30th January 2009
Friday
Cooking on a wood fired stove. We started cooking on wood in November 2008. Our first cooker was beautiful. Concentric rings on top that you lifted out to suit the size of cooking pot, side boiler to heat cooking water and a little oven. We rescued this little beauty from a friends ruin of a garage. After sanding with a ‘soft’ angle grinder we managed to clean off all the rust and installed the stove in our new kitchen.
It burned well and we managed to cook on it, but the firebox was just a bit too small at 40 cm logs for heating our 200m cubed room. It also didn’t burn overnight. So we changed it for an ’ugly’ wood fired stove with a bigger firebox.
Stove no.2 heats the room reasonably well ( we have had temperatures down to –14* this winter) and cooks well too. Our biggest scare with it was one day we didn’t shut down the back flue after lighting it and it was fully open for 30 minutes. When we came back into the room there was an amazing thundering noise and the flue pipe was glowing bright red like a nuclear reactor. The photo has not been edited.
How to roast chicken in a range : -
Heat your oven 30 minutes to 1 hour in advance of putting in your chicken.
Place the chicken , breast down, on a roasting tray with a complete cover of tinfoil.
Leave in the oven for as long as it takes. Todays has taken 4.5 hours so far and is still not done, but when it is it will be wonderful.
Check with a meat thermometer before eating. The juices should always run clear.
Not a very technical recipe – wood cooking is slow and the food is ready when its ready and not before. The tinfoil keeps the moisture in during cooking. At the end we usually light our ‘normal’ gas oven and heat it to ‘8’, give the chicken half to an hour cooking to finish it off and then put the roast potatoes in for the last half hour.
Sometimes we sprinkle olive oil and herbs on the chicken before cooking, today we didn’t.
The chicken weighed 3.5kg and came from our own stock. We prepared it yesterday.
Oh, how wonderful! It looks so incredibly beautiful there-- When I was small, we lived in a house (a very large log cabin of a house) that my father had built with his own hands (he carved my name into the cement of the foundation) and we had a wood stove just like that. I remember waking up on cold mornings, when the snow was everywhere, and coming out to sit in front of it, while my mother brushed my hair and dressed me to get ready for school. My favorite memory was the night the power went out, and my parents lit a fire and dressed me in sweats, so I wouldn't get sick, and we all cuddled together in a sleeping bag to sleep in front of the fire all night, one on each side of me so that I would be warm. Hmh. I haven't thought of that in years. I hope you are doing so very well, Cher... hug the kids, from the stranger. ;)
ReplyDelete~ Genevieve