Hello from Uganda Introductions Discuss Hello from Uganda in the Good Background Information forums; Hi Janine, I have enjoyed your thread because I can relate to your experiances in Africa being here in the ...

[lwood]

Hi Janine,
I have enjoyed your thread because I can relate to your experiances in Africa being here in the Philippines. especially the snake experiance. The one in the foto had been eating our chickens and eggs. My caretaker got tired of it one night and shot the snake up in a tree. And yes we ate it. They cooked it in soy sauce, sugar, star anise, and bay leaf. It was delicious. It also fed about four hungry families.

I also see you use banana stalks as forms four you oven. We do the same here. Many people use banana leaves to eat off of. Your fire brick look the same as what we can get here. So thanks for the encouragement on make do with what ever is available.

[Archena]

Rocket stove info:
Larry Winiarski's Rocket Stove Principles

Rocket Stoves -- Home

Homegrown Evolution: Our Rocket Stove

Rocket Stove Design Base - Home

Home


I love delicious!

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

hey Lwood,,,,THat is a SNAKE >>>>>> holy &%#@

[Janine M. LeGrand]

Here's a photo from a nutrition class I had the other day. We had representatives from three different churches come to my house for training. In addition to some basic nutrition information, I include practical cooking as part of the training. In this case these churches have started home vegetable gardens but wanted to know how to cook the vegetables such as carrots and zucchini. They had had a teaching on making carrot cake (an incentive to plant carrots) So we did a vegetable bean soup. Also, Ugandans are typically CRAZY about cake--they get a small bite when they attend weddings (the cake is cut up into bite-sized pieces and passed around). Everyone wants to learn how to make cakes, so I include a cake of my own recipe-- a high protien "cake" which is basically a modified cornbread that includes soy, 2 eggs and a cup of milk with only 4 spoonfuls of sugar per cake. I include some sweet spices (cinnamon and what they call "mixed spice" here) to hide the soy taste. So the students worked in teams and made the vegetable bean soup then the "cake". The WFO worked wonderfully for baking the cakes at the same time while people watched. Everyone had a great day.
I am also still baking lots for my own food.

Here is a photo of some of yesterday's bread. I've done a number of other foods too, but alot of time it gets eaten before I remember to photograph it. Orange muffins are becoming a regular item here and were eating lots of pizza of course.
Jay, thanks for the nice comment about how my bread looks. I'm still learning the oven, but I am getting to know it slowly--I've found the back right has some wonderfully even cooking with the heat of the fire and the walls in nice balance. Getting lots of practice quickly.

Mark, you're very helpful with the rocket stove info. I've looked at the first video a number of times and shown it to our stove-building teacher. I've found some links on my own and will look at the ones you just posted. Honestly, video it pretty difficult to get here due to the VERY SLOW internet connection (shared dial up). Often the power here goes out before I can get the video loaded so it may take four or five tries before I get the video. Written info is usually much better since I can save without much problem. On the stoves, it will be easy to add the shelf to raise the wood for better airflow. The other advantage is the well-insulated combustions chamber. I'll need to think to see if we can find a way to incorporate better insulation around the combustion chamber. Right now, our stoves lose a lot of heat to the mud of which the stove is built. Anything will need to follow the "keep it simple" rule plus be extraordinarly inexpensive. Here many people are living off very little money. The other day someone told me that they were saving their money to buy flour (and no flour is not particularly expensive here). Likewise another person earned some money then said, "Now, I'm going to buy toothpaste." It's hard for people who haven't lived someplace like here (or like some places in the Philipines--am I right Lwood?)) to understand. But people are happy, generally, and in many other ways life is good. I'm also seriously looking into adding a rocket chamber to my WFO to have a low firewood option--something I doubt anyone else here has done, but I think would work.

Lwood, welcome. Wow, what a snake!!! That one would scare me, big time! The longest I've seen here was just under 6 feet, but even that was nowhere near as thick or as long as yours.

(That's my shoe, upside down by the snake).
I'm guessing that your snake was a constrictor of some sort. I'm sure it must have fed 20 + people. I think you said 4 families, but I'm not sure of what size families you have there. Here 7 or 8 children is common and I would imagine the Philipines could be similar. Aside from the snakes, I hope you are enjoying life there. I love it here. From your photo, I'm guessing you're not native to the Philipines. Are you a missionary, with an NGO, married to a Philipino, tax-dodging expat, what??? (Just kidding about the tax-dodging, of course) You must have a story to tell. Do you have a wood-fired oven there? And, yes, I know how frustrating it is to have something eating your chickens. We had some sort of chicken eating lizard here--I never saw it; the guards descriptions made it sound like a Komoto Dragon so I really don't know what it was. Fortunately it decided to move on. You were pretty observant to note the bananna stems for the oven form--I think Uganda leads the world in bananna consumption per capita. It is a staple starch here. And likewise the leaves are used, in many ways here though most commonly to steam food in.
Well, I feel like I've wandered around a bunch of topics. Sorry if I got to far off topic; this thread really is supposed to be about WFO's though I guess wood fired stoves are related. Thanks again for all the great comments.
--Janine

[Archena]

Hi Janine,

Cheap and abundant insulation: ash. As long as it remains dry it's actually an excellent insulator and you have the added advantage that you're gonna be making it on a regular basis anyway.

On a computer note, if you are using Firefox (browser) there's an add on called Screen Grab that would probably be really useful for you. It takes a picture of an entire webpage that is filed in your Pictures folder. When you have power but no connectivity you can still read the page. I use it a lot.




I just copied a portion to demonstrate - the whole page was too big to upload. But if you copy the whole page it will look the same just a lot longer. (And a heck of a lot easier to read - FB compresses quite a bit. That won't happen on your own computer).

[lwood]

Hi Janine,
I am an expat married to a Filipina. Yes, I am building a WFO, just haven't posted anything for a while. We are building a retirement community in southern Luzon province at the base of Mt. Isarog volcano in the rain forest. Not quite as noble as your venture but we do have monthly feedings for the children in the community close to us. We also love it here, but all the corruption is hard to take sometimes. The police tried to confiscate my gun last week during a so called "Amnesty". He claimed the gun jammed when it was working perfectly as a double action without a magazine. The cops here are shameless, the so called amnesty is a way to bring out all the loose firearms so the cops can choose which ones they want by making up stories. We take many things for granted living in the good ole USA.

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

Written info is usually much better since I can save without much problem.

Wood Conserving Cook Stoves - A Design Guide
hi janine,, This one might help. There is actually one published by the U.N. that Im still looking for, I think I have the web adress on my work computer and will send that when I can find it... (this one is all printed)

Cheers
Mark

[KINGRIUS]

ACK!! Pictures of DEAD snakes!? I really like snakes alive much more than dead. I understand they can be a nuisance to farm critters and such, but please don't let this become a snake killer story telling line.

Darius

[Janine M. LeGrand]

KingRius,
Sorry if the pictures offended you. I am not advocating going out and hunting snakes. The one we killed here was venomous, wild, heading towards me and a few feet away from me, so I won't fault my guard for killing it. Actually I am slowly trying to educate the local people here on snakes--the general belief is that all the snakes here are poisonous and most people here do kill them on sight due to that false belief. From a health standpoint it is good to be able to tell if a wild snake which bit a person is venomous or not. There are a lot of "unusual" treatments for snake bites here (such as kerosene and "blackstone") I think thats because many of the bites were non-poisonous and people think whatever they did (e.g. apply kerosene) worked.
One challenge of using a WFO is that I need to keep a lot of wood around, and piles of loose wood are just the type of place snakes (plus other critters/insects) like to hide in. I try to look before I reach, but snakes can hide quite well at times, such as the one inside the wood I picked up.

[Frances]

Not that I wish to tread on anybody's toes, but I don't see so great a difference between the snake picture and one of a steak, slice of ham, whatever - specially considering the snake was used as food afterwards.

But yes, killing animals just for the sake of it would not be a very nice topic.

Facinating thread, Janine - Keep up the good work and as far as I'm concerned you can stray off topic as much as you want, I love reading about it all!