Snug At Home

I want to hit on several things.  There is no single theme to this post.  It's kind of a "what-I've-been-up-to-the-past-twenty-four-hours-and-I-need-practice-hitting-the-hyphen-key-with-my-ring-finger" post.

Had to brave it down the mountain yesterday in spite of all the ice, because Twyla's prescriptions were in and she was out of one of them. Yes, we slid a couple of times and it was scary.  But the positive side was the fact that we got a couple of great shots.  To wit:

Near the road on the way in to our part of the mountain they built a little decorative water wheel.
It left no doubt that it was cold.

We do have to venture outside to feed and water the chickens, and I have to spend a bit of time out there collecting more wood for the stove.

This is a great time to be experimenting with cooking exclusively with the wood stove.  The other morning we baked potatoes inside it. Wrapped in aluminum foil and nestled just above the coals. They were done to perfection in about 45 minutes.

Twyla got a craving for corn bread, so she mixed up a batch and poured it into the cast iron skillet and set it atop the stove.  There's a cast iron lid that fits both the skillet and the dutch oven that she put on top.  It cooked through well enough, but the top didn't get very brown.  That's just fine.  I suppose had we pre-heated the lid on top of the stove first, it might have been different, but the cornbread came out with a fluffy, cake-like texture that was awesome, with darker brown crispier bottom.  It was delicious.

If you are a follower of Twyla's blog, you may remember her writing about our great frugality and regular visits to the various thrift stores around here.  You just never know what you might find.  About a week or two ago, I spotted an ice cream maker for $6 at the Humane Society thrift store.  Had to get it.  There's just something about homemade ice cream.  Besides that, I just love experimenting with recipes.  So, I made a batch, but it was more like ice milk, even though I did add some whipping cream to it.  We went through that pretty quick with both cranberry relish and blackberry cordial.

This morning, I woke up at 02:00.  The fire had gone out and so I had to rebuild it.  Of course, by the time I did all that, I was wide awake.  What to do.  What to do.  Make more ice cream.  I bought more heavy whipping cream yesterday, so why not?  Let's improve the recipe.  Less milk and more cream in the ratio.  Two extra tablespoons of sugar compared to the first batch.  Three fresh egg yolks.  The high lecithin content is a fantastically smooth emulsifier.  I thoroughly pureed all the ingredients with the stick blender (that is one of my all time favorite kitchen tools!) put it in the maker and put it outside to run.  Hey, it was 14° F out there at 02:45, so I figure I can just put the inner container in the bucket and let it run. No ice, no salt.  Makes sense, right?

Moxie tries to herd Brewster

Meanwhile, I decided to take some store bought, whole wheat flour that somebody gave us for the dog, and make up some dog treats.  Old leftover chicken bouillon cubes, left over saved chicken fat (yes, we really don't waste anything) little salt, enough sugar to feed some yeast and I've got my basic dough.

Time to check the ice cream.  All that had happened was the liquid mixture had gotten pretty cold, but it was still very much liquid after 40 minutes.  Fail.  You apparently do need the ice and salt slush to supercool the ingredients while the paddle scrapes the sides. I go grab the spatula and the rock salt and fill the bucket.  Back to the biscuits.  What's a quick easy way to cut or shape them?  Hmmm.

By the time I had the first batch of dog treats ready to come out of the oven, Twyla is up and had come out to the fire to have her first cup of coffee.  She opens the oven to see what I'm cooking and starts laughing.

Yum, yum.  Moxie treats.

"They look like little turds!"

"I thought that it was quite appropriate for Moxie.  After all, she likes chicken poop."

More laughter.  Yep.  Doesn't matter how many times I scold her, when I move the chicken arks, Moxie is right there looking for a choice morsel.  This is why I think people who are lured into spending incredible amounts of money on "gourmet" or special blends of dog food have more money than sense.  How discriminating of taste can one be when one licks its own butt?

These little gems for the dog have a texture kind of like a scone.  Maybe we could call them "scurds?"

I only made one tray like that out of three, because it's much easier to roll out a flat ball of dough and then cut it into strips and then cross cut into little rectangles.  I didn't want to spend all morning on this project.

"I know how to be a lady!  Psst! Got any scurds?"

From looking at the weather forecast, we have most of this day's light to secure lots of firewood to a covered location, but then after dark we are due to get a lot of snow.  I just hope that the temperature stays well below freezing so that it does fall as snow and not as rain to then become a glaze of ice.

If we get snowed in again tonight, I'll have to come up with something else really clever to do.  Maybe it's time that I tried baking a loaf of bread on top of the wood stove with a makeshift aluminum foil tent.

I really am hoping for that six inches of snow so I can slide down the driveway.

Before I go, Twyla has created a new page on her blog to showcase her beautiful watercolors.  So make sure you head over to Green Acres and check them out.  It's in the sidebar titled Twyla's Watercolor Gallery.  In addition, Twyla has decided to create a second blog that has to do with her little fun experiment in Bible study.  Go check out My 316 Notes.  You might find it interesting.

Thank you for stopping by my blog, especially the persons in Moscow, Russia, and Stuttgart, Germany; whoever you are.

Enjoying The New Stove

On the day of completion

The break-in period was quick. The stove puts out some nice heat. I will be fine tuning it's performance by putting gaskets on the doors, so that I can restrict the airflow a bit more and make the fire burn slower in the night.  Right now, the rule is that if you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, you go throw a couple of logs in.


The last post had pics from just after completion, and Twyla hadn't really had a chance to put her decorating skills to work yet.  This morning she had it looking better, and I took the time to paint the ash bucket to match; that is, after diligently scraping the labels off.

The room as of today

Of course, there is no guarantee that anything movable is going to stay in the same place for the whole winter, er, the month, er, a week or two, er, even a day.  You just never know with Twyla.  I love how the place looks right now, though.  I would like to have a cast iron tea kettle instead of the white porcelain on steel version in the pic, but it will happen when it happens.


It wasn't cold enough this morning to justify making a really hot fire in the stove.  It got up to 72° F and we really don't want it any warmer than that.  I had to cook my breakfast potatoes on the regular propane stove because it was only hot enough to get the water in the kettle to about 160° F.  That would be great for heating some soup or for sweating some onions or "holy trinity," but it's just not hot enough for browning diced potatoes.

The view from the back

I can imagine that when January and Febu-Ugly get here and the temperature is below 18° F and there is a blanket of white outside, we will be sitting there with hot apple cider or chocolate with marshmallows or tea.  Maybe I'll be strumming my guitar and we will sing old hymns or folk songs. Maybe I'll read the Tanakh in Hebrew out loud to Twyla and see how much of it she recognizes.  Whatever it is that we do, it will be peaceful in a way that very few people ever experience.  Twyla has some other photo's posted over on her blog, so make sure you go over there and check it out.


In other news, the six orphan chicks moved to their new "digs" out in the front yard near the azaleas. Digs is an appropriate word, since you wouldn't believe how much chickens can dig with all that scratching they do.  They still look kind of small in that big run with the pet carrier, but in another month the place will seem small.  By then I should have the big coup done.

Moxie wants to find a way in

They immediately took to the roosting stick that I stuck in the cage.  Cogburn and Blackburn immediately began displaying even more typical rooster behavior.  Big flapping and rushing at the other chicks as if to herd them, or just show them who's boss.  Twyla now seems to think that a third one of the chicks is also a rooster.  I don't know, but I wouldn't bet against her.  It's the one that has suddenly come out with these pretty chestnut brown feathers speckled with black.  I will have to remember to take a close up for this blog in the near future.  It really does fascinate me how quickly the coloring of the feathers change from day to day.

Cogburn roosting

I cut an awful lot of firewood today and prepared another place for storing it.  Completely transferred a large compost bin to another area over under some trees behind the shed and further cleared the area where the big coup is going to go.

There is so much more to do.

My Solar/CO2 Heater

Back in the mid 1800s, an experiment was performed. They took a 5 lb. willow tree and planted it in a pot of 150 lbs of oven dried soil.  It received only sunlight and water for about 5 years. No extra fertilizer or food of any kind. At the end of the experiment, they carefully separated out all of the soil from the roots and weighed the tree and the soil separately.  The soil weight was about 149.75 lbs. and the tree was around 60 lbs or so.  What is the significance?  Over 99% of the gained weight of that tree came from the carbon dioxide that was absorbed by that tree.  It's chloroplasts used the energy from the sun to convert the atmospheric carbon dioxide into sugars that the plant used to grow.  That kind of amazing efficiency is just one of the small testaments to intellect of the Creator.

First fire in the new stove

We can use wood for so many wonderful things. We can build beautiful and strong structures, the finest musical instruments.  It is the most easily re-cycleable thing on the planet.  If it dies and falls to the ground, insects, bacteria, and fungi will decompose it rapidly into food for other plants.  If we cut it down or collect it and burn it, most of the "waste" product is carbon dioxide and water vapor, which are also food for more plants.  None of the paper products that come to the Ben-David house go out in the trash.  Any paper that doesn't have wax or plastic coatings or laminates becomes mulch and compost or can now be used as kindling.

This is a good thing.

I finished putting all the pieces in place yesterday, and by 17:00 there was a little fire roaring in the stove and producing a mild warmth that was soothing. It was nice to know that the weather report called for cloudless skies for Monday through Thursday, which means that had I run into any snags, I wouldn't have had to worry about rain, but I'm glad I didn't need the extra time.  I also feel blessed that it is a shallow roof. I think it's stupid to live in the South and have a 45° pitch roof as if you live where snow is an issue.  The gap between the original shingle roof and the new metal roof meant that I need to make a trip to HD for a longer composite blade for the jigsaw, but it was no big deal.  I needed a different type of cap for the stack, and we had forgotten to get a metal bucket for ash collection anyway.

It's a wonderful coincidence that where we wanted the stove is pretty much centered in the house. It would be a bummer to have one end of the house end up extremely cold.  It's also nice that it's on the North side of the house where there are fewer windows.  It's amazing how much solar energy on the south face of the house makes that side warmer.

It lit up fast and easy with some crumpled paper and twigs and the way the stove "breathes" there was only the tiniest amount of smoke.  However, if you've never had a wood burning stove before, there is an initial break-in period where the paint and sealants will smoke off.  The flat black stove paint, as well as the silicone joint sealing compound that I used on the exhaust system all smoked off for about 30 minutes, so we opened a window at one end of the house and used a box fan to exhaust at the other until it was all evacuated.  Now there is only the slightest smell of a wood fire.

Twyla's decorating skills are second to none.  She can take practically nothing and make it beautiful.  We will need to either find another rocking chair or I will have to convert one of the old chairs into one, but the scene in our extended kitchen is now cozy and comfortable.

This is not my first wood burning stove, so I have no illusions about the work involved in cutting, splitting, and storing wood.  No doubt many people think it's crazy to create that much work for yourself.  But those are the same people who think that everything will keep working fine in this country as we keep doing everything as we have for the last 50 years.

Sure it's more work, but I'll look forward to the absolutely necessary exercise program. Funny how that works.  The exercise you get from maintaining your fuel increases your metabolism which means you need less external heat to stay warm, and being in better physical shape increases your tolerance for cold even when you are at rest.

And to cap it all off . . .

The greatest thing about all of this is knowing that if the electrical grid suffered a major failure, and propane was unavailable or prohibitively expensive, we will be fine.  At the end of last winter, we had a final bill for propane of over $1,600.00.  That was with keeping the thermostat at 64° F and supplementing with small electric heaters.  I can't wait to see how well we do this year. If you've been keeping up with this blog, and the more intelligent information sources out there, you know that energy costs are about to rise even more dramatically in the coming months.

 The front porch is now a greenhouse. The temperature out there has gone from 33 at dawn to now 74 at 09:30.  I re-routed the dryer exhaust into the hallway, and Twyla runs the dryer either early in the morning or late evening. We are going to have a much better second winter compared to the first.  Baruch HaShem.

Now I have to work on that big stationary chicken coup.  Shalom.

Preparing for Cold

Moxie likes the creek

Winter is really just about here. It's not really about a date on the calendar.  Twyla says that this fall has been nothing like last fall.  She said the locals told her that there is no such thing as "Indian Summer" up here.  Maybe it's just about perception, but Twyla and I both consider the past couple of weeks to have been an Indian Summer.  When by 10:00 hours I am stripped down to a tee shirt and I'm sweating while doing chores in the yard, I'd call that warm.

But yesterday, it never really got above 52° F and while I could tolerate a short sleeve tee shirt underneath, I needed a vest.  I split my time between planting seedlings and making plant labels  and pre-painting the new stove pipes for installation.  I'd have concentrated on the stove only, but drizzly rain made that a non-starter. Can't exactly be cutting a hole in the roof in those conditions, now can I?

The old 1913 Karr woodstove just has too many problems.  Having new parts cast at a foundry would be outrageously expensive, so we decided to cut our losses and just go with a new woodstove.  We looked at three different styles and debated the pros and cons of them.  Twyla is such an artist, and aesthetics are pretty important to her.  Being the typical male, and pretty averse to any attachment to inanimate objects (i.e. I don't name things), I would have just gone with the most practical type.  There was a short little stove that had a broad flat top with two "burners," the round plates that sit above the fire pit. I kinda liked the look of it and it was less money. Twyla thought it was too short and not very attractive at all.  She liked the barrel shaped stove that some would consider a Franklin stove.  Better to not have regrets over the decor down the road, so the extra weight and price were not worth worrying about.  Even I have to admit that this stove looks a lot nicer than the others.

Swiss Chard, Cabbage, Romaine, Butter Crunch Lettuce

For purposes of scale; those tiles are 12" square.  It will be perfect for cooking a big pot of soup or chili on top.  With a "tent" of aluminum foil I can bake a loaf of bread on top.  The important thing is that we are going to be able to take advantage of all the free deadfall wood around here, as well as all the trees I will need to thin out in the future.  It doesn't take much of a fire in one of these to make the central part of the house comfortable.  When you have to keep it hot enough to cook on, you are going to want to be in the cooler parts of the house anyway.

The old Karr doesn't have to go to waste either.  Come late summer, when we will be full bore into canning again, it would be really convenient to have a wood burning stove outside.  Leaking panels and broken doors won't matter.  But having a nice, big, flat iron cooking and working surface outside where it won't be heating up the house will be wonderful.  I thought of just the place for it past the west end of the house near where the fire pit is.  I just need to level off a spot big enough for it.

Looking west at the creek

It seems that the timing for this is just about perfect, as we are supposed to get our first frost temperatures by tomorrow morning.  Twenty-seven degrees according to accuweather.com.  I've had the clear plastic up in the front porch for over a week now.  It seems to work well as a greenhouse. Everything I've got planted out in the yard is cold hardy, down to about 22° F.

As a matter of fact, the weather was so warm for the past month, that instead of the Romaine forming the way you see it in the store, it wanted to bolt (go to seed) and got all gangly. No affect on the taste.  All the greens that come out of our garden taste really great.  They don't have that old bitterness to them that I've noticed from supermarket produce.

The broccoli are starting to get nice heads on them. The iceberg lettuce and the cabbage are starting to head nicely as well.  I still don't see any Brussel sprouts on the stalks, but I've never grown them before.  The greens grow so well in the old straw bale piles that we have been eating from them for two months and they just keep producing.  I picked something like 5 gallons of assorted greens one day last week.  Swiss chard, a little loose cabbage leaf, Romaine, and Butter Crunch lettuce. I chopped it all up and sauteed it all until wilted. That reduces the volume to about one sixth of the original.  Twyla used it to make the most awesome vegetarian lasagna.  In the cleaning and chopping process, all the stems and discolored parts get diced up for the chickens, which they go wild for.

I haven't seen any deer in a while.  Makes me worry that I won't get any venison before Channukah.

An Ambitious Project

If you've never had to pay a huge bill for electricity or natural gas or heating oil or propane, you've either been miraculously blessed or you haven't lived long enough. I have nothing against fossil fuels and I don't resent the companies that produce and deliver them. Such fuels are incredibly efficient at delivering unbelievably great amounts of "work" with unbelievably tiny amounts of waste. In fact, we've become rather too efficient at making them burn without leaving enough carbon dioxide to replenish the supply in the atmosphere.  Currently, the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is less than 4/10ths of one percent.  It would be far more beneficial to plant growth around the planet if it were closer to about a full three percent.  More on that subject further down the page.

A house on the way there

Twyla and I traveled to a remote spot in western NC to buy an old porcelain on steel wood cookstove. The house it was in was being renovated rebuilt, by a 70 year old Viet Nam veteran who served with special forces and Navy SEALS. (Hang the ridiculous celebrities of today, this is the kind of person that impresses the socks off of me.) The house was probably built sometime before 1900, judging by the exposed timbers and such.  I wish I had taken more pictures. It was at the very end of a road that was only gravel a half mile after the winding blacktop ended.  I'm talking about a single lane blacktop that you could only go 15 mph on, not because of a sign, but because of necessity, and you wouldn't want to go any faster than that for fear of missing out on the great scenery.  It was somewhere north of the French Broad River.

1913 Karr: most parts removed

The stove that we bought from this gentleman was a KARR model built in Illinois in 1913.  A comparable model stove in really good condition on eBay would sell for about $3,000. Twyla spent enough time looking on the internet when we were trying to decide on what stove to get. We found the add for this particular stove in a publication at the grocery store.  The stove is quite a bit worse for wear than most, as you can see in the picture, but I'm Mr. Fix-it, and the sweat equity and challenge made the $350 price seem very reasonable. The first pic of the stove shows it after we unloaded it in the driveway.  The top sections and 100 pounds of other parts are sitting elsewhere waiting to be de-rusted.  There are a few things that need to be repaired; new hinges, etc.  I've got a vendor working on the estimate for all the exhaust parts I'm going to need to install this thing.  You can't see it from the front, but it even has a water jacket with plumbing connections so that it can heat water.  The next set of pics shows the place in the house where this baby is going to set. It's like the breakfast area off the kitchen, pretty much centrally located relative to the whole house.

Step one was to take out this built in shelving unit.  This is where you get to see the late 60s/early 70s decorating style. That nasty pattern was there originally, and then somebody built the shelving in a long time ago. The more neutral looking linoleum was installed around the shelving several years ago.

Then we went to Home Depot and found some 12" tile on sale for just 90 cents a square foot to install. Dark grout was a must. I've got a lot of experience doing ceramic tile, so it only took a couple of hours to install it, and the next day I put the wood trim around the perimeter.  Our hope is to eventually have all the carpet ripped up and replaced with hardwood. I'm pretty good at that as well, and some 3/4" red oak would be perfect in here.

With some hard work and the blessings of Adonai, we will be pumping plant food out of the chimney come November.That's right; plenty of wonderful CO2.

If that information shocks you, you might want to stop reading right now, because this blog is going to be a big defender of genuine science and not give any quarter to the idiotic crap that passes for science in the major media. Consensus of people with Ph.D. behind their names is not scientific. And in case you didn't know, most of the "scientists" who have signed on to the global warming hoax have their fields of study in things other than meteorology or earth sciences that would be relevant to the atmosphere.  And even among those who seem to have relevant credentials, the information leak on the East Anglia University data fraud demonstrates that such people don't really care about facts, they just have an agenda to promote global socialism.  Facts are facts independent of opinion. Computer models that don't include vital variables such as water vapor and solar cycles are just so much nonsense. This is why over 17,000 credible scientists have signed on to a petition debunking the belief in global warming.  You should be able to find plenty of links on the internet by reasoned, rational scientists who have thoroughly debunked this hoax.  You can start with Dr. Ian Plimer.  If you want more links, just ask.

The thing that I love about real science is how experimentation and observation makes it so easy to debunk the garbage out there. My favorite example in this case, is that you can seal a greenhouse and pump more than ten times the normal amount of CO2 into it, and in a matter of hours the chloroplasts in the plants will detect the extra level of carbon dioxide and respond by stepping up absorption and conversion to energy storage, thus returning the atmosphere inside the greenhouse to the previous gas ratios.  This has been demonstrated over and over.  If we produce more CO2, the planet won't get warmer, we'll simply have more plant growth.

I could go into details about chlorofluorocarbons and ozone, but this post is long enough, and if you are really interested in this stuff you probably already know that it's a hoax, but if you need more information, I'll help point you in the right direction.