Weekly Posting of the Conservative Cow Doctor

Close the Damper

Eighteen of my nineteen grandkids gathered at our ranch for the holidays just as we were finishing the 18-month long house renovation. Home construction projects are never officially finished, and most homeowners / builders finally throw their hands up and view missing trim and faceplates as normal.

Between Christmas and New Year’s, my son Tyler and son-in-law, Tim, installed the antique wood burning cookstove in the kitchen. It is a late 1800s Monarch like the ones in our mountain cow-camps and its presence elicits many fond memories. When I was a kid, we would fry bacon and eggs on the stove for breakfast, stuff the firebox with wood, close the dampers, and then shove a pot roast and vegetables into the oven. The cooking time was always one morning circle and when we rode into camp the midday meal smelled wonderful. I wouldn’t trade those memories for all the pop tarts at Wal-Mart and I hope my descendants learn the art of wood stove cookery. This Christmas, two of them did.

Henry is ten and now lives at the ranch. He and Sarah, his 12-year-old cousin from Texas, fired up the cookstove and cranked out a couple loaves of homemade honey-bread using honey from the ranch. I could smell the bread in the photo they texted me. I feared the bread wouldn’t last until I arrived on New Years’ Eve, and I was right. Fortunately, they made a second batch on the last day of 2023. It smelled wonderful but I was faced with a keto dilemma. I have removed carbs from my training table but figured I could make an exception since it was a holiday, and my grandkids had baked the bread in an old cookstove. I politely engulfed a slice hot from the oven after smothering it in butter. Note, I used real butter and not the new and improved larva lard promoted by communist bug boosters. The yeast weakened my resolve and before the ball dropped in Times Square, I had eaten one entire loaf. If you are going to bend your insulin curve, bend it big or go home. Mine snapped and this brings me to my point.

Wood fired cookstoves have become valuable again thanks to woke, sleepy Joe Biden. How is that for a contradiction? His administration has declared a climate war on major appliances from gas stoves to refrigerators, but it appears the Monarch Malleable remains unregulated. Lucky us. When the ruling elite shut off our electricity, natural gas, and propane because we are over our climate credit score, we can still cook and eat as our ancestors did.