This year our Christmas Lunch had two big differences and they were nothing to do with our menu arrangements which have always tended to remain quite traditional.
Difference number one was that it was our first Christmas Lunch in our new home!
Difference number two was that the lunch was cooked not on our standard gas cooker (which no longer exists in our new dwelling) but on (and in) a La Nordica wood cooker.
This required a little extra thought but we are pleased with our results:
Sandra’s lasagne:
her mammoth-sized chicken:
and my chocolate cake.
Our Christmas Lunch did take a little longer to cook. In particular we had problems in getting the oven up to the required temperature of 220 degrees C. (It never got beyond 180 degrees C; hints on improving this performance gratefully received). However, the results were delicious and particularly flavoursome – there is such a lot to be said in favour of ‘slow cooking’!
We were also able to enjoy our lovely lunch in the warmest of surroundings since the cast-iron stove, lined with red majolica tiles, is a great way to heat up our winter surroundings which are at an altitude above a thousand feet.
Cast-iron stoves were a standard feature of kitchens in by-gone times until they were superseded in the last century by gas and electric cookers. In the UK they continue to exist in the reincarnations of the Aga, invented by the Swede Gustav Dalen, and the Rayburn. Although the Rayburn has a wood-burning version the Aga (famously associated with an aristocratic ‘Aga-Saga’ country house lifestyle) is now powered by gas or electricity.
The Italian ‘Cucina economica’ is the basis for our Nordica which we inherited with our new house. It does not have to be on all the time, as distinct from an Aga. It only has one oven instead of the Aga’s multiplicity and, so importantly for our heavily forested part of the world where electric supply can sometime be cut off and where gas is not on line but has to be supplied in canisters, it happily feeds on a variety of timbers including acacia and holm-oak.
We are truly looking forward to further delicious ‘slow’ meals taken in warm surroundings and with the added benefits of much reduced gas and electricity bills.
Now I must be off downstairs to clean out the ash and to spread a bit of olive oil on our Nordica’s hob…
Happy New Year to you. We too have a Nordica stove/cooker, though not as sophisticated as yours appears to be. We too can’t get the thing much above 100 degrees. (Great for casseroles etc., not so good for roasting chickens!) We too fancied that we might have tiny electric and gas bills (Ours is supposed to supplement/replace bottled gas for heating and hot water). We too thought that chopping up the many fallen trees around us would be a pleasant way to spend winter days. Sadly, we have faced the reality, as much as we have tried to revive our inner peasant… It’s all a plot to make our lives as difficult and expensive as possible.
Indeed this was yet another of my nightmares how to cope with a cucina economica having never used one though seen at various relatives homes! We got up nice and early Christmas morning fired up our wondrous cooker used the oven like any other.but the Chicken cooked well we struggled with our tray of veg still edible but half cooked maybe should have boiled then oven cooked! But I managed to do a couple of stuffing sage and onion as well as chestnut filling delicious! A wonderful cooked meal amongst all this turmoil house move Omricon Delta Covid19 Pandemic! But we do have an electric handy stove and microwave for those lazy days.it’s a little difficult to handle a couple of wood burners in a day amongst transferring our belongings from our old.location to our new abode. However there is a lot of clearing of wood around and about tidying the forest grounds to last us a lifetime always on walks with our cats I would gather fallen wood thus clearing paths not many engage in this task. Planting trees is another matter as many as I can!
Yes trees are rather important!