Folied by the Wellington wind

... Or maybe I should say de-foiled.

We tried to cook in our home-made solar box cooker again yesterday, and our foil-covered reflector kept blowing down. It must have happened about 5 times. I'm not sure how many hours of sunlight we lost, but the end result was our old favourite - uncooked rice.

At the moment only one side of the reflector is held up by wire. I'm going to put a wire holder thingy on the other side as well - and hopefully that should do the trick.

In the meantime, We'll haul out our panel cooker from Solar Cookers International and get that going.

Now I know it's really spring

The spring issue of World Sweet World is out.

I just love this little DIY magazine, and not because I have articles in it. (It's more like the other way round; I wanted to write articles for it because I love it.)

If I had to sum up World Sweet World in one word, it would be 'friendly'. Reading it makes you feel a part of something good. (It has many other virtues too of course - it looks beautiful, for one.)

I have an article in this issue about making and using solar cookers. I also interviewed children's writer and illutrator Ruth Paul for a second article about wind farms and children's environmental picture books. (They sound like disparate subjects, but somehow it worked. Ruth lives right by the Project Westwind wind farm site - so she has an interesting perspective on wind power.)

The spring World Sweet World also contains a nice bread recipe, an article about eco-friendly coffins, and a lot of other things that I didn't get a chance to look at properly because I was just surreptitiously flicking through a copy in Juniper, while I wait for my free copy in the mail ...

Food activism article

A while ago, a couple of people asked if there was a link available to the article on food activism that I wrote for Sunday magazine, but there wasn't. (Often Sunday articles go up on stuff.co.nz, but this one didn't.)

So anyhow, I've put it up on a file sharing site, in case anyone is still interested. It's here.

Absolute beginners

My daughter and I stand in the clear, winter air, examining our long shadows.

‘Not yet,’ she says.

We are waiting for the day in early spring when, at the Sun’s highest point, our shadows are exactly the same height as us. That will mean New Zealand is at a 45 degree angle from the Sun, and it will soon be possible to solar cook again.

Last summer we bought a cheap cardboard panel cooker from Solar Cookers International, a non-profit organization that also sends these cookers to regions of the world where electricity is non-existent and firewood increasingly scarce.

For us solar cooking is an indulgence by comparison, but who can argue with saving electricity? And there’s something empowering – almost magical – about using little more than sunlight to cook a meal.

Our first few solar cooking attempts were disastrous (under-cooked rice, over-cooked rice, then under-cooked rice with a layer of over-cooked rice on top). But we kept our ambitions modest, and persevered. Finally, just before the weather packed up for the season, we got it right. You never saw a family so thrilled with a meal of boiled eggs.

- Extract from 'The Art of Eating'- today's cover story in Sunday Magazine (by me).