>
>Anyone in the BP community ever use a wood stove for cooking
>on a day-to-day basis?
>

woodstove-- that brings back northern michigan memories!!
growing up summers on walloon lake with my grandparents, I spent a lot of
time at the home of the man who opened the lake to white settlement....
(here I'll drop a name, my grandparents were contemporaries and neighbors of
the hemingways, and the particular gentleman I'm going to speak of spent a
lot of time with the hemingway's boys, as well as my dad, teaching them to
fish...)

he was a wonderful man, never married and no kids, but regretted it, and so,
spoiled the HECK out of me   ;)

his home was entirely wood heated and electricity made a late appearance,
somewhere around 1965 if I remember correctly... the long rows of cordwood
stretched out from the back of the house, so as to facilitate tunnelling to
the wood in the deep snow of winter...
(back when it used to snow, remember that?)  he had a big wood box on the
back of the house that stayed empty in the summer, and so was my fort .....

anyway, he cooked on a wood stove year round, and the house always smelled
of wood smoke and bacon.... when we went fishing, we cleaned the catch in
the spring bucket out back and fried them immediately in the bacon grease
from the lard can on the back of the stove....

he made the most amazing berry pies and ate them for breakfast, which
scandalised my grandmother  ;) (pie for breakfast!! that man needs a woman!)
  and biscuits with jam from the woods....  and roasted meat for hours on
end at what we would call 200 degrees fahrenheit, but what he called a slow
oven.....

ANYWAY, I know that you have to clean the things a lot, or else never  ;)
they can be temperamental, but are fairly straightforward...
we would get a fire going in the mornings from scratch in the summers, or
from the coals of the night before's fire in winter....

after it burned down to a solid bed of coals, we added "finger sticks"
which were thumb-sized pieces of wood to make a small flame over the
coals.... and the number of finger sticks added determined the level of heat
put out at the burner....

I was, and still am, a pyromaniac at heart  (firebug was my campname in
girlscouts as a kid  ;) ), and so for me the stove was fascinating,
especially since he let me feed all the wood in , and let me keep the
firebox door open and watch the flames....   he was a good man, christian
scientist who never saw a doctor until his stroke at 97...
(he did not smoke or drink, and he worked hard gardening and getting
up wood and maintaining the homestead there, so despite a little potbelly
(or pie-belly, more accurately  ;)) he was in really good shape even in his
70's and 80's as I was growing up...)

woodstoves.....

deb
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