So today was spent in warm endeavors.

I made vegetable stock, and cooked down our pumpkins. (Tuesday’s post will probably be about this.)

But even hotter–it was finally cold enough to crank up the wood stove! The first fire in our brand new wood stove!

I really like the fact it can be filled from the front or the top.

Hey look! Fire!

More fire! The directions said to start it up slow, and keep it at a relatively low temperature. So only a couple logs at a time, and I’ve been trying to keep the temperature low.

What are the cats excited about? The wood.

This stove is going to be a lot hotter on the outside than the old (jacketed) stove. Hopefully they’ll remember enough to stay away from it when it’s putting out a lot of heat. Because I figure that griddle on top is most likely warm enough to do some damage to kitty paws.

So how is the new wood stove? Pretty awesome so far. It barely smokes–the old stove would inevitable fill the basement with smoke on regular basis. And it puts out a fair amount of heat rather quickly. The only current drawback is that like a cast iron pan that needs seasoned, this is a new cast iron stove that needs seasoned. So the house smells… odd. But it’ll eventually disappear.

And it’s not like the house hasn’t smelled like baked pumpkin and vegetable stock all day.

Well, not right now. Right now, in fact, the air conditioner is on and cranking out cold air to keep the temperature nice and cool.

However, we are now prepared for winter.

You may or may not remember that back in the spring I broke our wood stove.

As it was a monstrosity and not extremely efficient and had several other problems, we decided to purchase a new wood stove. Luckily, we ordered our stove back in June, since apparently it’s impossible to find a good woodstove around here now–everyone seems to be sold out because of the current high fuel prices.

So the stove was installed Friday!

First and foremost, I cannot believe how *small* the new stove is!

It can hold more wood, in what seems to be half the size of the old stove! It’s well sealed, so smoke won’t escape all the time! The parts are easily replaceable (the floor model at the store was actually missing parts, because she’d taken it apart to replace parts for her customers so they didn’t have to wait for new parts to come in) which is just an added bonus.

Plus it’s got lots of interesting features.

It can be filled from the front or the top. The lid for the top is also a griddle, so we can actually cook on the stove! (The old stove was jacketed, and so was relatively cool to the touch, comparatively.) It has a swing-out ash tray with a carrying lid…

It is, essentially, awesome, and I can hardly wait for it to get cold, so we can light a fire!