Snap. Crackle. Pop.

That's not the sound of our breakfast cereal, it's the sound of dry wood taking off in the stove. And what a lovely sound it is too!

As you can well imagine we are enjoying the heat from the wood stove after a couple months living with space heaters in a few closed off rooms.  Walking bare-foot across the floors at night, to-go-you-know-where, is no longer an exercise in torture.

But heating and mostly cooking with wood is going to take some getting used to that's for sure!

Geoff doesn't think chicken nuggets and hash-brown patties are meant to be cooked in wood-stoves.Getting the temperatures up to over four-hundred degrees is challenging. And so far we haven't done it. It is only the first time using the oven and I am typing this as I wait for the timer to go off, but we are realizing that we have some learning to do.

Thank goodness I don't usually serve such things to my family and this is only a temporary problem, (frozen, pre-packaged food) as we live without a usable kitchen.

But making bread is going to be a challenge. Temperature is supposed to be 350 for thirty minutes. At the moment we have all kinds of coals in the fire box, added a bunch of small stuff, opened the draft to allow oxygen at it and it's all the way up to two-hundred and fifty. Hummmmm. Got a ways to go yet!

I started this post a couple days ago and since then we have figured out that what we need for hotter temperatures is smaller pieces of wood and an already hot stove/oven. ("pre-heat oven" has a whole new meaning!!) I have read before that sticks burn much hotter then logs and that many people the world over use sticks to cook with (of course they have stoves made to utilize sticks efficiently and it's largely cause there is no other option). But even here on our property, there are piles more sticks then logs. We'll have to get into the habit of gathering branches and twigs as often and as much as possible, and it's in the plans to build a rocket stove in a summer kitchen to make use of small wood and branches and to keep the heat of cooking outside in the summer months.

Some things a cook stove doesn't have -
- A handle where you can hang your tea-towel.....need to find a solution to that, since at the moment I don't have cupboard doors to hang them on either.
- A bottom oven drawer, now where am I going to put my muffin tins and such?
- Dials for lowering the heat, when a pot starts to boil, well she is going to BOIL and there isn't a lot you can do about it....except drag it all the way across the cooking surface, the right side is less hot than the left which is where the fire box is.
- An oven light - I may end up with a flashlight in the kitchen?
- A timer or any of those fancy electronic "gadgets" like "Delay cook time"- that's OK, I'll use my IPod to remind me not to burn supper.
- Broil - hummm....and I have those two or three recipes that we enjoy and need to be broiled....

Things a cook stove does have or give...
- Warmer boxes - I put our dinner dishes in there to be warmed and ready for our food.
- Huge cooking surface area - every inch of the cook surface is available. I haven't tried to see if all my pots will fit on the top at the same time, but if they do that means I can cook using all of them at once. (although the "when she boils, she BOILS!" could be a problem if the whole surface is covered)
- Soft butter! This time of year my gas stoves never warmed the room enough to keep the butter soft and the furnace was always lowered at night so buttering toast in the morning was almost impossible, but now that our heat source is in the kitchen!? Soft butter. Nice.
- A kettle that is always ON.  Actually it was all we could do the first few days to not keep asking someone to "Turn off the kettle, please". Then a neighbour gave us a gadget, a metal disk full of holes for placing the kettle (or pot) on, to keep it hot but preventing it from boiling dry, we like the quiet most of all. It's not a whistling kettle, but it pops, bangs and hums while boiling and there is always the worry that it will run out of water. (and when you are bringing the drinking water in from a different location you don't want to boil it all away)
- Exercise - stacking wood, splitting wood, lugging wood, scouring the forest for kindling ...Who needs a gym membership?!
- Ashes - I knew there would be ashes, of course, in the ash box and then we would take that box and dump it into the galvanized trash bin outside and "be done with it". What I didn't count on was the "poofs" of ash that float out and about and land where ever they please. I'm realizing that I will have to lower my standards of what the definition of clean means.
- Stacks of wood, boxes of kindling, bags of newspaper and bit and pieces of stuff always on the floor. Again, re-defining "clean".
- Lessons in common sense - when the fire is going the surface is HOT. At least we haven't melted anything, but the "Pass me that pot, so I can put it away" caused a scream and a can't-believe-I-was- just-that-stupid moment. Lesson learned. Thankful for lavender essential oil!!
- Bumps-in-the-night .....that'll take some getting used too.  The sounds of logs shifting during burning.It happened once while I was the only one up in the still-dark morning, and I can tell you it gave me a bit of a fright.

But all-in-all, although the learning curve is steep, and although the food isn't always what we were hoping for or of the quality we are used to, it's proving to be a fun and interesting challenge that we are glad we took on.

You'll just have to excuse me if I don't invite you over for supper right away......gotta practice a bit more.  ;)