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Cooking on Our Wood Burning Stove at Thanksgiving

11/26/2017

Bear here...

You may have heard that we are writing a book about our experiences using our wood burning stove. One of the main things people seem interested in is using it for cooking. Can you use a small wood stove to cook a big meal? Yes you can! (With good planning.) We proved it this Thanksgiving. Here is some of what we did...

The day before, cooking pumpkin for pie...

Multi-tasking: boiling eggs (for Theresa's Deviled Eggs) while keeping our smallest cat warm...

If your pots are small enough you can multi-cook too...

Thanksgiving day, multi-cooking the corn, the potatoes, and the garlic cream that goes into the potatoes...

Remember that pumpkin for the pie?

Yep, we gave our wood burning stove the bird...

... and we didn't forget the gravy!

Dinner is ready- Time to eat!

Yes, it is ironic that the last photo is on the electric stove that we didn't use all day, but it had enough space to hold all the cooked food so we could take a photo for you!

Hope all your Thanksgiving meals went well.

Type at ya later...

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More Uses for Sunchokes & New Book News!

11/26/2017

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Bear here...

Looking at our sunchoke page I noticed there is a useful part of the plant we neglected to mention- the dried stalks. They're not just for compost anymore!

Sunchokes can be harvested in the Fall or Spring. The tall dried stalks (they're even taller than me) need to be pulled to get to the tubers. During the Winter the stalks we leave behind the bird feeders create a bit of a windbreak and give the birds more places to land.

In past years we've thrown the stalks into our compost bin or added them to our birdie condo, which is the pile of branches and sticks in the photo below. Many birds shelter there in the Winter.

The compost can only hold so many, and Theresa didn't like the way they looked on the bird condo (too straight), so what do we do with the leftover stalks?

We decided to break them up like this...

For kindling to make this...

Yep... It's a great example of using all the resources we have. We only need a handful or two for some great kindling to start the fire in our wood burning stove!

Speaking of our stove... we'd like to thank everyone for making the wood stove section on our site the most viewed pages. We're getting so many hits that we have started writing a book about our experiences with the many uses of our wood burning stove.

Side note: We're also interested in what you would like to see in the book, so add a comment or send us an email with your suggestions.

Type at ya later...

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It's Winter- Don't Waste Food

11/19/2017

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A simple jar of pickled beans and the right question can unleash your inner
Cook of Anarchy!

From Theresa:

We've had this jar of homemade pickled beans sitting on the counter for a while. Bear got them from a friend, who likes to snack on them. They were too spicy for our taste buds, though. It looked like they had garlic and hot pepper flakes floating in the vinegar. I suggested I could take them to work to see if anyone there would like them.

I was putting the jar in my work bag when Bear asked, "What if this was all the food we would be able to get for the Winter? What would we do with the pickled beans then?"

A great question. Obviously, we wouldn't just give them away. Bear suggested we could trade them for some other food. I said maybe if we put the beans with bread & butter, that would cut down the spiciness enough that we could eat them... and then we were off.

I decided we could chop them up and put them in my homemade coleslaw, in place of the pickle relish I usually add. I had to use about nine beans before we could taste the flavor. It was yummy.

.Bear, who is famous (at least with me) for his cheese sandwiches, realized that everything goes good with melted cheese, so added them to a perfectly toasted mozzarella and pickled bean sandwich.
(Bear here... It's always perfect when no one is watching. Why couldn't I do this in the Grilled Cheese Championship?) The spicy beans paired well with the plain cheese to give the sandwich a little kick.

Then we took the coleslaw and added it with some chunks of smoked salmon to a couple wraps. Unfortunately, I tried to fill them way too full, so Bear wasn't able to use his professional burrito wrapping skills- the wraps mostly fell apart, but they were still edible.

So that is how we figured out how to not waste food. A little creative cooking made use of a flavor that we didn't think we liked, but found out we did. It's a good skill to cultivate, because some day we might not be able to go to the store and simply buy different food. And I like not being part of that statistic that says Americans throw away 40% of their food.

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Theresa & Bear's Blog

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