A culinary breakthrough!

A big day here at Tylda’s Towers! Since moving in, we’ve been trying to get our old Stanley wood fired cooking range to work properly. After having the whole thing opened up and cleaned, the range itself gets much hotter than before, but the oven side of things still can’t get it up, so to speak. Consequently, we have filled our kitchen counter-tops and cupboards with several low-wattage appliances that we can run off our fledgling solar and battery system - a small toaster, an air fryer, and the clear favourite, a low wattage Breville sandwich toaster, waffle maker and panini press. Stick anything between two slices of sourdough and it tastes great in a freshly flattened panini! We also have a small, camping gas two ring hob which works great for heating up soups, boiling pasta and such.

However, there was one corner of our culinary life that has remained a barren wasteland - how to roast veggies without an oven? But a couple of days ago, my wonderful wife Yangmi suddenly remembered roasting food in the embers of the woodfires that heated her grandparents house in Korea, during the 1970s. Now our cooking range firebox and hot plates work a treat. They will easily heat up to 200C in the morning, and we use that for boiling up water for coffee and warming up the breakfast bread. But this morning, we tried wrapping up a few sweet potatoes and regular spuds in aluminium foil, and chucking them right in the firebox, once the heat had dipped down to around 100C and the once roaring fire calmed to a bed of glowing charcoals. And it worked a treat! After an hour of roasting thus, the spuds were perfect, just aching to be buttered, and the sweet potatoes were a real treat - crispy, caramelised skins and sweet, near-liquid soft insides. I simply cannot put into words the joy we felt as we feasted!

We can roast!

And what’s more, we can roast without using any more energy than we have already been using each day. The range has a back boiler which heats our hot water tank, as well as cooking our breakfasts. And the same fire now cooks lunch too!

So, as Julia Roberts once declared in Pretty Woman, “Colour me happy!” I know how she felt, I think … possibly.

Love, Light and lashings of buttered spuds,

Tylda!