Hello from Uganda

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

Re: Hello from Uganda

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

[lwood]

Re: Hello from Uganda

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.

[Archena]

Re: Hello from Uganda

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).

[Janine M. LeGrand]

Re: Hello from Uganda


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

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

Re: Hello from Uganda

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

[Archena]

Re: Hello from Uganda

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!

[lwood]

Re: Hello from Uganda

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.

[texassourdough]

Re: Hello from Uganda

Hi Janine!

I have been traveling and missing your updates but am now caught up. One comment...

Your fire baked bread is easily the best looking I have ever seen! How you get it to look that good without steam is totally beyond me!

Jay

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

Re: Hello from Uganda

Hi Janine, That looks like the Indian chulha stove Im sure they are similar. very cool,, Maybe you could incorporate the rocke stove into it... THere ara a ton of youtube videos on rocket and other types of stoves..

Cheers
Mark

[Janine M. LeGrand]

Re: Hello from Uganda

YouTube - How to build a Rocket Stove

Janine,, here is a youtube link for building a rocket stove, very easy and thought it might interest you, after building your oven this shouldnt be any problem for you
Recipes for snake ??? sorry fresh out....

Cheers
Mark

Thanks Mark! The Rocket Stove info was very interesting. It looks like an improvement on the types of stoves we teach in a church program I am involved with here. We have two types of low-firewood stoves that we build. One is made of the local bricks and the other out of mud and dung. Here is a picture from a teaching on the brick low-firewood 2 burner stove--the wood goes in at the left and smoke vents from a chimney attached on the right. Of course the bricks would be mortared in on a real stove.
The mud and dung stove is built by putting a mud mixture around pieces of plant stem as a form then the stems are removed. Here they are building a three burner stove. The wood feeds in from the front of the stove at the bottom and burn in a small central chamber.



You dig out the mud to connect the chambers, add a vent to the chimney, and shape the burners set in the stove with a built in pot support. You also need to make burner covers for when the burners are not in use. All this can be done out of free local materials and is uses maybe half the wood of a traditional three stone fire that most people cook with.
The rocket stove you sent me the link for incorporates a shelf for the wood to get better air draft and a better insulated burning chamber. I am very intriqued and have someone who will try to get a premade one from Kampala. I am also looking into building one but the 1000 deg C (Celsius, not Farenheit) suggested to fire the bricks is hotter than my oven gets.... I may be able to do the stove just not firing the insulating bricks that hot.
I also saw a bread oven using the rocket elbow combustion chamber--I am thinking I might try a modification of my WFO. I could add a rocket chamber behind the oven with a chimney into the oven body. That would give me an option of using it as a low-firewood oven when I don't need the full heat such as for pizza but am only baking say 350-400 deg F. I don't think adding such a chamber on would have any significant negative effect on the regular performance of the oven--I believe other people may have ash drops or such at the back of the oven. Lots of interesting possiblities.
Lastly I have now bought the wood and roofing materials so hopefully soon I'll have a roof over the oven--just a very simple sloping iron-sheet roof.

P.S. No more snakes killed yet. The rattlesnake recipies looked interesting so maybe next time

--Janine

[Archena]

Re: Hello from Uganda

Maybe you can adapt some of these...

Rattlesnake Recipe Page



What? I live in a state that has had a rattlesnake rodeo for the last 48 years...

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

Re: Hello from Uganda

YouTube - How to build a Rocket Stove

Janine,, here is a youtube link for building a rocket stove, very easy and thought it might interest you, after building your oven this shouldnt be any problem for you
Recipes for snake ??? sorry fresh out....

Cheers
Mark

[Janine M. LeGrand]

Re: Hello from Uganda

Janine,,
you didnt cook the snake did you ??

Mark

Nah, too small. Actually, I didn't think of that. I should have at least used him for chicken food. My main concern at the time was making sure he was dead. Here you hear stories of snakes "coming back to life" so I think sometimes they are just knocked out. Small doesn't mean harmless; in fact I recall reading that bites of smaller poisonous snakes had a higher mortality rate than the larger ones of that type. I think the theory was that larger snakes learn to regulate the amount of poison injected--but maybe the venom is just more concentrated in the little ones. I have never eaten snake, though I hear the rattlesnake can be quite tasty. I have eaten, and enjoyed, eel though never filleted it myself. I think you would need a fair size snake to get a good meal; while they do get big here this time it was only a little one! Any recipies for next time?

[ThisOldGarageNJ]

Re: Hello from Uganda

Janine,,
you didnt cook the snake did you ??

Mark

[Janine M. LeGrand]

Re: Hello from Uganda

Awww, Lunch is so cute!!!!!

Now that's a comment I bet people never expected on a Wood Fired Oven Forum! But, yes he is. (For those just joining, look back and see pictures of the chicken named "Lunch." ) He is still doing well and growing. Big cooking day last Saturday--8 french baguettes, one olive loaf, 3 pizzas, and a bunch of cornmeal muffins. Sorry no pics again, but I'm living well on all this bread. Still no time to do any repairs/improvements to the oven. I am getting some cracking and ideally should do a little patching on the oven floor as there are some pits now. Some of the excessive mortar that sneaked in to the inside of the oven has also flaked off--not a problem though as bricks are still well set. Still need more adobe on the outside. Vertical poles are up for the roof, but that's all so far. Minor oven damage to the hearth as after I carried a piece of firewood to the oven, a small but poisonous snake came out of the piece of wood and was coming towards me out of the oven. Damage occured as my guard vigourously attacked the snake with another piece of wood. Nobody injured (except the snake). Life is sure an adventure here in Uganda!
--Janine