Cooking with fire wood in my locality can be a lot stressful, ranging from looking for firewood in the bush especially this rainy season and or buying a good fire wood that will catch fire very well.
Most firewoods do not really catch fire. Instead, they smoke and even after fanning them to flame, the flames only last for few seconds and they're gone.
Thank our stars we had preserved some dry wood in the store for the rainy season and that is what we use to construct our fire for cooking.
We have our local gas cylinder which we also use in cooking our meals. But the prices of gas had skyrocked to N1,800 per kilogram which is more than 1 dollar and a kilogram is not even enough for cooking meals thrice for a home of more than five persons.
Here in the village, cooking with gas is a very rare thing as most people tend to cook with firewoods.
One thing I do not really like about cooking with firewoods is the stress of going to push the firewood inside the fire every now and then once the burnt side is exhausted by the fire.
Cooking with firewood seems okay for most rural dwellers and they tend to see nothing stressful about it, but for me, I see stressful things about it.
So today, I chopped some firewood into two, using a matchet. It was stressful having to cut and cut over and over again. Whereas, if I was using a small gas to cook, all I would have just done would have been to just light it up with a matches stick and boom the flame lights up.
I prepared white rice and egg sauce after which I also warmed a small soup which was remaining from yesterday.
Using firewood to cook is actually a universal thing I think. All over the world, people use firewood to cook in one way or the other.
Firewood came out first before the invention of other simpler methods of cooking. So I feel everyone has gotten a taste of using firewood to cook.
I respect this age long practice of using firewood to cook not just food, but using it to do multiple things such as grilling, smoking of fish and other things.
Using firewood to cook also gives meals different sweeter taste and makes food to feel more special.
Ever tried party jollof rice prepared using firewood? It is always very delicious and tastes different from the normal jollof prepared at home with a cooker or stove.
Preferably, I will use firewood to cook very large portion of meals as it will save cost and use stove or gas cooker to cook smaller portions of meals.
