Cooking on the Wood Stove with Becky Ashenden

Becky is the founder and executive director of Fabric of Life, as well as the owner of the Vävstuga Weaving School. Sharing a meal with her is an opportunity to revisit the simple and joyful things of life, and to be reminded that things of beauty come in many forms – from the company you keep, to the local farmers and craftspersons around you, to traditional ways of cooking, that can make an evening meal fill your belly and warm your heart. 

One of my favorite things about winter (there are many), is cooking on the wood stove. Cooking with a wood stove is an opportunity to slow down after a busy day and it helps to keep our home warm and cozy. 

Here we have a mixture of green and yellow beans from our garden, along with a nice large onion from our amazing Natural Roots CSA in Conway all run by horsepower. And I have just thrown in some frozen cherry tomatoes. It’s so easy to pop these in the freezer during the summer months when you can’t keep up with eating them from the garden.

This is a pot of cooked up Einkorn (an ancient kind of wheat), from our treasured Pioneer Valley Heritage Grains CSA offering all sorts of locally grown dry harvest produce, including rice.

And I also have a large and lovely leek sizzling up in the cast-iron pan directly over the firebox where you get the highest heat. I added just some of the Einkorn to the leeks, I didn’t know I was going to do that but here it looks kind of pretty. I will save the rest of the Einkorn for another dish later in the week, maybe a pot of stew.

My friend and bandmate Addie of Real Pickles fame turned me on to preserving parsley ground up in the food processor with olive oil, and kept in the refrigerator (as long as you put enough olive oil on top to cover it to keep the air out). Parsley is super green and healthy, and adds a great flavor to pretty much any dish. Speaking of pickles, I have made my own spiced pickles here from our garden cucumbers, so I had a thought to slice them up and throw them in with the leeks and einkorn.

Now we have added a pound of local, certified organic grass fed beef from Wheelview Farm, also on the hot left side of the stove directly over the firebox. The fun thing about a woodstove, is that instead of turning the heat down, you just shove your pan to the right, and there is plenty of room for lots of pans. Or just have a trivet to put your pan on!

All week I have been wanting to use potatoes and although I don’t yet know how this will tie in or what it will be a part of, or if they will be all by themselves, at least I have sliced them up with the cheese slicer. Nice thin little slices that cook up quickly. Into a pan they go, right on top of some nice hot peanut oil-sizzle sizzle. You can see that the darker colored ones might be cooked through by now, but it’s always a mystery what is happening on the backside. About those potatoes – I have discovered a tricky way to flip them all over it once rather than trying to pick at them one at a time with tongs. Simply slide them all into a fresh pan. Then I quickly flip them into the first pan which is still hot, so now they can continue to sizzle on the other side!

Although things are getting closer to being cooked I’m still not quite sure how this is going to end up. I’ve decided to put a nice large platter in the oven to warm it up, so it doesn’t cool the food off; I received this platter in trade many years ago at a craft fair for woven goods.

Originally I thought I was going to serve this meal in separate serving dishes but I’ve decided to use one of my beautiful large platters that are seldom used now. Here is a new approach that I came up with for serving just now. I make a nice painting with all of the food, starting by plopping the beans and onions and tomatoes into the middle of the platter. Make a new middle and add the ground beef. And make another hole in the middle of the beef and add the einkorn and leek mixture. And what to do with the potatoes? A nice fresh potato chip ruffle around the whole edge. How did I decide what order? It’s all about the color; I did not want the two greens next to each other, it’s much more dramatic to have the dark color in between.

And now the complete table setting, with placemats & napkins from my production weaving past, along with beautiful black stoneware plates that I purchased many years ago, along with amazing “New Mexico” blue glass tumblers by Josh Simpson, also done as a weaving trade many years ago, as well as the stoneware water pitcher. 

There you have it, a whole platter of very simple food really, mostly from our very own garden. I’ve definitely noticed a correlation between eating all of these healthy vegetables and experiencing a healthy feeling in the entire body. And the addition of a beautiful and simple table setting that reminds me of the wonderful craftspersons and friends that I have met over the years adds to the feeling of health and joy as we share this meal.