In Hot Water

I felt quite blessed this morning.  I didn't have school today because we had had parent-teacher conferences on Tuesday and Thursday evenings of this week, so I got to stay home for most of the day.  The alarm went off at five, and I got up and stirred up the fire.  I filled the reservoir (a job which should have been done last night) and the 40-cup coffee pot with water and went back to bed until 6:30.

After a shower in wood-heated hot water, I threw a small load of permanent-press stuff into the high-efficiency automatic and proceeded to make a Rocky Mountain Pancake for my breakfast.  I haven't had one of those in quite some time, and it tasted very good.  The recipe is not mine to share, but you can find something similar cooked on a wood cookstove here.  The recipe that I make is not so large and is, therefore, a much thinner pancake.  If you've never had one, they are delicious.  When we had them when I was growing up, we used to sprinkle powdered sugar on them.  Unfortunately, I'm naughty and just go ahead and mix up a thin glaze to put on the top.

The sun was finally up by then (I'm having a terrible time adjusting to Daylight Savings Time), and I did chores.  Then I washed a few dishes and scalded milk to make white bread.  I had the radio tuned to The Bible Broadcasting Network while I was puttering around the kitchen, and I was nearly "suffocated with a sense of well-being."  Sorry, I couldn't resist borrowing Edith Wharton's line from Ethan Frome.

By about 9:15, I had the bread dough rising on the back of the reservoir, which turned out to be an excellent place for that activity, and I was ready to begin my laundry adventure.  Today was a test to see if the Margin Gem's water jacket and attached Vaughn range boiler paired with the reservoir and 40-cup coffee pot could provide enough hot water to do a large washing.  The answer is yes. 

Our electric hot water heater has remained off since last Friday night.  Our Saturday morning showers were warm, but not hot enough to suit Nancy, who prefers her shower water so hot that, were she a tomato, her skin would slide right off.  She was quite unhappy, but hid the fact well since we were headed to Ames for State Speech Contest.  I thought that it was odd that our showers weren't very hot because when I put my hand on the side of the range boiler, it felt quite warm to me.  As I was getting out of bed on Sunday morning, though, what the problem was dawned on me. 

Due to the fact that in a wood-fired water heating system like ours you really don't have any control of how hot the water is in the boiler, a tempering valve is installed in the hot water line that connects to the house plumbing.  This tempering valve mixes cold water with the hot water if the hot water leaving the tank is above the temperature that you have set the valve at.  Somehow, during installation, the tempering valve handle was broken off, and the little plate that indicates which way to turn the valve for hotter or colder water fell off the handle. 

Long story short, I had turned the valve the wrong way.  Sunday's showers were much, much warmer, and every shower after that has been equally comfortable.  In general, we have found that we have to mix much more cold water into the flow at the shower valves because the hot water on tap is considerably hotter than what our electric water heater would put out.  The trade-off is that the recovery time of the wood-fired system is not as fast as the electric one.

Back to this morning.  As I said, I had already washed one small load in the front-loading automatic after showering this morning.  Knowing that I would be using quite a bit of hot water later in the morning, I had kept the fire pretty brisk, and everything worked out beautifully.  I put a very full load of overalls, jeans, and heavy things like that in the front-loading automatic and set it on hot.  While it was starting its cycle, I emptied the reservoir, the 40-cup coffee pot, and our gallon teakettle into the wringer washer.  After the automatic had taken what it needed, I then turned on the hose to fill the wringer washer the rest of the way, fully expecting to drain the boiler of all of the heated water.  Much to my surprise, the water coming from the tap remained quite hot.  In fact, it was so hot that I had to shut it off before the wringer washer was full and add cold water to finish filling it, just so that I wouldn't scald my fingers while running the items through the wringer. 

The first load of sheets starting to agitate in the wringer washer
full of hot water from our Margin Gem cookstove.

I washed for the rest of the morning (I had been saving up dirty laundry for this test) and never ran out of hot water.  The following pictures are intended to show you how much laundry I was able to wash with the hot water from the cookstove.  I was impressed.  I actually ran out of dirty laundry rather than hot water.

All of the clothes hung on the clothesline were washed in hot or warm
water which was heated on the Margin Gem cookstove.  This is a view from
the east side of the clothesline looking west-northwest.

A view of the same set of clothes on the line looking east-northeast.
The clothesline is four lines deep, and if I remember right, we've got
over two hundred feet of line.  That's a lot of hot water!

The range boiler would have been easily able to keep up with the hot water needs of the front-loading automatic washer.  It has a 4.5 cubic foot drum, so it can wash a large load, but its cycles are so long that the slower recovery time of the range boiler system would not be a problem.  Of course, the wringer washer lends itself really well to bucketing hot water from the reservoir, but I think that the range boiler would have been able to keep up with its needs, too.  I don't think, however, that it would have been able to keep up with the needs of a top-loading automatic due to their greater water consumption and shorter wash cycles.  We still have our old top-loader, so I may test this theory sometime.

Two short sidenotes about heating water with the wood cookstove:

1. I had read several articles about the water jacket/range boiler system of heating water before we had ours installed.  I didn't really believe the writers who said that having the water jacket in the firebox affects combustion because of the cold water constantly circulating into it.  That was stupid of me.  There is a visible difference in the flames and the coals which are next to the water jacket compared to the flames and coals that are on the oven side of the firebox.

2. Nancy mentioned to me this morning that since we've been heating our water with the cookstove, she has not had to condition her hair after she washes it.  The Vaughn range boiler that we purchased from Stoves and More Online is lined with stone, and I wonder if this has something to do with that.  Otherwise, I cannot account for it.

I've got so much more to tell about other aspects of this stove, but I've got to sign off for tonight.

P.S. You can find additional information about our hot water heating system in the post entitled "In Hot Water, Part II."

Now We're Cooking with Wood--Again!

Marjorie the Margin Gem is now installed!  We got her all connected on Friday night, and fired her up at 9:45 p.m. Central Standard Time.  I turned off the electric water heater at about 9:30, we used up the water it was holding with a bath and a load of towels, and we have had wood-heated hot water ever since. 

We've been so busy with speech contest, church and family activities, and our jobs that the only meal that we had been home for over the weekend was Sunday breakfast.  I woke up too late for anything more than a quick bite of toast, however, so this morning's breakfast was the first meal that I cooked on her.  Tonight's supper was the second meal.  It was just take-and-bake pizza since I had a township trustees' meeting tonight, so it really wasn't blog-worthy.

There is a great deal that I want to document here, but I only have time to share a few pics tonight.  Rest assured, however, that more information will be coming.

Marjorie the Margin Gem cookstove in place and in operation.

The Margin Gem's maiden meal: French Toast.

The first pan of chocolate chip cookies.  Note how evenly they were cooked,
even though I did not turn them while they were baking.  Three are conspicuously absent
because I forgot to take the picture until I had already removed three from the cookie sheet.
Oops!  You can tell that I'm not used to recording my daily activities with a camera.

So far, we are both pleased, but it sure has taken some getting used to.  Operating this stove is a lot different than operating our old Qualified.  I promise to give a detailed account as soon as possible, but this teacher has to get to bed because we have parent-teacher conferences tomorrow, and I'd better be bright eyed and bushy tailed for them.

Baking Pies in the Wood Cookstove

Though this post is a couple of months late, I wanted to document baking the Thanksgiving pies for our 2011 Thanksgiving dinner.  Of course, I had wanted to be baking in the house kitchen by November, but that was not to be.  Thus, since Nancy and I were in charge of pies for Thanskgiving, we ended up baking them down in the summer kitchen.

The first thing that I always do when baking pies in a wood cookstove is to build a good, hot fire.

A hot fire preheating the wood cookstove oven.

Most double-crusted pie recipes say that you should start baking the pie at 400 degrees or thereabouts for about ten minutes.  Then, you reduce the heat to 350 for the duration of the baking time.  This is to cook the crust first so that it won't be soggy and then cook the filling at the lower temperature until it is done.  Of course, when you are cooking with an electric or gas stove, this temperature change is easily accomplished.  With a wood cookstove, techniques for regulating the oven temperature for pie baking vary.  Here are a few suggestions:

a) Compromise the two temperatures and adjust baking times accordingly.  I have often had great success by maintaining an oven temperature somewhere between 375 and 400 and judging the doneness of the pie by the browness of the crust.  This is the method that I most frequently use.

b) Have your usual, steady wood fire burning on the grate, then heat the oven to 400 by adding very small pieces of kindling, corn cobs, small sticks (what I think of as "biscuit wood"), etc.  These burn quite hot, but do not burn long.  Thus, once the pie is put into the hot oven, a larger log can be added to calm the hot fire created by burning the small fuel, reducing the heat of the oven.

c) Some cooks advocate opening the oven door for awhile when it is time to reduce the oven temperature.  I've done this on occasion, but I don't recommend it because some baked goods are too delicate for this kind of temperature shock.

d) If your cookstove is equipped with a water reservoir which sits next to the oven side, I've read that you can be ready with a bucket of cold water to pour in it when it is time for the oven temperature to be reduced.  The addition of the cold water to the reservoir robs BTUs from the oven.

e) In the book Woodstove Cookery: At Home on the Range by Jane Cooper (a book which I should dedicate a blog entry to), guest contributor Barbara Streeter stated: "Fruit pies are the best in a wood stove.  If you have no thermometer on it--just build the fire real hot, till it's mighty uncomfortable to put your hand in the oven to test it.  Then quick put the pie in the bottom and let the fire die out slowly.  After forty-five minutes, it should be done.  If juice runs over onto the oven, shake some salt onto it and it will burn to a crisp and will easily brush away."

Anyway, the first pie that I assembled was the raisin pie. This pie is one of my favorites; unfortunately, I was the only one who ate a piece of it on Thanksgiving. I remember a family Thanksgiving many years ago when my grandmother on my dad's side made a raisin pie. I had not had raisin pie before that, and it was not until the mid to late 1990's that I finally ran across a recipe for it in a Reminisce magazine.

I always make this pie for our local town's Fourth of July celebration, and I don't think there's ever been a piece left at the end of the afternoon. Because our kitchen was all torn apart this summer, I made our Fourth of July pies at my parents' house and somehow managed to lose the raisin pie recipe between there and here. Thus, I was excited when one of my fellow faculty members at school suggested that I look for the recipe online.  I was easily able to find it here: Raisin Pie Recipe. Don't pay any attention to the negative reviews. I've recently found this same recipe on another very popular recipe site, and all of the reviews are quite positive.

This is a good wood cookstove recipe because while your oven is heating, you take advantage of the hot stovetop to prepare the filling.

The raisin pie filling ingredients when they are first put on the fire.

The filling once it reaches a boil. 

The hot pie filling poured into the bottom crust with the top crust waiting
on the rolling pin.

The assembled pie ready for the oven.

The raisin pie baking in the wood cookstove oven.
Pardon the appearance of the oven floor.  Obviously,
it has seen its share of boil-overs.

Once the raisin pie was in the oven, I began to work on the pumpkin pies.  The pumpkin pie recipe that I used belonged to my great-great grandmother.  As my grandma says, it is what pumpkin pie should taste like.  I started by assembling two pie crusts.

 

The two crusts ready for the pumpkin pie filling.

Grandma Ford's Pumpkin Pie

1 cup sugar

2 cups pumpkin

1 1/2 cups milk

1/2 cup cream

(if you want to omit the cream, use 1 3/4 cups of milk)

2 tablespoons flour

2 tablespoons molasses

3 well-beaten eggs

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 tsp. ginger

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

Combine all ingredients.  To ensure even distribution of the spices, mix them into the molasses before adding it to the rest of the custard.  Makes two nine-inch pies.

The recipe says to bake at 400 for ten minutes, then 350 for forty minutes.  I find that it is more reliable to insert a table knife half way between the edge and the center of the pie.  When it comes out clean, the pie is done.  I also notice that once the custard has risen to a uniformly shaped mound, it is ready to come out of the oven.  It will fall almost immediately and look the way we all expect pumpkin pie to appear.



Beating the eggs.

The prepared custard batter being poured into the unbaked crust.

The two pumpkin pies baking in the wood cookstove.  Notice that the pie nearest the firebox has completely mounded; it is done baking, but the one in the back corner of the oven still has a concave center.  It needs a few minutes more.

Things took a turn after that.  I mixed up a pecan pie.  It looked beautiful.  It smelled beautiful.  It was going to taste beautiful.  As you can see from the picture below, however, it didn't look so beautiful on the floor.  While I was taking it out of the oven, I managed to drop it!

An entire pecan pie on the floor in front of the cookstove.

The problem was that somehow, during the family reunion back in August, the pics of which are here, the right hinge of the oven door got broken.  Unfortunately, this makes removing baked goods from the oven a two-person affair.  I thought that I could get the pecan pie out without help, but I was wrong.  Balancing the oven door on my knee and removing the pie turned out to be too much, and the pie suffered the consequences.  I started over on the pecan pie, but the second one was not as pretty, so I'm not going to blog about pecan pie here. 

The offending hinge.

The last pie to be made was an apple pie.  It's getting late, and this post is already quite long, so I'll just show you some pictures of the process.  Really, apple pie needs its own blog entry anyway, don't you think?

I wish that we had gotten some shots of the finished products, but hindsight is twenty-twenty, you know.  Hopefully, I'll get better at this blogging thing.  At any rate, the pies were delicious, and baking them in the wood cookstove contributed to their excellent flavor.

If you bake in a wood cookstove, please leave a comment and let me know about some of your methods of regulating the temperature.

Marjorie the Margin Gem Cookstove Is in the Kitchen

In the ongoing saga of our kitchen renovation, we are getting a little closer to the installation of the wood cookstove.  Delays have been numerous, but I don't want to go into that here.  I did want to share a few pictures, though.

Our nephew posing inside the firebox of the Margin Gem.

Our nephew visited us last week, and as he and I were playing jump around the house (in which he did all of the jumping and I did all of the lifting), he "jumped" into the firebox of the stove as it sat awaiting the plumber to return to finish the job of connecting it to our water supply.  We thought that the picture was too cute to pass up.

At any rate, as we were shopping for our new cookstove online, one of the things that frustrated me was that there seemed to be a deplorable lack of photos of the Margin Gem from all angles.  As the back of our cookstove will be quite visible from the dining room and immediately as you enter the back door of the house, I was very curious to know what the back of the Margin Gem looked like.  The back of the Qualified range sat farther out into the kitchen, and it was quite visible.  Unfortunately, it was also not very attractive.

As you can see below, the back of the Margin Gem is simply a straight black panel, and compared to what we are used to, it is very chic.  Many stoves have their flue exit out the rear of the stove, thus causing the back of the stove to be pretty utilitarian and rather ugly.  Because the flue exits out the top of the stove in front of the backsplash, the back of the Margin Gem is quite nice.  This flue design coupled with a built in heat shield which is standard on the lower part of the stove also allows the rear clearances of the Margin Gem to be 6" from a combustible wall.  The low clearances were a huge selling point to us because we were tired of the stove sticking out so far into the kitchen.

The back of the Margin Gem cookstove from the firebox side.

While we were doing our shopping, we seriously considered the Heartland Oval, but the optional heat shield which can be attached to the rear of that cookstove was not only expensive, but also rather unsightly when compared to the Margin Gem. In the pictures, you see the stove moved out into the kitchen.  Nancy and I moved it this morning in order to facilitate the plumber continuing his work today.

The rear view of the Margin Gem from the reservoir side.

Front right side view of the Margin Gem.  As much hardware as could be removed
is missing so that it is as light as possible while we continue to move it around to
facilitate cabinet construction, tiling, etc.  In addition to the lids on the top, note that the faucet
to the reservoir has not been installed yet, either.

This view shows that the soot cleanout door under the oven is missing,
and so are the two bell drafts from the ash door and the left side.

The range boiler is almost ready to be attached to the cookstove.

As you can see, progress is being made, but I am having a tough time being patient.  As I write tonight, a howling north wind is making our temperatures plummet, and the forecast high for tomorrow is in the low 20s.  This is the time when having a woodburning cookstove is most ideal, and all we can do is stare at ours.  I wish that we could have re-installed the Qualified while we waited, but Nancy was right when she nixed that idea because it would have been quite an imposition on the male family members who would have been called upon to move it over and over. 

All I can say is that I hope that the stove is installed and operating by the end of January and that February brings us several snow days during which I can stay home and cook up a storm.  Fortunately for everyone else, I'm not in charge of the weather.

As we progress with the stove assembly, I'll post more pictures in an effort to provide the internet with a place that shows the details which seem to be missing out there in cyberspace.  If you don't see a view of the Margin Gem that you'd like to see, please post a comment, and I'll try to get a picture that satisfies your curiosity.

Rosalie's Spice Bars

While we have been waiting for the house kitchen to progress far enough that we can install Marjorie the Margin Gem, precious little baking has been done around here since June.  I've mentioned in other posts that we have a couple of 20" propane stoves in the basement that we've been trying to limp along with, and we've learned to do some baking in the electric roaster, but neither of these methods are quite satisfactory, especially since the ovens on both of the stoves are wonky.  The one that I thought was stuck at 350 degrees no matter what seems not to be so attached to 350 as it used to be and has begun to run a little too cool for anything other than roasting or cooking things "en casserole."

Side note: I'm amused at how cooking on a wood burning cookstove gets in your blood and changes your thought processes.  When I began to notice that the oven on the propane stove wasn't hot enough and knew that turning the dial resulted in nothing, I experienced a fleeting moment when my mind was instinctually wondering what small sticks or corn cobs I could put in the broiler drawer to get the oven hotter.  Obviously, I didn't go so far as to try such an outrageous thing, but nonetheless, the thought most certainly crossed my mind before I was jolted back to reality by the cognizance that I could easily burn our house down by doing a thing like that.

At any rate, when Nancy suddenly remembered that she might need a pan of bars for our church's potato bake tomorrow, our only real options for accomplishing such a thing that had any sort of quality were to travel to either her folks' or my folks' houses and bake there or fire up the range in the summer kitchen.  We had already been away from home twice today, so I wasn't too excited about going anywhere and therefore chose to build a fire out in the summer kitchen.

The last time that I cooked on a wood cookstove was for the family reunion in August.  For me, this has been a long, long time.  In fact, this is the longest I've been away from a cookstove in ten years, and I've just got to say that tonight's baking felt good.  I trust that other wood cookstove enthusiasts out there will know exactly what I mean.  Standing next to a wood cookstove that is hot enough to bake in just plain feels right to me.  I probably can't even describe it adequately, but tonight while I was down in the summer kitchen working over the stove, it struck me that I feel like a stove ought to be a presence and a personality rather than a sterile, dead box.  Even in the summer, when the heat of the cookstove literally drives me out of the summer kitchen, it seems like it still subconsciously feels right.

Anyway, enough with this waxing poetic.  On to the recipe and pictures!

Tonight, I decided to make Rosalie's Spice Bars.  Rosalie is a former neighbor and longtime family friend, and she is an excellent cook.  Many recipes in my family's boxes bear her name.  Generally, our family simply calls these "Raisin Bars" because the raisins are really more the star ingredient than the two teaspoons of cinnamon which constitute the only spice in the whole recipe.

I chose this recipe tonight because it makes a large batch of bars, but I consider it a good wood cookstove recipe because you have to parboil the raisins before baking the bars.  I think that any recipe for something that starts with top-of-the-stove cooking but ends with baking is particularly well suited to the wood cookstove because it allows you to utilize the heat that the stove is emitting while you wait for the oven to heat.

Rosalie's Spice Bars

1 and 1/2 cups raisins parboiled

1 cup reserved raisin water

1 cup shortening at room temperature

1 1/2 cup white sugar

2 eggs

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. vanilla

2 tsp. cinnamon

3 cups all-purpose flour

Start by placing one and a half cups of raisins in a saucepan.  Put enough water over them to cover them.  Place directly over the firebox and bring to a boil.  Once they have boiled, pull them over to the coolest part of the cooktop to steep for bit while you mix the other ingredients.

Cream the shortening and the sugar until fluffy.  Beat in the eggs.  Mix in the soda, vanilla, and cinnamon.  Drain the raisins, reserving the one cup of liquid.  Add the flour alternately with the hot raisin water.  The dough will be kind of fluffy.  Fold in the cooked raisins.  Pour into a greased 12" x 17" jelly roll pan.  Bake in a moderate oven until a fork inserted in the center tests done.  Let cool and frost with caramel frosting or cream cheese frosting.  We always use caramel frosting.  I'll put that recipe in a later post.

Raisin bar batter ready to go into the jelly roll pan
while a hot fire burns in the wood cookstove.
There is no electricity in the summer kitchen, so this
picture is taken in the light of an oil lamp.

The bars being put into the oven of the cookstove.  We used
the camera's flash in this picture and the next so that the color
of the bars is visible.

Golden brown doneness!  You can see that they cooked very evenly.
I turned them once after about fifteen minutes of baking.

A view from the top so that you can see the texture. 
Obviously, a smaller pan would be a problem!

They should be cool enough to frost now, so I'd better go take care of them.  They will be delicious!

Kitchen Progress

When we got home tonight, we discovered that we are one step closer to having Marjorie the Margin Gem installed in our house kitchen.  Our cabinet builder installed the woodbox/boiler stand that will be behind the cookstove.  The carpenter brought the boiler in (which we spray painted the silver color) from the shed and put it where it will stand so that we could see what it would look like.  The bottom cabinet is a large, deep drawer that will be our woodbox.  The part that is Durock will be covered with tile to match that which is on the chimney (last week's progress).  Many things have to be done before the stove is in, but we can see movement!

Waiting Patiently for a Kitchen

As I blog tonight, I feel a little guilty about doing so because the pile of school papers that I should be checking is quite high.  I guess I'd better make this short.

Progress on the house kitchen is slow at best, but at least we do have progress.  Drywall is in, and mudding should be complete early next week.  Our cabinet makers, who are basically in charge of everything from here on, will be here next week to lay everything out on the floor so we can "walk through" the actual dimensions of things.  After that, the chimney needs to have its exterior tiled, the cabinet which will sit behind the stove and hold the water boiler needs to be constructed, and the floor needs to be refinished.  Then, we will be ready to have Marjorie the Margin Gem cookstove make her way from the utility room, where she sits in a depressing state of disassembly, to the kitchen.  We won't be able to fire her until the plumbing is hooked up and water is in the waterfront, though.  Firing a cookstove that has a waterfront which has no water in it is risky business because dry waterfronts can be damaged too easily.

At any rate, I am hoping that I'll get to bake Thanksgiving pies in the Margin Gem.  I know that we won't be in any kind of shape to host Thanksgiving (much to my disappointment), but if I can just cook part of the meal here and haul it to Mom and Dad's, I'll have to be satisfied with that.

Fortunately, God has blessed us with a very warm autumn so far, so we haven't missed the heat of the cookstove very much.  Our little Jotul has had a fire in it only three times, and that has been enough to keep us sufficiently warm.  Since school started, time has been in short supply, so cooking down in the summer kitchen has not been feasible.  We have two old 20" propane stoves in the basement of the house, and most of the cooking has been done down there.  The only problem is that both of the ovens are wonky; one is basically unusable, and the other is stuck at 350 degrees no matter what temperature it is set at.  I've been learning to do some baking in an electric roaster, but I certainly miss the cookstove.

A view of the Qualified Range in the kitchen before
we began remodeling.

Some people have asked what we will be doing with the old Qualified Range.  Right now the Margin Gem cookstove is barricading it in the utility room, and it too is in a sad state of disassembly.  The answer to the question is that we have no idea yet.  I want to hold onto it until I have decided for sure whether I like the Margin Gem.  I can't imagine not liking the new stove, but it doesn't seem prudent to get rid of the Qualified until we're sure.

As money is always tight around here, one of the things that I've thought about is selling the Qualified Range to someone local and offering a couple of free lessons on how to cook on it.  I would love to have another wood cookstove cook close by to exchange ideas with.  We'll see.  As it is, I'd better go find my red pen and get back to my real job.