Antique Cooking

One of my goals for this winter is to use the antique cookstove that's in my antique kitchen for COOKING. 

I want to see if I can learn at least the basics of putting together a meal without using modern appliances. 

Since I only fire up the wood stove when it's cold enough to warrant it (usually not unless it's below zero out there) AND when I happen to have a day off from work - which two criteria haven't seemed to match up very well so far *sigh* - I haven't had a lot of chance for experimentation.

The photo above is today's experiment:  au gratin potatoes with bacon. 

Baked in the deep cast iron skillet (as opposed to the ones of normal depth) without the cover, they turned out tastier than I had any right to expect. 

Then I made biscuits too. 

Not being sure of myself, and not wanting to ruin ALL the biscuits, I did half of them in the electric oven in the new kitchen and half of them in the old kitchen. 

Until I remember to bring the oven temp gauge over from my sister's, I have to kind of guess at whether or not the oven is at the right temperature. 

For the potatoes it didn't really matter that much, but for the biscuits I wanted to see how close I could get by guessing. 

When I put the biscuits in to cook, the gauge thingy on the front of the oven read about one and a half.  It goes up to nine but I've never gotten my stove hot enough to get that high.  I had kind of wanted to go with two, but ... the two sets of biscuits went into their separate ovens at the same time and the old one was at one and a half so I just went with it. 

The result was better than I could have anticipated; the finished biscuits were indistinguishable from each other! 

The only difference was that I SHOULD have waited until the wood stove got up to two - the set of bicuits in that stove took a couple of minutes longer to get done.

So I have learned something today.  

Bake biscuits at two on the dial. 

Another thing I've learned today:  I CAN do it! 

At least, so far I can. 

I'm not ready to try a cake yet. 

Or bread. 

But I'll get there!