Apricot Bars in the Wood Cookstove

After this last weekend, I think I'm finally beginning to understand Marjorie the Margin Gem Cookstove better.  As I baked these bars tonight, I felt like the two of us were much more "in tandem" than we have been so far.  Jane Cooper, in her book Woodstove Cookery: At Home on the Range hits the nail on the head when she writes "You are as much responsible for the final product as the stove; rather than being your slave, it's a partner.  You learn to cook together."  Tonight, I'm happy to announce that I feel like Marjorie and I are finally coming to an understanding. 

I promise a long post about how to operate the Margin Gem later when I feel like I've become an expert.  The purpose of this post is to share with you all an excellent wood cookstove recipe that I found.

For my readers who are from outside my area of the Midwest, I need to first give a little background information.  I found this recipe for Apricot Bars in the April 1974 issue of Kitchen Klatter Magazine.  Kitchen Klatter was the longest running radio homemaker show in America.  Broadcast from Shenandoah, Iowa, to several radio stations throughout the Midwest, Leanna Driftmier (and later her daughters) had a huge following among the homemakers of America's Heartland.  The popularity of the radio show led to the publishing of a monthly magazine, the development of a line of flavorings and salad dressings, and then to the manufacture of some high quality cleaning products.  The brand is now known as X-tra Touch and is still widely sold in our area of the Midwest.

The April 1974 edition of Kitchen Klatter Magazine.
Leanna Driftmier, founder, is seated at left.

This recipe is a great wood cookstove recipe because it takes advantage of the heat of the cooktop while using the oven, too.  Of course, the deliciousness of the end product makes it a good recipe for any stove, but I always think that any recipe which would have meant turning on an extra burner or heating element in a modern stove is particularly well suited to the wood cookstove since that extra heat is already available from the same fire. 

Keep in mind that I doubled the recipe, so the pictures below are going to show a larger version than what the captions indicate.  Here is what to do:

Cut 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 sugar, 1 cup sifted flour, and 1/4 tsp.
butter flavoring together with a pastry blender.

Press into the bottom of a lightly greased pan.  Pop this mixture into
a moderate oven for approximately 25 minutes or until it begins to
brown very lightly around the edges.

The recipe says to use 2/3 cup dried apricots, but I think that a
full cup is better.  Put 3 tablespoons of water on the apricots in
a saucepan.  I put a splash of X-tra Touch apricot flavoring in
too in order to freshen their flavor a bit.

While the bottom crust is in the oven, simmer the dried apricots,
watching to make sure that they don't boil dry.

While the crust is baking and the apricots are simmering, beat
two eggs.  Beat in 1 cup brown sugar, 1/3 cup sifted flour,
1/2 tsp. baking powder, 1/4 tsp. salt, 1/2 tsp. vanilla (I used more),
and 1/4 tsp. almond flavoring. 

And now a word from our sponsors: X-tra Touch almond flavoring really is the best almond flavoring on the market.*

*I did not receive any remuneration or other consideration from the kind people at X-tra Touch for my endorsement of their product.  They know that I exist, but they are, at this writing, unaware that I am giving them free advertising on my blog.  While I'm on this jag, by the way, I'd like to mention that their butter flavoring is really quite good, too.  Oh, and did I mention that their laundry detergent is superior to anything else I've ever tried?  I didn't?  Then let me also just say that their laundry detergent is superior to anything else that I've tried.  Their color-safe bleach has salvaged many a garment around here, as well.  Oh, no!  I totally forgot to mention their Honey Dijon Dressing--OUT OF THIS WORLD!

Drain any remaining simmering water from the apricots and
add them to the brown sugar and egg mixture.

Poor the brown sugar/egg/apricot mixture over the hot crust.

Make sure that the apricots are evenly distributed.

Pop it all back in a moderate oven for about 25
minutes or until it is a deep golden brown.

When it is ready to come out, it will look puffy on the top.

As it cools, the brown sugar/egg mixture falls and creates a
gooey, yummy caramel layer.

Sprinkle the top with a little powdered sugar once they have cooled
quite a bit.  I'm sorry that the picture is of such a small piece, but the
rest are going to school tomorrow.  This piece didn't even make it to
the room where our computer is.

Here is the recipe the way it appeared in the 1974 magazine:

Apricot Bars

1/2 cup butter or margarine

1/4 cup sugar

1 cup sifted flour

1/4 tsp. Kitchen-Klatter (now X-tra Touch) butter flavoring

2/3 cup dried apricots

2 to 3 Tbls. water

2 eggs, beaten

1 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup sifted flour

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. Kitchen-Klatter vanilla flavoring

1/4 tsp. Kitchen-Klatter almond flavoring

Combine butter or margarine, sugar, 1 cup flour and butter flavoring.  Pat into a greased 8-inch square pan.  Bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  While this is baking, combine apricots and water and simmer until soft.  (Add a bit more water if needed, but use as little as possible.)  Beat eggs and combine with brown sugar, 1/3 cup flour, baking powder and salt.  When blended and beaten smooth, add remaining flavorings and apricots.  Spread on top of baked crust.  Nuts may be sprinkled over the top if desired.  Bake in 350-degree oven until golden on top, about 25 minutes.  Remove from oven and cut in squares while warm.  Sprinkle the top with powdered sugar.

As you can see, these bars are neither healthy nor economical, but I hope you enjoy these as much as I do!

Little Things Mean a Lot

Happy Easter!  We've had a wonderful day celebrating the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ with our church and our family, and now Nancy and I have finally gotten a little time to ourselves this evening.  I just wanted to write a few notes about how things are progressing as we get to know Marjorie the Margin Gem cookstove.  Tomorrow will mark one month that she has been installed, and with the exception of a couple of days when I was away for the All-State Speech Festival at the University of Northern Iowa, Marjorie has been fired every day.  We haven't necessarily cooked something every day, but except for those two days that I was away, she has been faithfully heating our hot water.

First, I need to say right up front that all of the food that has been cooked on the Margin Gem has been good, and I haven't ruined anything yet.  However, I'm still getting used to cooking on Marjorie, and I am a ways from being able to write a blog post which would give an expert set of instructions on how to manage her.  Significant differences exist between how I operated our Qualified range and how Marjorie responds to those same tactics, and I am still learning.  What I would like to address in this blog post is how some small aspects of the Margin Gem's design make it a much nicer stove than I have ever dealt with before.

One of the first things that I noticed about the Margin Gem was how clean the floor around her stays.  The floor just beneath the left side of the Qualified range always had a little pile of ashes on it.  Sweeping and vacuuming would only clean this mess up temporarily. Each opening of the white enamel door that covers the front feed and the ash drawer always sucked a few ashes out onto the floor, and each time the grates would be shaken, a few ashes would dribble out onto the floor, and when you pulled the drawer out in order to empty it, quite a few ashes would be dragged out onto the floor.  The bottom of the ash drawer slid along the floor of the stove, which was part of the problem.  As you can see in the picture below, the other part of the problem was that the bottom of the opening for the ash drawer was level with the floor of the stove

A photo of the ash drawer of the Qualified range pulled partly out of its
slot under the firebox.  You can see that the bottom of the drawer rests
on the bottom of the stove.  Even at rest and in a state of disassembly
in the utility room, you can see that a few ashes have collected on the lip
of the bottom of the stove.

 The Riverside Bakewell in the summer kitchen is constructed in much the same way except that it doesn't have the long front door which covers the access to the front feed and the ash drawer to suck out ashes each time that it is opened.  Thus, it doesn't usually have quite as many ashes on the floor in front of it as the Qualified did.

The ash drawer on the Riverside Bakewell pulled out a little way.

 The Margin Gem is constructed so that the ash drawer still sits on the floor of the stove, but a lip on the ash door fixes it so that the ash drawer actually sits about 3/4" lower than the opening of the door.  This allows one to pick up the ash drawer and--at the very least--slide the bottom of the drawer across the lip to remove any ashes which are stuck to the bottom of the drawer and leave them in the bottom of the stove.  Furthermore, if any ashes do drop as the drawer is removed, a small shelf is in place to catch them.  This has made a drastic difference in how difficult it is to keep the hearth clean.

A closeup of the open ash door in an attempt to show how helpful the lip
and shelf are in keeping the floor around the stove clean.

Another significant difference is the reservoir.  The Qualified did not have a water reservoir at all, so my only experience with a water reservoir has been with the water reservoir on the Riverside Bakewell in the summer kitchen.  The Riverside's reservoir is the conventional type in which a side of the copper water tank sits against the side wall of the stove.  While this is certainly effective at getting water hot, it can take quite a while for the water to get hot, and recovery time is not very quick.  Also, once the water is heated in that reservoir, it has to be dipped back out through the top for use.

The Margin Gem's reservoir has what its competitor calls a "hyper-heat" reservoir.  By turning a lever at the bottom of the reservoir to the right as shown in the picture below, a baffle in the stove diverts some of the smoke and heat from the fire so that it travels along the bottom of the reservoir before traveling under the oven and out the chimney.  This enables the water to get quite a bit hotter than the conventional water reservoir design and also improves recovery time.  The spigot, as shown in the second picture, allows the water to be drawn off the reservoir without having to go through the time-consuming and messy process of dipping it back out by hand.

Some of you may wonder why we chose the additional expense and bulk of having a reservoir when we also have the water jacket to heat our hot running water.  The answer is simple: at some point, I would like to have our rainwater cistern back in operation, so I wanted to have a way to heat rainwater with the cookstove, and the reservoir was the only logical option.  Until we are able to use rainwater, we will keep filling the reservoir with well water, thus increasing the hot water heating capacity of the stove.

The lever on the reservoir turned to divert heat from the fire to the
bottom of the reservoir.

The spigot on the side of the reservoir.

 The next feature of the Margin Gem that I like is the warming oven.  The Qualified simply had a high shelf, but the Riverside has a warming oven.  I cooked on the Qualified for twelve years before we hooked the Riverside up in the summer kitchen, and after getting a taste of what a warming oven can do, I wasn't going to purchase another stove that didn't have one.  The uses for this ingenious contraption deserve their own blog post someday, but for now, let me just tell you that Susan Fenoff from Stoves and More Online, the company that we purchased the stove from, calls her warming oven her "Amish microwave."  As my students used to say, " 'Nuff said."

The Margin Gem's warming oven.

 The firebox on the Margin Gem is huge!  I'm amazed at the size of log that fits in that thing.

A poor picture to demonstrate how large the Margin Gem's firebox is.

 Another thing that I find amazing about the Margin Gem is what an even baker it is.  In the first picture below, you can see four loaves of bread which were all baked at the same time, and they were never turned!  Furthermore, the bottoms of the loaves of bread were thoroughly cooked also, and I didn't have to do anything special.  In the Qualified, I always kept a layer of fly ash on the top of the oven box just under the cooktop, AND the top rack of the stove was always in the very top position with a sheet of aluminum foil over it to keep the tops of things from cooking before the bottoms were done.  I baked with the other rack resting on the floor of the oven so that whatever was cooking was only about a quarter of an inch from the oven floor.  Furthermore, when baking breads and rolls, I would remove the bottom rack for the last five minutes of the baking time and finish baking them directly on the oven floor. 

In the Riverside, I always put the baked goods on the stovetop for a few minutes to cook the bottoms thoroughly.  You can see this in a picture below.  Obviously, the Margin Gem has solved all of these problems for me.

Four loaves of bread in the Margin Gem oven.  They were not turned
at all during baking, but cooked very evenly.

You can see that the bottoms of the loaves were perfectly browned,
and I had nothing to do with it!

The first four loaves from the Riverside cookstove oven browning
their bottoms on the cooktop while the next two loaves begin baking.

 I do have one complaint to share, and that is that the oven thermometer in the Margin Gem is dreadfully unreliable.  The oven thermometer on the Qualified was spot on all the time, and I got spoiled.  I have a small oven thermometer placed inside the oven of the Margin Gem to help me get this thing figured out, but I sure do miss being able to just glance at the oven door and know what was going on within.  This seems to be something that everyone agrees about because one site even runs the disclaimer that the oven thermometer on the Margin Gems is for decorative use only.  It's a small inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, though.

Monster Cookies on the "Iron Monster"

Our nephew came to visit last Saturday.  Now that we can bake with comparative ease, we had invited him over to help us make Monster Cookies.  If you've never heard of them, Monster Cookies are indeed monstrous.  I first had them while I was in college at Iowa State University.  They weren't my favorite cookie then, and they aren't my favorite cookie now, because of the fact that they have peanut butter in them.  I detest peanut butter with a passion.  However, while I was at Iowa State, I was shopping in an antique store somewhere and ran across a $5 copy of the 1968 Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.  This cookbook is one of my mom's go-to cookbooks, so I was familiar with it and happy to get it for such a reasonable price.  Upon further inspection once I got it home, I discovered a loose sheet of paper in it on which was written the recipe for Monster Cookies. 

Thus, we baked Monster Cookies in the "iron monster" in our kitchen.  As you can see from the pics, we all had fun.

Nancy and our nephew mixing the cookie dough by hand.
When you see the proportions of ingredients below, you'll know
why this has to be done this way. 

The cookies are dropped by ice cream scoop, so not very many fit on a cookie sheet.

The mounds of Monster Cookies put into the hot oven of
Marjorie the Margin Gem.  The oven of the Margin Gem seems
cavernous compared to the oven of our old Qualified Range,
even though the measurements are only a little larger.

A finished monster cookie resting on a six-inch diameter dessert plate.
Judging from the size, I'd say they are appropriately named!

Our nephew enjoying his chicken casserole and homemade
applesauce for noon dinner while Monster Cookies baked in
the oven of the Margin Gem cookstove.

Monster Cookies

1 dozen eggs

1 lb. butter or oleo

2 lb. brown sugar

4 cups white sugar

1/4 cup vanilla

3 lbs. peanut butter

8 tsp. soda

18 cups quick oatmeal

1 lb. nuts (we didn't use)

1 lb. M&Ms (not really enough)

12 oz. chocolate chips (we probably doubled this)

Cream eggs, butter, and sugars.  Add rest, mixing thoroughly by hand.  Bake at 350 for 15 minutes until light brown.  We did not grease our cookie sheets, and we discovered that the cookies stayed together better and were easier to remove from the cookie sheet if we let them cool on the cookie sheet for about ten minutes before endeavoring to remove them to a length of paper toweling to cool the rest of the way.

One thing to note about this recipe is that there is no flour in it.  If you are cooking for someone who has a dietary issue with wheat products, I would think that this recipe would be quite a find.

The Margin Gem baked these cookies beautifully, but I'm still learning the quirks of this stove.  When I feel confident about understanding it all, I'm planning to post a very informational blog entry.  Stay tuned!

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.