A Cooking Fire

My husband recently expressed concern about us smelling like smoke from the woodstove when we go out into public places. I’ve had many moments of self-consciousness about this over the years, whenever I leave home and step out into what seems to be an evermore sanitized and scented society, but as I threw a stick of maple onto the coals this morning to wake up the fire to make my coffee and eggs, I felt peace, and then felt the smell of slow smoke cling to my hand and sleeve, and I thought, Fuck ‘em.

It’s an ancestral joy and comfort to have a working fire in the center of the home. It steadies me when the world wobbles. February is a right time to pay homage to the cooking fire. We’ve had a few months together but still a few months to go until we say our seasonal goodbye.

Here are a few fond woodstove moments so far since we lit the fire this season, beginning with a snow day breakfast with Sal. You cannot quite see but might intuit that the joy and order are not just found in the skillet of eggs and biscuits, and not just the kettle or big pot for steam, but the constant working of tea pots, espresso pots, bread toasting, butter softening, dough warming - the tending - and the explicit dependance on trees.

There’s a 15-gallon stainless steel tank with a tap on the back of the stove with the flu pipe running through it for hot water. This might be my favorite thing about the stove - hot water - what an old friend, what a solvent. We’ve always known to go to it for relief. I don’t have enough for a bath, (I go to the gym the next town over to shower December - April) but I love using the tap off the back of the woodstove to make a steaming hot face towel every morning and to wash greasy dishes.

A halved onion and pepper were set just above the late morning coals of a dying fire on a sunny day. Leftover braised whitetail shank went in a skillet on the stovetop with the eggs.

Often, the afternoon woodstove is perfect for slow simmering a pot of congee or stock, and toasting seeds and infusing oils for topping at the same time.

Early afternoon coals on a sunny day are welcoming to whole vegetables. This day I had a whole golden beet, a few carrots, an apple and a salad in mind.

After the ash was wiped from the skins of the vegetables, they were sweet and warm and perfect for chopping into rough chunks and heaping onto this tender lettuce I got from the Amish farm down the road. I topped with lacy bits of lonza and manchego and some toasted pecans from Mom in Florida. The apple got very soft, so I ate it with a spoon for dessert.

When I’m home all day, it’s lovely to look at the hourly forecast and plan a meal around how hot I expect the woodstove to be running throughout the day. I browned everything for this venison stew in the morning when I needed to really rip the fire to get it going for the day. Once the sun rose, I could let the fire die down and the oven held at low braising temps for the stew to cook for the hours that the sun was out. When the sun began to fade, the stew was done and the house was cooling, so I built up the fire to heat the house and bake the bear fat biscuits.

A mid-morning, medium fire for simmering Alan Bergo’s rosehip + crabapple jam, and toasting barley for tea.

The woodstove was running at the perfect heat to toast some dried chilies and then simmer some chicken and squirrels for a restorative pozole rojo. Thankfully, I did not need as much restoring as when I made this pozole, though the company was worth the subsequent pain.

Very rarely, I am capable of meaningful forethought. Sometimes when the woodstove oven is going to be in prime roasting temps for a while, I do a little preparing for future meals by batch roasting things like the above: chicken thighs, big chunky mixed vegetables, and whole apples, to be mixed and matched.

Speaking of forethought, we’ve got a few subzero nights coming when we’ll be running the fire extra hot, which means we should probably feed the starter to make some pizza dough.

Happy winter cooking. xx