Welcome to My Kitchen

In the vein of cutting the power bill we have set up an outdoor kitchen of sorts. One of the things we realized really heated up our house during the summer months was the heat from the stove and oven. So...... what about cooking outdoors? (It's kinda like camping:))

We don't have a gas grill, but we do have a turkey fryer. We had bought this really interesting oven years ago (y2k preparation) and never used it.

I wondered if it would fit on top of the propane burner. And if it fit would it work? It has been two weeks now and almost all our baking- muffins, toast, bread, a layer cake, cookies, pizza, etc. has taken place in this oven- I love it.
Look inside- I can fit 4 large loaf pans easily.

When we aren't baking I simply remove the oven and cook with our pots and pans over the burner. All of our cooking, with the exception of crock pot dishes ,takes place on this burner. There are of course adjustments and finagling to get the meal ready at the same time, but all in all I think it's going to work.

I'm amazed at how hot dishes stay when pots are insulated. I fixed dinner one evening before we headed out to a meeting. I left about an inch of water in the bottom of a pot of cooked pasta noodles, put the lid on the pot, and wrapped towels around the pot. When we arrived home three hours later and unwrapped the pot the pasta was steaming.

How's my power bill doing? We are running about 1/2 of our normal usage which was about 100 kw hours/per day. Our goal is to keep it in the 50kw hours/per day range.

Hope we can keep it up in the middle of summer :0!!