easylivinginamerica

Fall is the perfect time to rediscover fire. In the north, trees are bursting into colors of flame against the blue sky. In the countryside, the air is tinged with the smell of burning leaves and bonfires. In many places, the weather is still pleasant enough to cook food on the grill or fire pit out on the patio.

In this time of fossil fuel shortages, it is a good time to get comfortable with the old-fashioned, primal light and heat energy of fire.

This past spring, my house lost power twice, for nearly a week both times.  It was an inconvenience to say the least. Everything in most of our homes relies solely upon functioning electrical and gas lines from the power company. When these services are interrupted, we can feel extreme anxiety as we are unable to refrigerate food, cook, turn on a light, heat our homes, or plug in our computers and cell phones. Harnessing the power of fire–reigniting the ancient heart of the home, the hearth–can help us ride out the storm in comfort and overcome our dependence on modern conveniences.

And power outages aside, we can use fire to bring warmth, beauty, romance, relaxation, money savings, and delicious flavors into our homes.

Whether you live in a small apartment or a spacious house, candlelight gives any room a luxurious, calming, warm glow. Candlelight makes people’s skin tone appear soft, even, and warm, and it brings out the sheen of hair and eyes. When the weather gets chilly, the radiant heat from candle flames quickly fills a room with cozy warmth.

Try setting up sconces and other safe containers for candles all around your home and lighting them in the evenings instead of turning on unflattering, wasteful overhead lights that can interfere with your brain’s sleep chemistry in the hours before you go to bed. Use task lighting in the form of reading lights or lamps for reading or working at the computer. Choose unscented candles made of natural materials such as beeswax for the best indoor air quality. Always follow burning instructions, and never leave burning candles unattended.

Ignore the marketing hype around everything related to candles. You do not need to purchase expensive candles or hurricanes or fancy paraphernalia or the latest trends or whatever the door-to-door saleslady is pushing. Just buy a bunch of unscented candles in bulk at the dollar store or, if you’re crafty, make your own. Set them in fire-safe dishes, glasses, or candle-holders. You can find plenty of charming options to display your candles at thrift stores or in your grandma’s basement. When you set up candles all around a room and ignite them, whether it cost you $500 or $5, the luxurious glow will look and feel just as decadent.

And next time the power goes out? Instead of a disaster, the storm becomes an opportunity for adventure, romance, or just a nice meditative, cozy, spa-like break from modern distractions such as TV, phone calls, and e-mail.

We can also use fire to make cooking easier, cheaper, and more enjoyable. If the weather is nice enough, cook food outside over a grill or fire pit. Share the warmth and food with family, neighbors, and friends. To cook for a small group, all you need is a portable mini-grill, a few pieces of charcoal, and a match. It’s amazing how many hot dogs or ears of corn you can roast in a tiny, portable grill! I have one on my porch that is about a foot and a half in diameter. I call it “Sputnik” because it looks like a little toy satellite. Cooking, cleanup, and maintenance on Sputnik is incredibly easy.

If you are lucky enough to have a fireplace or own your own home, you can use fire to cook indoors. It will be easier and more delicious than you could ever imagine. Fireplace inserts or woodstoves are ideal for cooking. If you have a regular fireplace, you can install an insert or woodstove with the help of a friend or two. Look for a sturdy, simple unit that does not use electricity to power a blower or other mechanism. My husband and I found a rusty old steel woodstove in a friend’s garage and bought it from him for a few hundred bucks. With the help of a buddy, we cleaned it up and installed it in our fireplace. You can often find inserts and stoves at thrift shops, estate sales, or home heating retailers. They increase the heat output, safety, cleanliness, efficiency, and ease of maintenance on a traditional fireplace, and they are easier to use for cooking. We now use ours to heat our entire 1700 square foot house and cook some amazing meals that fill our home with delicious smells.

Whether you love to cook or hate it, it is worth checking out some old-fashioned hearth recipes from American pioneer days and investing in some cast iron cookware that will last you a lifetime and provide nonstick cooking without the dangers of toxic nonstick coatings. Think of your hearth as the ultimate slow cooker. You throw some food in a pot, put it in the fire, and leave it there while the fire heats your entire home. Later, you pull out the pot and find an incredible slow-roasted comfort meal with depths of flavor you can never achieve in an electric crock pot or on your kitchen range.

When you prepare your own food with fire you have built and tended with your own hands, there is a passion and deep appreciation for the food that modern American women have mostly forgotten. You will be able to savor the tastes on a deeper level to get more satisfaction out of less food and help control your weight. Also, roasting food in the hearth adds heavenly flavor without needing extra fats, salts, sugars, or other unhealthy additives that we use to make our lackluster modern food taste good.

We modern women have horrific dietary habits compared to our hardy pioneer ancestors or even our moms in the 1970s. Junk food is marketed to us as “fast,” “convenient,” “light,” “fat free,” “sugar free,” “low calorie,” “low carb,” “diet,” etc. But most of this marketing is, pardon the pun, BALONEY. There is nothing “convenient” about filling your body with poison that has little nutritional value and will clog your colon and arteries and give you a complex next time you try on a bathing suit. It’s a short-term trick that our generation has fallen into. There is nothing “diet” friendly about a cookie made of chemicals that tricks your organs into producing insulin to digest the sugar that you taste but isn’t really there, causing you to crave junk food hard and throwing your metabolic processes out of whack. When you incorporate more homemade, truly flavorful, truly nutritious whole foods into your regular menu, you take your health and beauty into your own hands. You will experience truly delicious, satisfying real flavors and never again experience a craving for a drive-thru cheeseburger with bone chips and fecal matter mixed in. You can save the money you might have been tempted to spend on tiny, bland, frozen “weight-loss” meals and packages of artificially flavored sawdust or meat and dairy products processed with plastics. Yummy!

Feed your body, don’t punish it. Feeding yourself and your loved ones with wholesome nutrition made with love is a spiritually enriching, sensual act and puts you in control of your health and happiness. Hearth cooking is fun to share with family and friends and can be an intensely romantic ritual to share with a lover. Fall in love with cooking and truly healthy eating with recipes from books such as:

The Magic of Fire:  Hearth Cooking: One Hundred Recipes for the Fireplace or Campfire (by William Rubel)

or

The Open-Hearth Cookbook: Recapturing the Flavor of Early America (by Suzanne Goldenson and Doris Simpson).

Find these books and more hearth cooking recipes at any major bookstore or online.

Try using fire in any ways you can, large or small, to bring warmth, relaxation, fun, romance, beauty, and health into your life. Rediscover your inner goddess of the hearth!

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