solar cooking - a few last lessons

Alas, the best solar cooking days are nearly over for the year. I thought I'd do a last quick update of things I learned this summer.

1. When solar cooking meaty, casseroley dishes (bolognaise sauce etc.) - add way less water than you normally would.

For solar-cooked bolognaise sauce I use tomato paste completely undiluted. The only extra liquid I add is a little balsamic vinegar. The mince releases loads of liquid as it cooks and it doesn't steam away.

2. Osso buco is great solar-cooked. No risk of too much bubbling - therefore no risk of the marrow falling out or getting lost in the sauce! It stays perfectly in place as it cooks.

3. I still can't get the hang of solar cooking pasta. Not wheat pasta anyway. Even fresh, home-made wheat pasta. I think it's because I can't get the water quite hot enough to cook the flour properly

Nikki did some great rice noodles in her cooker though. I tried them at our solar cooking get-together, and they were perfect. Maybe the rice flour just cooks at a lower temperature than the wheat flour???

4. You have to make an effort to stay in the habit of solar cooking.

This is probably the most important lesson I learned. Although we had some great solar-cooked meals this summer, we could've had a lot more if I'd made more effort to get a routine going. For me, solar cooking is one of those things that the more I do, the more I do. But as soon as I stop for a few days, it's hard to get going again.

Wellington is a bit problematic that way, with its unpredictable weather. Just when you're on a roll, the weather packs up for a few days and it's easy to get out of the habit again.

Next summer, I won't let the weather beat me!

Meanwhile, we have to prepare for winter, and our next power-saving venture will be attempting to go fridgeless. Not sure we could manage it in summer, but winter should be possible.

I'll probably be picking Ruth's brain's alot, as she is an experienced fridgeless dweller ....

Solar cooking backyard get-together

So New Zealand now has a right-wing government, and Roger Douglas is back. I should be feeling angry and miserable, but actually I feel great.

Today, we had some lovely people from Wellington South Transition Towns round for a solar cooking get-together - and it was the perfect antidote to Terrible-Election-Results Blues. Who cares what the government does, when Transition Towns communities are starting to get together and try sorting things out for themselves?

It was just an informal event. We set up our solar cookers - one bought - two home-made, and invited TT people to drop round any time during the day. We had curry, peppermint tea, and pavlova on the go. (Thanks to Heather for the pavlova inspiration.)

Just a few people came in the morning, and then more in the afternoon.

It got extra fun when Jean-Fabien and Rose brought some tin-foil coated cardboard and started cutting out more panel cookers ... and more ... and MORE!



Lots of different ideas for constructing and using solar cookers were flying round - as well as thoughts for another solar cooking event.

Meanwhile, our curry and pavlova were steaming away. My daughter was absolutely desperate for the pavlova to be ready. Luckily Wayne and Ping had brought some chocolate biscuits for the interim. Whew.

A lot of people had to go before we got the food out, but hopefully they enjoyed the afternoon anyway.

The curry turned out great.


The pavlova was good too - um - in it's own way. But I'm going to contact Heather for some tips.


All in all, it was a fantastic day, and we even got two nice little bunches of flowers out of it.

Anne brought this from her garden - a fully edible bouquet. Very cool.


And Rose picked these on the way.

And there's our cat, the publicity hound, again. It even managed to get into Rachelle and Rimu's photos at the Transition Towns website.

The joys of solar cooking at 41 south

I haven't posted a solar cooking update for a while, but we've been puddling away at it and having a few nice meals.

What's becoming obvious is that a solar cook's biggest challenge here in Wellington is the unpredictability of the weather. I don't mean from day to day, but from minute to minute.

Wellington weather is like - 53 minutes of sunshine, then 46.5 minutes of high cloud, then more sunshine, then a breeze blows up, then a huge, low rain cloud rumbles over and releases 23 drops of rain, then it's sunny for 5 minutes, then a howling gale rages for an hour, then the sun comes out again ...

As far as wind goes, I've got a bit better at dealing with that.

With the CooKit panel cooker, I anchor it down at the sides with bricks, and set up the pot in such a way that there's no risk of it sliding around inside its bag or tipping and spilling.

With the box cooker, I thought I was going to need to prop up the lid's relector panel at both sides, instead of just one, but so far I haven't needed to. I just made a better, stronger prop for the one side. (That may yet turn out to be unsatisfactory though.)

As for dealing with rain, I think what would be ideal would be to make a little shelter that we could put over the cookers at short notice whenever Welllington decides to turn on one of its brief, impromptu little showers. Must get onto that.

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.

Solar-cooked squdge

My second lesson of the solar cooking season: Don't use Hings noodles for solar-cooked meals.

Don't get me wrong, I love Hings noodles - they're fresh-ish and cheap-ish, locally made and additive free. But they're best cooked fast, at high temperatures, often with only minimal liquid (e.g. in stir fries). They're not made for low-temperature, slower-than-slow cooking.

I knew all this, I did, but still, yesterday, I thought I'd try them.

I put them in the pot with diluted soy sauce, ginger juice, and various other things, and left them in the solar box cooker from morning till late afternoon.

The title of this post says it all really. The highest praise anyone in the house could heap on this meal was 'moderately edible but let's not have it again', and, 'Can you maybe follow a recipe next time?'

Ah well. Still, I might give them another go when the sun (and so the box cooker's temperatures) climb higher. Just to see.

Learnt my third lesson too: Pay more attention to what the wind's doing. We lost a couple of hours of sunlight in the morning, when we went out and came home again to find the reflector flap had blown down.

We used our solar box cooker!

Still a couple of weeks to go before we get into prime solar cooking season here, as calculated by my Dad, but it was a beautiful day today, so we thought - why don't we have a go at something that only needs a short amount of cooking?

Boiled eggs it was.

We started at around 10.30am. We put the eggs in our black pot and covered them with warm water from the tap. I know warm water was slightly cheating, but I was desperately trying to maximise our chances of success, given that it's so early in the season, and the sun is still relatively low in the sky.

We put the pot in the cooker on two stacked cake racks to raise it up slightly and make sure the underside of the pot could heat up properly. (We had problems last summer with our panel cooker when we didn't raise the pot.)



We closed the lid, angled it towards the sun, and left it for a bit. At this point I learned my first lesson of the season: Make sure the outside of your pot is absolutely dry when you put it in the cooker!

I had given the pot a quick wash before we used it, and hadn't dried it properly. After it had been in the cooker for about half an hour it started to steam up the window. We had to open it all up again, wipe down the window, dry the outside of the pot, and then start again.

We left the eggs cooking there till about 3.30pm ... or maybe it was 4.30. I'm a bit confused by daylight saving.

During that time we moved the cooker about three times to follow the sun. As you can see from the pic below, by the end of that time it was practically falling off the deck. (And so was the cat.)



We opened the pot nervously. The water wasn't boiling, but a promising cloud of steam billowed out ...



My son did the honours with the first egg. The white was cooked.


And so was the yolk!


Hurray! Our box cooker works!

Solar cooking with whatever you've got

Lynda has experimented with pizza box cookers.

Free is making a panel cooker from a car sunshade. (And has other plans too.)

Solar Cookers International are currently promoting the 'Fun-Panel solar cooker', which they say you can make in under an hour - with a single cardboard box, some foil, tape, string and glue. (Plus an oven bag.) The box cooker we made this year was pretty simple - but this is simpler! I'm keen to try it.

You generally need to solar cook in a thin, dark pot that will absorb the heat. However, thin dark pots that are the right size for your cooker are not always easy to find. In the book Cooking with Sunshine, the authors give several ideas for improvising:

* You can paint the outside of a pot black.

* You can drape a black cloth over your pot.

* You can even cook baked potatoes or corn in old black socks!

When can we start?

My Dad, a retired physicist, has kindly been calculating when we might have enough sun to start solar cooking this year. Here's what he's come up with:



I don't understand it in the slightest.

Luckily he's also provided a translation:

In Wellington, prime solar cooking days (when we're at a 45 degree angle to the sun, or greater, for 4 hours or more) will begin in mid October, and run through till early March.

Solar cooking is, however, often also possible a few weeks before and after that prime period, so I'm planning to have a go towards the end of September.

The further north you are in New Zealand, the earlier you can start. That means Aucklanders can get in there about a week and half before Wellingtonians, while Mainlanders will have a few more days to wait.

Hurry up, spring!