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The Basil Soup Rant
It's raining again again again after all the extra inches--whole extra inches!--of rain this summer. People were getting SAD in the middle of the summer. And now it's getting to be fall, it's 40 at night and too soon to get into the wood, but the rain is cold. Cold. And the sky is so gray the outside lights have come on. I'm hungry but I have a bit of a cold so don't want to bother. Besides I can never remember if it's feed a fever, starve a cold anyway. Who wants to eat when you're all fevery? You just want drinks. Not that I'm fevery. That would be warm. Not that I can afford to be that sick anyway. Friends and family have worse colds and I need to go bring around soup. Except I'd have to make it first. Which involves washing dishes. Since my dishwasher is broken. And before that going out in the cold rain into the garden to pick some fresh vegetables. Which didn't work out that well this year. Can you make basil soup? If you did and it was lovely, the friends and family wouldn't eat it. Then you'd have a lovely full pot of hot fresh basil soup, smelling that lovely aroma and knowing it was all, all, with the exception of however many small bowls you can or should force down in your unfed cold or fed fever, going to go bad.
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Your rant is my rant
Except I don't have any basil.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
Open a can
Forget the basil soup, or anything else homemade, if you feel this lousy. When you get well again, make a big batch of chicken soup, or veg soup, and freeze it so you'll have something easy for emergencies.
Oh, and definitely, FEED THE COLD. If you don't eat well when you have a cold (or any illness), you hamper your body's ability to fight off the virus, making it somewhat more likely you'll get sicker, maybe even come down with an opportunistic flu virus.
The corrollary is NOT to starve yourself when you have a fever. That's bad, too. The original saying is "Starve a cold, feed a fever," meaning that if you don't eat when you have a cold, you're "feeding" the likelihood you'll get sicker to the point of having a fever.
Kewl gyrfalcon!
No one ever explained that before: ""The original saying is “Starve a cold, feed a fever,” meaning that if you don’t eat when you have a cold, you’re “feeding” the likelihood you’ll get sicker to the point of having a fever."
And thanks--
please vent on something bothering you!!
And CD--that goes for you too--this was what I was trying to describe in the other post a while back.
I hate rain
Yeah, rain is good, it makes the crops grow, blah, blah, blah, but enough is enough already. Over the last 2 weeks in central Illinois it rained around 7 inches, now hurricane Ike is getting its licks in too.
Basta!
-----------------------------
Around these parts we call cucumber slices circle bites
Venting, venting, venting
Nope, don't have any small ones worth typing at the moment, and Corrente posters and commenters are doing a great job on my big ones. If the remnants of TS Ike take down all my painstakingly stacked firewood when it blows through overnight at a promised 40-45 mph sustained, I'll have a vent worth venting tomorrow.
Yes, you can make a nice soup with lots of basil...
a little olive oil, a little onion, a little garlic, chicken stock, pepper/salt and any noodles or rice... add your basil at the end.
It would be very good with some crushed tomato, zucchini, spinach, italian sausage or those costco meatballs too...
Just the smell of the garlic and basil would probably break through your cold. I almost wish it was cold here now.
Sorry, I might have missed the point of your rant.
That's okay
just don't forget to rant if you need to, and thanks muchly for the recipe!
And now I can say, gyrfalcon, can you tie down the wood more so it doesn't blow?
No way to tie it, TP
I've got about three cords strung out in stacks out in the open in full sun and wind so that it will season (ie, dry out)in the time between early May, when I got it, and somewhere around October when I'll start to bring it into my attached woodshed.
Big problem with that is that my land is sloped in two directions and uneven, plus since my stove is small, the splits have to be short, no more than 14 inches, and this lot is primarily beech, which burns very well but is all twisty and knotty and uneven and hell to stack. Has to be done piece by piece like a giant jigsaw puzzle.
So all that makes for an unsteady stack no matter what you do, and the non-stop rain during July made the ground soft and the wood heavy with water and upset the balance. So I've *already* had to restack most of it twice since May.
I'm learning how to do this and made many mistakes along the way, but at least I got the short ends of the stacks well braced, and tied in a couple of cases. But there's nothing you can do to keep it falling over the long way if it wants to.
I'm getting my wood for the 2009-2010 winter in soon, primarily nice straight rock maple, and will stack that much closer together behind the barn because it will have time to season fully. But the stuff I got green in April and stacked in May needed to be completely exposed to get into condition for burning this year, and it's vulnerable as heck.
I went through last winter as a novice to serious wood-burning with only partially seasoned wood, and DO NOT WANT that again.
Even though I don't cut and split my wood myself (no woodlot, so not even an option) but have it delivered, it's a lot, a lot of physical work to manage. While I do complain about it, as a gracefully aging non-athletic female I'm actually very grateful for the necessity. Times I'm really not in the mood for it, I just glance at the cost of fuel oil and haul my lazy backside out to work.
My father's system...
... was to get TWO years ahead. And we have a barn to store inside, so we're lucky.
I don't envy you your experience from last winter.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
I'm working up to that
but it'll take a while. One of the surprises of living in the country is how impossible it is to hire unskilled labor to help with things like stacking wood (or digging garden beds, etc.). Turns out the very last thing farm workers want to do on their time off is help some broad stack firewood. (Duh!)
So I have to creep up on it a year at a time just because there's only so much I can do on my own. Piles of firewood lying around on the grass get punky fast.
The great prize of this house, though I didn't realize it when I bought it, is the perfectly constructed, well-ventilated enclosed woodshed attached to the back of the house.
But it takes even split wood much, much longer to season inside a barn or a woodshed, so unless you can get five or six years ahead on your supply, it's got to be outside until it's ready to burn.
Also worth noting that modern EPA-certified low-emission woodstoves like mine are much, MUCH fussier about wood being properly seasoned. Folks around here with big honkin' old cast-iron boxes typically don't even go out and cut down a tree for firewood until they run out in the middle of winter. Those things would burn dirt.
Quite apart from the good exercise and the massive cost savings, life in winter is simply much, much sweeter when you're putting logs on the fire to warm up the room instead of giving a thermostat a poke and walking away.
Amazingly, lack of rain
is the problem here in the Great Northwest. It has been an unusually dry summer; we are in the midst of another patch of 90 degree plus days; and there is some concern about brush fires starting and getting out of control right here in the city. Just last week a brush fire closed I-84 in the Columbia River Gorge at Hood River for a few hours. Luckily, firefighters got it under control.
My family is suffering the rains in central Illinois. My cousin has spent all day trying to get the water to drain from my aunt's basement. The basement at my mom's retirement home has taken on water. And my entire family is pretty annoyed and peevish about the approaching TS Ike.
I want some rain here in Portland. Makes me nervous, all this dryness. Of course, in April i can hardly wait for the summer dry season. But, school has started, and I need rain. Not flooding type rain, but rain nonetheless. I'm serious, all this dryness makes me nervous. And I want it to be cold enough to make soup.
Any problems with storing inside near the house?
I am getting completely conflicting advice:
DO store the wood inside--it's drier.
DO NOT store the wood inside--it'll have bugs which will eat your house.
The wood's been in a field all summer. The garage has no car, is very close to the house, and is made of wood; there's a small open-to-the-air part that runs under the eaves. Never had this option before. It would be a tremendous luxury to just get the wood from there. All 3 cord may fit in there; it's on concrete slab.
And, er, should I pallet? (Sorry, verbing a noun there.)
Pallet yes, inside the house no
Ah, TP, a fellow wood-burner!
Go look up a fantastic web site called www.hearth.com and look for the wood-burning forum. I can't tell you how much I learned from reading that and asking questions. It's populated by long-time wood burners, some honest stove dealers with good advice to give, etc. It also has a pretty good search engine. Right now, they're overloaded with posts asking questions about stove installation from people who are just starting, but there have been many, many threads there about where and how to store firewood.
The consensus is that you really don't want it anywhere near your house until the weather turns cold, and definitely not to bring more than a couple days supply actually inside the house at one time. Not sure where you live, but northern winters usually put an end to the ant problem, which is really what you want to worry about, since they get all sluggish with the cold. You will, no matter what you do, have the odd spider, beetle, ant rushing out from the wood when you do bring it inside, but I haven't found that to be a big problem. It just entertains the cats.
Do stack your wood on pallets, whether it's indoors or out. Moisture will rot especially barkless and cut wood pretty quickly, and even seemingly bone-dry wood will exude enough moisture that having it flat on a concrete floor for X months even in winter can cause problems.
So I'd say go ahead and stack it at your garage, but not until the weather really starts to turn cold. It's a heck of a guessing game to try to wait until it's cold but before snow starts to be a problem, but that's the best way to make sure your wood is as seasoned as possible and also to avoid the worst of the bug problem.
This sounds like my setup
If you stack it in the garage, you can bring in a day's worth, or even a loading's worth, of wood at one time -- assuming the garage is connected to the house. Since you burn almost everything on the same day, the insect problem (I've never had one) should go away. Plus, it's not bad exercise bringing the wood in by the armful. Just be sure that you store it well away from the stove!
Also, I save wood scraps, and especially birch bark (though not other kinds of bark) for kinding. It's nice to have all the ingredients to hand.
And I concur on the pallets. Keep the air circulating at all times.
[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
What kind of stove do you have?
Mine is a tiny Hearthstone Tribute, but I've got enough insulation in my old house that it does pretty well. Only problem is the firebox isn't big enough to sustain an overnight burn, and getting a good fire going in my pajamas in the morning chill before I've had my coffee is a royal pain, especially if I have to shovel out ashes.
If I'd known I was going to go whole hog on wood heat, I'd have gotten a bigger stove, but at the time I was only thinking in terms of the occasional cozy evening fire. Gah.
On the up side, the stove actually keeps my unheated second floor bedrooms noticeably warmer than the baseboard oil heat did.
CaseyOR, okay you can have the rain
Please send some dry sunny days in return.
Much warmer!
Actually I'm looking forward to it very much, this winter, because the one stove keeps the whole house toasty warm with the entire baseboard oil heating system off. Like yours, gyrfalcon, it is actually warmer (and you have a Hearthstone Tribune with soapstone?--they're cute and the soapstone works, eh?) Last year, when it got expensive, I was turning the heat down to 50 during the day and wearing many layers. This year, it will be 70 or above most of the days. Yeah! And I'm a sucker for the open hearth, the fire, watching the flames...and you can cook on it, let bread rise, the clothes dry (saving on dryer costs--and you have to because otherwise the air's too dry), read in front of it...
I've had more efficient stoves but this one, a freestanding Avalon, can be packed to keep going most of the night, with excellent coals to start again in the warm morning. It's also got a glass door in front which I never had before but appreciate although you do have to clean it off with ashes now and again.
Soapstone
is terrific, but with the caveat that I've never lived with any other kind so can't make comparisons myself. Personal preferences vary greatly, and there are folks on that hearth.com forum who swear by their cast iron or steel.
The soapstone doesn't get as hot on the surface as a metal stove and the surface takes a lot longer to heat up, but once it does, it holds the heat for a long time and keeps radiating (or convecting or whatever the heck it does, my physics is weaker than ****) long after the fire inside has died.
The glass door is makes the difference to me between an annoying, mysterious, inconvenient appliance and the center of Home. The fire is beautiful and magical, and being able to see what's going on in there, especially whether the secondary burn has kicked in, makes it possible to figure out what the heck I'm doing.
Although my house is small and pretty well-insulated, the Tribute isn't enough of a beast to keep the whole place toasty, but the big front room it sits in is comfortable and the farther reaches of the house tolerable. We had a few nights last winter that were down around -15, and the front room stayed around 67 or 68, even though I didn't have the wood or the knowledge to get it cranked up as high as it should go.
I keep the oil burner thermostat down at 50, and if it goes on at all, it's only for a short period in the night after the stove has cooled. Since my hot water ("on demand") is hooked to the boiler, I'm honestly not sure how much of the one tank of oil I used last winter was actually for supplemental heat, but I'm having an old-fashioned electric tank hot water heater installed this week and disconnecting the boiler from the hot water, so I'll know better this winter.
Speaking of dry air, btw, if you don't have one, get yourself a steamer to put on top of the stove. It makes a significant difference. Mine holds about a quart, and when the stove is cranking, I have to fill it twice a day, so that's a fair amount of moisture going into the air.
(My clothes dryer, in the first-floor bathroom, vents indoors through a water-filled doohickey that strains out all the lint, so I actually get more humidity into the air using it than drying by the stove. Might want to look into a conversion kit for yours if your dryer is anywhere near the main part of your house.)