated in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Ms. Moore's home is remote, and she has to be ready to be snowed in for days at a time.  Thus, she keeps a very well-stocked pantry that is a combination of home-preserved and store-bought foods.  Ms. Moore has also cooked on her Enterprise King wood cookstove for more than twenty years, so she definitely qualifies as an expert on prepper cooking.  For me, though, the best thing about this cookbook is that it is a modern collection of recipes that have all been regularly prepared on a woodburning range.

Ms. Moore has included a very wide variety of recipes in her cookbook.  With Harvest Chowder on page 19 and Pecan Chicken on page 165, she's got literally everything from soup to nuts.  The recipes vary greatly in their difficulty levels too: some are a lot of work; others are simple, but all are made with ingredients that could easily be a part of any well-stocked pantry and freezer. 

Before each section of the cookbook, Ms. Moore has placed brief essays on many different subjects.  This is where she includes five pages of information about cooking on a woodburning cookstove.  In such a short space, Ms. Moore does an excellent job of giving the basics.  The only thing she says that I would disagree with is that she advises cleaning all of the ashes off the top of the oven box.  I'm sure that on her stove that gives her the best baking results.  However, in both the Qualified Range and the Margin Gem, I have found that leaving at least a half inch of ash on top of the oven box is beneficial.  See, in these models of cookstove, the oven basically heats from the top down, so to create the most even heating, it is important to keep the flue on the bottom of the oven clean, but a layer of insulation on the top is good.  Other than that, Ms. Moore and I are largely in agreement about these wondrous appliances.

On a side note, I read a negative review of this cookbook online from a reader who said she was disappointed because the information about cooking on a woodburning range was so short.  I wish I could get a hold of her and direct her to my blog!

My only negative criticisms are that there was some kind of a printing error on one of the recipes, making it obviously incomplete.  I also did not enjoy some of the essays at the beginning of the different sections of the cookbook.  These are generally small, though, so they aren't a big problem for me.

When I read this book in the late summer, one of the recipes that really caught my eye was the one for "Canned Cole Slaw."  I did not grow any cabbage in my garden this summer, but I had everything else the recipe called for, and the idea of having cole slaw in a jar was intriguing.  I tried it, following the recipe to the letter.

On Sunday, October 18th, I opened a pint of it to see what it tastes like.  Following Ms. Moore's advice, I rinsed the slaw twice.  This allowed much of the sugar, vinegar, and celery seed to come off.  I then mixed some sugar and a little pepper into some mayonnaise and folded that into the slaw.  The end product was good, if a bit krauty, but even Ms. Moore says in her narrative that the recipe is not meant to be a substitute for fresh cole slaw, rather a close second during the long winter months when fresh produce is harder to come by.  

I'm looking forward to trying other recipes from this cookbook in the future.

Making Popcorn on a Wood Cookstove

I like popcorn, but Nancy LOVES popcorn.  Her grandparents, with whom she frequently stayed, would have popcorn for Sunday night supper.  Her grandmother made it in the bottom of an old pressure cooker which she shook over a burner of her propane stove.  We are a little more uptown with a Lindy's stainless steel stovetop corn popper that we purchased at an Amish store, but we still use a stove rather than a microwave or electric popper.

Making popcorn on the gas stove is very easy, but there was a bit of a learning curve for us when it came to popping corn on the wood cookstove.  Here is the key: you've got to have a REALLY HOT fire burning in the stove in order to get the best popcorn.  Thus, at the risk of sounding like a broken record on this blog, we use lots of small sticks to build a raging inferno when we are going to make popcorn.  You can see one of the fires built for popping corn during the Covid-19 Quarantine in the picture below.

You can't tell it well from the photo above, but I try to keep the bulk of the fuel toward the front of the firebox so that the hottest part of the cooktop is the front left lid.  This is the easiest spot to place the popcorn popper since you have to be able to lightly hold the handle with one hand and turn the crank with the other.

Nancy puts a little canola oil in the bottom of the popper along with two kernels of corn, places it on the fire and begins turning the crank.

When she hears the two kernels pop, she knows the oil is the right temperature.

Once the oil is hot, she adds a scant cup of popcorn, shuts the lid and begins turning the crank in earnest.  She says the popcorn is done popping when she can no longer turn the crank.

Within minutes, she has a popper full of delicious popcorn, which she pours out into one of our large stainless steel bowls.  She then seasons it as she desires, and we scarf it down.  If you want, you could use the recipe at this link in order to make caramel popcorn.  Either way, the popcorn is delicious.

What Does "Back of the Stove" Mean?

200th Post!  200th Post!  200th Post!  200th Post!  200th Post!  200th Post!

Sorry.  I'm excited that this is my 200th blogpost!

A while back, I had a reader suggest to me that I write a blog post explaining the phrase "back of the stove"--as in "Let it simmer on the back of the stove for six hours" or "Cook at the back of the stove until thick."  It is a very common phrase in old recipes and cookbooks and is perhaps a little confusing to today's cooks.

In actuality, this phrase even predates the most common designs for woodburning ranges, so we have to go back in history a little to understand it fully.

When household cookery began to move from open fireplaces to cast iron stoves, the stoves were built with very low fireboxes at the front, which then vented toward the rear of the stove beneath an oven, the bottom of which was even with the level of the cooktop, as in the picture below:

Photo courtesy of farmallclub.org

This stove design then changed to have the oven be tucked under the cooktop, and the firebox was raised to a more comfortable height. Cookstoves then looked like this:

Photo Credit: amberghistory.org

A door is open on the oven in the picture above, but the photos only show one of the two oven doors on each stove since each of these cookstoves was equipped with an oven which could be accessed from either side.

This type of cookstove was usually installed with the firebox side toward the room as in the first picture above.

Thus, the firebox side was literally the front of the stove, and the cooler, rear part was at the back.  The phrase "back of the stove" meant the cooler part of the cooktop.

As with so many things in the human experience, our tools changed before our terminology did.  More recent stove designs put the firebox on the left (only rarely on the right), and the cooler part of the range top is now on the side of the stove instead of the back.

In the pictures below, you can see the firebox on the left side of the Margin Gem, and in the second picture you see a saucepan and our teakettle "on the back of the stove."

Basically, the phrase "back of the stove" means the coolest part of the cooktop even though it is no longer necessarily at the stove's back.  The phrase indicates an area used for slow cooking and keeping things warm while still having direct heat.

I hope that clears things up for everyone who might have been wondering!

Some General Information about Wood Cookstoves in Response to a Reader Request

When I created this blog, I wanted it to be a clearinghouse of information about woodburning cookstoves, so I get particularly excited when a reader leaves a comment with questions.  That is what happened a couple of days ago when reader Momma Panda ran across my blog and asked several questions about wood cookstoves.  She is new to the woodburning cookstove world, so her questions may seem basic to those of us who are more seasoned wood cookstove cooks.  However, she asks questions that are reflective of what most of today's population might wonder, and my mission here is to educate, so I am more than happy to answer.

As a side note, I am continually chagrined at how ignorant the entertainment industry is about wood cookstoves.  I like to watch movies that are set in the past, and what I see regarding cookstoves is often quite ridiculous.  When I was growing up, we had a steady diet of wood cookstoves on television with shows like Little House on the Prairie, etc., but we weren't yet so far removed from the days when wood cookstoves were in regular use that people had forgotten their general principles. These days, it is not uncommon to see actors put their hands down on cooktops, lay potholders just anywhere, and leave stove lids open indefinitely.  The worst thing I've seen recently, though, was in a movie where the stove was very obviously a Home Comfort brand range, and they had built their fire in the warming oven beneath the baking oven.  For me, that completely ruined the believability of the whole movie.

All that is to say that I really appreciate it when people ask questions, and--as always--I welcome other readers to use the comments section to add their two-cents worth whether they be in agreement or otherwise.  Keep in mind that what I write below is general information, and individual cookstove models can vary quite a bit.

So here goes.  First, the basics.

Most old-style woodburning cookstoves have their firebox on the left side, and they are usually smaller fireboxes than heating stoves have.  This allows for better control of the fire.  When the oven damper is closed, the smoke and heat from the fire travel to the right, just under the cooktop. This makes it so that the hottest part of the cooktop is directly above the fire, and the heat gets lower as you travel to the right.

In the picture below, the pressure canner and the open kettle of apples would be over what might be considered high heat, the green waterbath canner and the open kettle of applesauce apples would be roughly over medium heat, and the kettle of ketchup and pan of canning lids on the right would be over low heat.

When the smoke and heat get to the top right side of the oven (the big white door with the round thermometer on it), they then travel down the right side, beneath the oven, and then out of the stove to the chimney. Below are some illustrations of the smoke paths in wood cookstoves from John Vivian's book Wood Heat.

The heat of the fire (and consequently the heat of the cooktop and oven) is regulated in a number of ways:

1. What type of wood you are burning.
2. How large the pieces of wood are.
3. How much air is allowed to come into the fire.
4. How quickly the combustion gases are allowed to leave through the chimney.

Now to answer your more specific questions:

How Much of the Stove Is Hot:

The stove gets hot on the outside, but just as I explained with the cooktop, some parts of the stove's exterior are hotter than others.  This also can vary quite a bit with different brands/styles of stove.  For example, our Margin Gem (shown in the picture above) is so constructed that you can put your hand on the left side of the stove without getting burned.  The left side of the green and cream Riverside Bakewell that you see at the top of this blog would be WAY TOO HOT to touch.  Lightly brushing the outside of the oven door on either of these stoves would not hurt you unless you left your hand there for too long.

As far as whether this would be a problem with small children about, my opinion is that children should have a healthy respect for all stoves no matter what they use for fuel.  I'm not sure that there is any greater risk for them around a woodburning cookstove than any other range, but that would be something you would have to decide.  With our nieces and nephews, a warning or two when they were very young has always been sufficient, and we've never had a problem.

It is also important to understand that the entire cooktop gets hot, not just the round lids.  Thus, we usually lay spoons and spatulas on top of the warming oven (the long horizontal box at the top of the stove), which is also where we keep the stack of hot pads.  The tradeoff here is that you can have a lot more than four or five pots and pans cooking on the stovetop at once.  Last Saturday, I had seven vessels on the stovetop simultaneously in order to cook our dinner.

Summer Cooking:

Because the whole stove radiates heat, it can be uncomfortable to cook on a woodburning cookstove in the summer, though I have had fires in the Margin Gem during every month of the year.  We do have a gas stove in the kitchen that we use in the summer, but the green and cream cookstove at the top of the blog is actually in our summer kitchen, which is an outbuilding.  Our plan is to move that much closer to the house in order to make it even more practical to use a wood cookstove during the summer.

Truthfully, I'm quite alarmed at the amount of heat that our gas stove allows to escape unused around the edges of cooking utensils, and I'm not sure that the cookstove top lets as much heat go wasted.  One of the biggest differences, though, is that the wood cookstove radiates heat while it is getting hot enough to cook on as well as long after the cooking is completed--certainly a major difference from the instant on and off of a gas or electric stove.

We mitigate the before-cooking and after-cooking heat in the summer by using different size and types of fuel.  You can read more about that in my post about Summer Cookstove Fuel.


As you can tell from my blog, I'm very enthusiastic about cooking on a woodburning cookstove, but I'll be the first to admit that it isn't for everyone.  It really is kind of a lifestyle choice.  However, most of the people who choose to do it find it both satisfying and rewarding.

The biggest thing I would suggest you consider before getting your own wood cookstove is where and how you will get your fuel.  If cutting your own firewood (or at least purchasing firewood at a reasonable price) is not realistic, I wouldn't recommend going to all of the expense of buying a stove and renovating your kitchen to accommodate it.

If you have any more questions, please feel free to ask.  And, readers, use the comments to chime in here, too.

Cheating with Your Wood Cookstove: Broccoli Rice Casserole

I'm totally embarrassed by the recipe that I'm sharing with you today.

It is not healthy.

It is not original.

It is not from scratch.

It is not one made from all homegrown foods.

You've probably all seen it before.

But .  .  .

It tastes SOOO good!

This 1970s-era recipe was one of only two casseroles that my mom could get the three of us kids to eat while I was growing up.  We all loved it, and it was frequently requested on our birthdays when we got to choose what we ate for all three meals that day.  I still really enjoy it, and because of the cooking method, it is extremely well suited to being made on a wood cookstove.

You are going to need the following ingredients:

1/4 cup butter (I usually reduce this to 1 or 2 TBSP.)

1/2 cup chopped celery

1/2 cup chopped onion

1 can cream of mushroom soup

An 8 oz. jar of Cheez Whiz (GASP! I'll talk more about this later.)

10 oz. frozen broccoli

1 cup instant rice

Here is what you do:

1) Build your fire so that eventually you will have a moderate oven.

 

2) While the oven is heating, gently sauté the onion and celery in the butter in a very large frying pan.  I like to use my Magnalite chicken fryer for this because it has much taller sides, and that prevents spillage on the cooktop. I usually add a sprinkling of pepper to this mixture, too.

 

3) Once the onion is translucent, add the rest of the ingredients in the order given, stirring after each addition.  You may need to add a little water if the mixture doesn't flow freely, but don't do this until the broccoli has thawed so you know how much moisture it will release.

 

4) After the mixture has started to bubble a little, pour it into a greased 7" x 12" casserole dish.

5) By this time, the oven should be running at about 350º.  Pop the casserole into the oven for about a half hour.  It should be bubbly around the edges and beginning to brown a little on the top.

 

6) Remove from the oven and serve.

 

My mom always served this with our homemade applesauce, and I think this is an excellent combination.  When I was little, Mom would always make hamburgers (sans bun; we never had hamburgers with buns) to go with this as our meat.  Later on, she began to put a pound of cubed ham into the casserole.  This adds a lot of flavor to this and makes it a one-dish meal.  That is my favorite way to make it, but I didn't have any ham to put in it this evening.  If you do put the ham in it, you'll need a bigger casserole dish.  I often use a 9" x 13" dish then.

I have made this casserole with home-canned broccoli quite successfully.  It is a good way to use up a vegetable that many don't find very good when canned.

Now, about that Cheez Whiz.  You can substitute other cheeses or other cheese sauces here as you see fit and your taste permits.  You could also make your own mushroom white sauce and parboil regular rice, and then this recipe is no longer cheating.  It's still a great cookstove recipe, though, because you take advantage of the hot cooktop while your oven is heating to bake the casserole.

And since I'm so embarrassed that I like this dish so much, let's just agree to not talk about it anymore. 

Thanks.  I knew you'd understand.

Grasshopper Pie - A Frozen Cookstove Dessert

I am just old enough to remember the time when microwave ovens came into popular use.  My parents bought theirs shortly after I was born, but I distinctly remember when both sets of my grandparents bought theirs, and I was near to junior high age when my aunt Meme began to use one.  No one in our family did much cooking in their microwaves; their primary service was to re-heat leftovers, and I think (with a few exceptions) that is how most of us still use them.

Eventually, I'd like to do a series of posts about how to use a woodburning cookstove to re-warm leftovers because one of the purposes of this blog is to show people what a flexible appliance wood cookstoves are.  Another purpose of the blog is to show that older methods of cooking can still be viable in today's world.

Now, I'm not sure that the recipe that I'm about to share even really qualifies as cooking because it is so easy--"food preparation" yes, but "cooking" not so much.  This is because the heat is only applied to some ingredients to melt them, not to change their chemical composition.  (Some may say that a comment like that makes me into a cooking snob.  Guilty as charged, I guess.)  However, the end product is delicious, and you can't make this dessert without using some heat-producing device or other.

This recipe came from cooks.com, which appears to have somewhere around three billion recipes for grasshopper pie.  I had printed it off many years ago and pasted it into my binder of dessert recipe clippings.  A short search to try to find it again online so that I could provide link to it was unsuccessful, so just know that I'm not taking any credit for this one at all.

You'll need the following ingredients:

1 lb. marshmallows

1/2 c. milk

18 chocolate sandwich cookies (We splurged and bought real Oreos®.)

3 Tblsp. butter

1 1/2 c. heavy cream

1/4 c. Creme de Menthe

3 Tblsp. Creme de Cacao

Andes mints for garnish

1. The first thing to do is to melt the pound of marshmallows with the 1/2 c. of milk.  My copy of the recipe even says right on it "can be done in microwave," but I decided to do this the old-fashioned way and melt them in the top of a double-boiler.  I can remember my mom and Meme doing this when they made Rice Krispie Treats®.  I started them directly over the fire, but ended up moving them to a cooler spot to just keep the water at a simmer rather than a rolling boil.  The marshmallows may begin to stick a little if the water below them is boiling too hard.

2. While the marshmallows are melting, melt the three tablespoons of butter in the warming oven or on top of the water reservoir.  I used the warming oven this time.

3. As the marshmallows melt, stir them occasionally to speed the process and to mix in the milk.

4. When you can no longer see any marshmallow lumps, remove the top part of the double boiler to a trivet to cool completely.

5. At about the time the marshmallows are melted, the butter should be melted too.  Crush the Oreo® cookies using either a rolling pin or a food processor.  I was in a hurry, so I used the food processor, and I have to admit that I think that machine is great.  Mix the 3 Tbsp. melted butter into the cookie crumbs and pour them into a nine-inch pie plate.

6. I used another pie plate that was the same size to quickly press the crumbs into a crust.

7. Once the crust is ready, the next step is to whip the cup and a half of cream until it is stiff.

I took a picture of some of the ingredients because I laugh when
I think about the two bottles of liqueur.  The other teachers at
school make fun of me because I got these two bottles in 1997
when Club 64, a steakhouse where I was working, closed.  I was
the one who cleaned out the bar, and the owners let me take home
a few bottles of things that I knew would be valuable for cooking.
I still have all of the bottles except the bottle of sherry which only
had about a cup in it.  The six bottles and a couple of bottles of
wine we have received as gifts over the years constitute the
entirety of the alcohol around here.

8. Add the cooled melted marshmallow/milk mixture to the whipped cream.   Add the liqueurs and mix thoroughly.

The entire filling mixture being combined in the mixture.

9. Pour the mixture into the prepared crust.  Then decorate with Andes Mint® shavings and put the whole thing in the freezer.

10.  Just before serving, melt the rest of the Andes Mints® with a little cream and butter to make a chocolate mint sauce.  If you have a steady fire burning in the range when you do this, be sure to keep the pot as far away from the fire as possible.  You want to have only a gentle heat for melting chocolate.

11. When serving, drizzle a little of the melted chocolate mixture over each piece of the grasshopper pie.

Just an FYI: When I made the pie in the pictures above, I actually made two pies, and used the microwave to melt the marshmallows for the other one.  I don't know why, but the marshmallows melted in the double boiler were much fluffier and gave the nice volume to the filling that you see above.  Those melted in the microwave were runny, and the pie was consequently a little less attractive.  Of course, flavor was not affected at all.

This is one of Nancy's favorite desserts, and I hope you all enjoy it!