RIP Mr. Potatohead

Okay, to be truthful, this potato was always going to be sacrificed. I just thought it would be dinner, not compost.

This was my third try at baking potatoes in the ashes of the wood-stove. The first two were great, honest. This potato is hard as a rock and weighs next to nothing, just like a charcoal briquette.

I like the idea of baking potatoes while simultaneously heating the house and heating water. Wood stoves are great that way.

But let me be clear about this: Just because it's buried in ashes in the wood stove and you aren't paying for gas or electricity to bake it doesn't mean you can forget that it's there.

Bread report: Tangy and tasty

I baked the sourdough bread I started two days ago on the wood stove this morning. Grill baking will wait till I can get a small propane tank filled. This dough was from a different recipe for grill baking: the baking temperature is a lot hotter and the dough a lot stickier. But it had risen nicely by this morning and I had high hopes for good bread no matter what.

When I took the bread off the wood stove I let it cool in the pan a bit before flipping it out onto the rack. But oops, the top was still unbaked dough. It stuck to the rack when I picked up the loaf (hence that crustless space in the center).  Stuck to my fingers too. I put the loaf back on the stove, upside down this time, and baked it further. 

It doesn't look too bad and look at those nice holes in the loaf. So far my bread's been kind of evenly grained like store-bought white bread. Eeeeew!  I wanted those holes! So good for catching melted butter when the bread's warm. And yes, so very tasty.

My sourdough starter is nice and strong now, meaning it's very forgiving. Good thing, too, because obviously I need a starter like that!

Bread baking adventures - baking on a grill

In another life I was a mad scientist. In this one I'm a modern contrarian.

As those who know me are aware, my idea of fun is to try something new and different without reading the directions. I guess it must be something in my personality, or my astrological chart or some deep-seated neurosis from my childhood.  Be that as it may, reading -- much less following -- directions is so not me.

I decided some years back that because I love sourdough bread, I should make my own. How that developed is a story for another time, but I am now accomplished at baking bread on top of a wood stove (not in a Dutch oven).

That's well and good, but as spring progresses, the days are warming up to the point where I don't particularly want to be building fires in the wood stove, even first thing in the morning. So my most recent adventure is learning how to bake a loaf of bread on an outdoor grill.

Oh no, no, no. Don't you go thinking I'm weird. I Googled it and discovered baking bread on a gas grill is old hat. Lots of people do it (and here I thought I'd come up with something unusual). Besides, this is legitimate research: The other day I got invited to a friend's house to make pizzas in her new outdoor pizza oven. I want one, not so much for pizza (though I'd use it for that, too) but for break baking.

But wow, what an investment in time and labor to build one. Hence the grill. If I learn to use it and like baking bread outdoor enough to keep using it, maybe I can justify building a nice wood-fired oven over in a corner of the yard.

So okay. Research.

Not that I was going to read the directions closely, mind you, but I did skim through a few web pages to get the gist of it. Part of my tendency to skim is because unfortunately much of the info out there for the weird projects I do is useless (poorly written, written by people who've obviously never done it, or the instructions call for equipment I don't have). I figure if the instructions have to be worked around there's no point in reading closely, right? 

And yes, I will have to do some creative work-arounds for baking bread on a grill. For one thing my grill is older. It doesn't have a fancy two-level rack system to keep the bread from getting scorched by the flames, nor does it have a built-in thermometer. For another thing I want to use the heavy enameled cast-iron bread baking bowl I always use, not a stone cloche (really?) or a pizza stone (could I just use a rock?) or doubled cookie sheets (who knows where mine are). 

And for that matter... where is my grill, anyway?

So, earlier today I decided I should be proactive and get the grill out from where it's been stored for several years. I had to use a shovel to dig a hole to lower it so I could pull it out from under... no, no point in going there. Let me simply say I got it out of where it's been stored and tugged it over to my yard next to the house. Opened it up and whoa. Good thing I was being proactive. Lots of dust in there. It would be a good idea to see if the grill would even ignite and hold a flame, and of course doing so would burn off the cobwebs, too.

Then the next question: Which, if any, of my propane tanks actually had gas in it? Hint: None of the small tanks that I can lift. I eyeballed the four-foot tall tank that requires my using a hand cart to move it. I thought about how I'd have to unhook it from what it was hooked up to, and the gymnastics that would entail. I thought about how much easier it would be to get a propane tank filled next time I'm in town. 

See how these things go?

Looks like I will bake this next loaf of bread on the wood stove after all. It's not nearly as warm in the house as I thought. A fire would be nice. Yes it would. Really.

Is It Soup or Is It Compost?

I don't often want to cook. No, let me rephrase. I rarely want to cook. How this plays out in the real world is that when I get the urge to play chef I usually don't have a lot of ingredients available to cook with.

Yesterday I got the urge to make spaghetti sauce. Mmmmm - that nice tangy red sauce that goes over pasta, and that you enjoy with warm bread fresh out of the oven. Mmmmm.

Well, not at this house.

Background info

If you haven't read other stuff I've written, you might not know some important facts about me that influence my culinary efforts:

• I live in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. Nearest town - nearest store - is 30 miles away.  
• I believe that processed foods are bad for people, so I focus on raw and organic, which tend to be bulky, space-consuming ingredients.
• I also live in a teensy tiny house. I don't have much storage space, including space to keep much food.
• I like the concept of gardening, but the practice of gardening has been less than fruitful.
• My chickens are apparently on strike. Or maybe they're too darned old to lay eggs. And no, I'm not going to eat the chickens. That's another topic, thank you very much.
• And in the winter when I've already got a fire going in the wood stove, I try to do all my cooking on it. Why waste propane?

Combine the above with an only sporadic interest in cooking and you can imagine that not only is there not much meal planning going on here, but when I do decide to cook, what I want to eat and what I make are not necessarily going to be the same thing.

Yesterday's Spaghetti Sauce

So yesterday I get the urge for spaghetti.  First I built up the fire in the wood stove and started heating some olive oil in a suitable sized pot.  Then I started sauteing onions - I happened to have some that weren't growing too much greenery.

I went through the fridge and saw that the celery was getting old, so I chopped up some of that for the sauce and chopped up some for the chickens. I saved the stem end plus a couple inches of stalk to sprout and become more celery someday*.

Rummaging around, I found some carrots that were ready to use now or to feed to the critters in a day or two more, so carrots got chopped up and added to the pot to saute. I like the sweetness that carrots give to a sauce. The ends and mushy parts I saved for the horses.

Time to add some tomatoes. I checked in the cupboard - uh oh. One measly can of chopped tomatoes and one of tomato sauce. I have learned to check the expiration date on any food stuff I find in my house, and unfortunately these cans were... quite old. Old enough to start kindergarten.

I grow tomatoes in the house all year long, but I don't use grow lights. Thus in the dead of winter the plants are not enthusiastic about producing fruit, so no help there.

So no red spaghetti sauce. Time to regroup.

Today's Soup

As you may have concluded, following recipes is not my thing.  I like to wing it when I've succumbed to the urge to cook.  So... if I wasn't going to be making red spaghetti sauce, it was time to explore my other options.

There was half a head of cabbage waiting for me to remember it - actually quite fresh. I chopped that up (saving the stem end for growing a new head of cabbage*) and added it to the pot to cook.

I had some organic chicken broth that I was going to use last Thanksgiving and didn't. Its expiration date hasn't even been reached, how lucky for me and for my dog Joe. Some of the broth went into the pot when I decided the veggies were cooked enough and some went over Joe's kibble.  He liked that.

I added some water and leftover coffee from the morning to cover the veggies (I like to add coffee because it adds a richness to sauces), plus some garlic and some salt, and let it all cook a while.

When it started smelling good I gave it a first taste. Hmmm.  I rummaged around in the cupboard and found a can of organic black beans and one of pumpkin. Dogs seem to like cooked pumpkin a lot, so Joe got a tablespoon of pumpkin before the pot did.

For a final touch, I added some dried oregano and basil - I grew those and dried them myself, I'll have you know!

The soup was smelling real good and the occasional taste confirmed it, though it hadn't cooked long enough to have fully blended by the time I went to bed.  I put the pot outside in the cold (it was in the 20s out there) rather than heat up my fridge, and put it back on the wood stove this a.m. to continue cooking.

If I was going to do this right, I'd put the soup in a blender and I'd add some sherry. I'm too lazy to do the blender and I don't have any sherry, which is too bad because I can tell that would really provide an extra depth and richness that the soup calls for.

I'm working - in my own way - on a loaf of sourdough for this evening.  By the time the bread is done the soup will be perfect.

But I still want the spaghetti, darn it.

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*I did say that I don't garden well, but I'm always hopeful.