Ponderings: Cooking the first meal on our new wood stove.

I have been looking forward to cooking on the new wood stove.. this weekend was a good time to give it a try... I had a ham hock in the freezer and decided to make  Split pea soup.

I started out with a good sized ham hock, an onion, a carrot, a rib of celery, a couple cloves of garlic, and a bay leaf or two  then put about a quart of water in the dutch oven covered it and set it on the stove. 

After a few hours cooking the meat on the ham hock was very tender.. I took everything out of the pot and added a 1 lb. of  dried split peas... then back on the stove it went... I had a bit of a problem at this point getting the fire hot enough to boil... and mess around with it for several hours... Finally I got the fire right and the soup finished cooking in short order. 

I added salt and pepper to taste as well as some onion and garlic powder...  A grilled cheese sandwich and dinner was ready.