A couple of days ago I set out to cook dinner on two of my stoves: the larger woodgas one, and the rocket, also homemade. Both of them are made out of #10 cans, with the fire hole from the rocket stove slightly smaller. I’ve cooked over the rocket stove and found it both powerful and easy to control. The downsides to the rocket stove are that it blasts the heat in a small area and leaves thick soft black soot on the bottom of the pot or pan. I’ve contemplated scraping that soot off and collecting it to make ink – I don’t know how much I’d have to collect or where I’d have to store it, so I haven’t worked up the gumption to do that.
I cook over these stoves with pots and pans made for camping or bought from the local thrift store, so I don’t worry about them too much, but I do fear that having so much heat concentrated in the center will wreck a pan after a while, and I really would like to find a way to use these stoves that would spread the heat more evenly over the bottom.
In the two occasions when I’ve cooked rice over the rocket stove (maybe not very imaginative, but it’s easy), the rice has cooked up uniformly enough even though the heat was blasting in the center. So that’s encouraging. And on this occasion, when I did a simple stew in a pan . . . but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Since I had had success cooking rice on my rocket stove, I decided I’d do a simple sort of Indian-style dinner: jasmine rice and stewed garbanzos. I’d cook it on two stoves. After my previous attempt to cook over the large gasfier using pellets, I thought I knew how to make it run properly. So I set up the stoves and gathered my ingredients.
From the start, this was beset with problems: my quest puts me to the test. I had to set up utensils and ingredients in a less than ideal space (on the driveway) and deal with the “help” of neighbor children and the wanderlust of a child who keeps running off into neighbors’ yards down the street out of my voice range. At least they went and got a bunch of fresh Roma tomatoes from the garden as I asked. I put the rice on the rocket stove to give it a head start and melted the butter in the frying pan over the gasifier . . .
which went out again.
Later I figured out that I’ve made the holes too small in this bigger gasifier to work with pellets, but at the time I was very, very annoyed: why wouldn’t the thing work?! This is the kind of thing that you have to go through when you’re on a Quest.
I got the rice cooked over the rocket stove then (with a couple of green cardamom pods in), and then put the frying pan back on. To the melted butter I added some garlic and ginger paste, then my spices: black cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, chili and lots of cumin. Then – calling for my child – I cut up the tomatoes from the garden and fried them in that fragrant mix for a while.
After that I dumped in the can of garbanzos – nothing fancy. I didn’t cook them from scratch this time.
I let that simmer/almost boil for the next while, as I continued to call for my wayward child and stave off the usual parental panic. I live in a safe neighborhood, and she has a history of blithely running off to play with friends at its edges, but I had told her not to go far, and I was annoyed at my gasifier not working, so I was on edge . . .
I brought in the food and then my daughter appeared, safe and sound, of course. And I tasted the food and it was nothing fancy, but it was good. I had cooked another meal over an efficient fire. Despite the setbacks, I had achieved another feat of voluntary simplicity. It didn’t feel simple at the time! Juggling all of the components while sitting on a driveway, rather than in a furnished modern kitchen. But I did it. And having read and thought and reached conclusions about voluntary simplicity, I stuck with a frustrating and difficult experience in putting them into practice.
That is always the key to making real changes: staying with a course of action after the initial motivating emotion has evaporated.
Quest for the Flame 
That’s pretty cool!
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Thanks!
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