Friday, January 16, 2009

FIRED UP THE OVEN TODAY

The day started with a buzz in the air. Our neighbor, Tom, fired up his "powered parachute" and took off using about 150 feet of runway between the RVs parked near us.


After a 4 mile fast pace walk, Marlene got busy on her caning project.



She finished the horizontal and vertical grids and is ready to start the diagonal tomorrow.

In the meantime, I split wood and got ready to fire up the rebuilt oven. We wanted to test it today before we open it up tomorrow evening for a community pizza bake. We have invited all the people gathered here to bring their favorite pizza sauce and toppings over tomorrow evening and we will provide the crust and oven for baking their pizzas.



The fire started nicely. Notice the new wall thickness on the edge of the door. The walls are now 6 to 8 inches thick.





Once I got the fire started it was pretty nice to sit back with a cup of coffee and add the firewood as needed. I kept a small fire going in the oven for 3 hours. Then I raked out the coals and put the door in place letting the heat inside radiate uniformly through the oven.





As a test, we put in some potatoes to bake. After an hour of baking the potatoes were ready. For dinner tonight we had the potatoes along with brussel sprouts which were steamed and then dressed with a teaspoon of butter mixed with like amount of stone ground mustard and two teaspoons of lemon juice. As a condiment for the potatoes Marlene sauteed some mushrooms. Our salad was a half of avocado with raspberry vinegar and mayonaise blend. A meal fit for a king.





As the sun was setting tonight there were over 60 rigs around us. When we first arrived we were the eighth rig to pull in. That was 4 days ago. By the end of the two weeks there may be as many as 150 in total. The nice thing is that there is so much room out here that it never seems crowded








After dinner, we checked the oven temperature and it was over 370 degrees. So, Marlene prepared a pot of beans which will be part of one of our meals tomorrow.







No comments: