Power Outage

On Saturday afternoon while the rest of my family went to Jesse and Kendra's wedding reception, I decided to stay home and just chill. My hope was to have a quiet afternoon with nothing to do... and have warm homemade pizza for dinner. After laying around most of the afternoon reading, I decided to go work on an email newsletter for the Smocking Bonnet. I was just putting the last words in and thinking about starting dinner when the computer screen went dead. Lights blinked off. The whole house was still and dark. It was a power outage. "Oh great!" I thought, "Now what?" There were no cell phones at home and I could not find a corded phone anywhere so I could not call my parents or the power company and tell them about the outage. (Although when dad came in, he calmly informed me that there was a corded phone sitting on his desk in the basement :P) Since I was bored and didn't want to eat a cold dinner, I decided to either grill or cook over an open fire... After a mad search for matches, and not finding any, I scratched the grill idea. Still no power. "I wonder if I could cook in a wood stove? Well, it's worth a try!"
Digging up our ax, I headed to the woodpile. "This is ridiculous. What am I doing?" I told myself as I tried to chop a piece of wood. It was crazy. There I was, home alone, trying to chop wood for the first time just so I could have a warm dinner... Because chopping wood is a little harder than it looks, I ended up bruising my hand in the process. As I sat on the ground writhing in pain and laughing at how ridiculous this must have looked , I figured that it might make a good blog post so I ran and grabbed my camera.


Back inside, I laid my wood in the stove, stuffed a bunch of newspaper in between and lit the whole pile. The fire crackled cheerily and I debated about how to cook pizza in a wood stove on a grate. Both grates that I tried were too big and would not fit in the door, so I moved on to plan #2. Onto the metal spatula went the pizza and both went into the fire. This process was painfully slow and hot! The edges of the pizza hung off of the spatula and soon they ignited. By this time, the fire was not drawing right and the whole living room was filled with smoke. The windows came up and I finished trying to cook the slice without burning it. This took forever so I gave up, wrapped the other in a piece of foil and stuck it in the coals. As I pulled the last piece from the flames, the power came back on. Oh, brother, timing is everything. They turned out well, both having a flavor that you can never get in an oven. That smoky, fiery flavor. Unfortunately, they also had a flavor of something that has been cooked in wood stove.. not quite the flavor I was hoping for, but at least I had a hot meal.