Would you like your eggs scrambled or mashed?

Learning to cook on the ever-rampant temperatures of our wood burning stove provides the bulk of our entertainment these days. The steel plate welded atop the bottom barrel of the stove is installed to allow stovetop cooking, but its wide surface area and limited thermal bridging to the actual barrel limit its temperature. We bypass this by instead of using pots and pans atop it, to use it as a griddle. Future developments might mean removing this completely, cutting into the top of the bottom barrel and replacing the round top with a sealed, flat one - allowing a more direct heat transfer.

In the meantime, we have much practice to do.