Molly Yeh Hagen, from the Food Network’s Girl Meets Farm. Click to enlarge.

One of the channels that’s on television with some frequency at the Pico household, especially when my daughters come to visit — which is almost every weekend — is the Food Network, Channel 231 on DirecTV, and one of the shows is Girl Meets Farm, starring Molly Yeh Hagen. She’s a very pretty and personable cook, working in what appears to be a small kitchen on the family farm with her husband Nick Hagen.

Unlike Joanna Gaines, and her imported $53,000+ La Cornue Chateau range, if you’ll look in the lower right hand corner of the photo, Mrs Hagen uses an old electric range. Not even one of the newer, glass-topped stoves, but one with the curlicue electric heating elements.

She’s also unlike most of the people that you see on the various house hunter and remodeling shows on HGTV, the DIY Network and others, in which it seems that everybody wants a gas range.

We did, too. So when we remodeled our kitchen in 2018, we installed what Mrs Pico wanted, a gas — propane in our case, being out in the country beyond natural gas lines — range, replacing the old electric one that came with the house when we bought it.

We had other reasons, as well. Our house was all electric, and our first winter here was miserable. It got colder than usual for a winter in central/eastern Kentucky, and the electric heat pump just wouldn’t keep up very well. Then, when we lost electricity for 4½ days in an ice storm, it was decided: we would not depend just on sparktricity for heat, cooking and hot water. We added a propane fireplace and water heater as well, so if we lose electricity again — and we’re pretty much at the end of the service line, last ones to get service restored out here — we’ll still have heat and hot water and can cook.

Yes, my wife and I remodeled that kitchen all by ourselves, with help from my sisters and, occasionally, a nephew, but no ‘professionals’ were involved. The plumbing, the electrical, the drywall, the floor and backsplash time, the cabinet installation, the wallpaper, the window installation, everything you see — and you can click on the image to enlarge it — with the exception of the quartz countertop installation was done by us. Pardon me while I pat myself on the back.  🙂

Well, we might like a gas range, and most homebuyers want gas ranges, but it seems like the climate change activists don’t think you should be allowed to have one. From National Review:

The Democrats’ War on Gas Stoves Is a Slap at Cooking Cultures

By Judson Berger | October 17, 2021 | 6:30 AM EDT

“No way in hell you are going to put a wok on an electric stove.”

That was Steven Lee, a San Francisco official and restaurant investor, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle last year after the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to outlaw natural gas in new buildings.

Nevertheless, they persisted. Per the Sierra Club, the quickening campaign to phase out natural gas recently notched its 50th city-level win in California alone. (Take a bow, Encinitas!) No. 50, as with some others, has “situational exemptions” for restaurants and the like, but the overall push to compel an all-electric design for homes and commercial buildings understandably has had chefs and home cooks worried, roughly for the reasons articulated by Steven Lee.

Berkeley was the pilot light of this movement. The city was the first to ban gas connections in new buildings in 2019, something the California Restaurant Association is still fighting in court. The speed at which other municipalities followed, from Seattle to New York to other cities across California, only underscores how the culture of lawmaking often is the culture of fads.

Berkeley was the “pilot light” of the movement?  Guffaws!

There’s more at the original, an no, it’s not hidden behind a paywall.

I wonder is self-proclaimed foodie Amanda Marcotte uses a gas range in her South Philadelphia apartment.

Chefs aired similar concerns in a Wall Street Journal piece published over the summer. The Journal detailed how some cities include carve-outs for gas stoves in their natural-gas restrictions (after all, it’s the heating of homes and water, not stoves, that gobbles up most natural gas around the house) but noted that advocates still see full electrification as the end goal.

That’s just it: gas for cooking is something of a luxury, a luxury that a lot of people want, but the heating of homes and water isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. Those 4½ days we were without electricity in January of 2018? Mrs Pico went to stay with our daughters in Lexington, where there was plenty of heat, but I had to stay here, to take care of the critters, and the plumbing. Staying in a house that got down to 38º F just before the power came back on wasn’t a whole lot of fun!

Of course, when the power did come back on, here in central/eastern Kentucky, it was coming from a fossil-fueled power plant!

As I noted in a tweet on Saturday, the show This Old House was featuring the remodeling of an 1879 home in Newton, Massachusetts. The homeowners, even in very liberal, very ‘blue’ state Massachusetts, has a natural gas fueled modern heating system installed, in a show first broadcast in 2018, and even “a wood-burning stove.” It seems that in cold, snowy New England, homeowners care less about climate change than they do about keeping warm in the winter.