Non-electric cooking

“I pity the fool who doesn’t have a woodstove,” reads the Facebook status update of a smug friend sitting in front of a roaring fire in the middle of a blizzard last winter.

I’ve often told not-so-lucky friends that they are welcome to come enjoy the warmth of our own woodstove any time there’s a cold snap or power outage; the offer comes along with an invitation to bring over whatever papers they want to see go up in flames–ancient Visa statements and bad teenage poetry come to mind–and to be ready to split kindling!

The beauty of a woodstove is many-fold: that ancient feeling of comfort and security that our ancestors must have felt when they gathered around their fires, the chance to use a (theoretically) renewable local resource, and of course, that warm and fuzzy multitasking feeling of cooking on the same surface that’s heating your house!