Cooking Methods Based on the Season

Living a comfortable life with a minimal amount of fossil fuels to meet our needs means that we adjust how we cook, heat, preserve food, etc. based on the season. In the summer, we get all of our power needs met through our solar panels. In the winter, we aren't able to meet all of our power needs through solar. That means we rely on our generator to charge our batteries on cloudy days. We are planning on eliminating fossil fuels from this part of our system by buying or building a wood gasifier to power our generator, but until then we're stuck with using gas. We minimize the amount of power we need during the cloudy months by using our woodstove for cooking, baking, and heating hot water.

Winter Cooking: we cook on our woodstove (the Vermont Bun Baker) during the winter. It can fit up to four pots on the stove top at a time. We use our hand harvested wood to fuel our woodstove while it heats our home. 

Winter Baking: our woodstove has an oven underneath the fire box with two full sized racks.

Winter Food Storage: to save on power, we unplug our fridge/freezer in the winter. We store our food in the basement which serves as a root cellar, and we place a cooler in a snowbank outside to store frozen food.

Winter Hot Water: We have a water jacket installed in our woodstove, which heats a large pot that we keep in our bathroom (on the other side of the living room wall). The radiant heat from the hot water helps heat the bathroom and provides on-demand hot water during the winter.

Summer Cooking: In the warm months, we have plenty of solar power to run electrical appliances. We use an electric induction cooker for all of our stove top needs.

Summer Baking: We have a Nuwave infrared oven that we use for baking and toasting food.

Summer Food Storage: We have an energy efficient refrigerator from SunFrost that we plug in during the summer months. It has a built in freezer for all of our frozen food.

Summer Hot Water: We use an electric kettle for heating water, and on hot sunny days I fill up a black pot and set it out on the front steps in the sun to heat up. By the late afternoon it's hot and I can use it for a shower or dishes.