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.

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.

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!

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 ...

Our home-made box cooker

Yippee - we finally finished it last week.

I think it'll need adjustments though. I suspect the lid isn't tight fitting enough. Hmmm ... and I don't think that bit of coathanger wire will hold up the reflector for long when the Wellington wind gets going! But all in all, my children and I are quite pleased with it.

I've written about our beginner efforts at making and using solar cookers for World Sweet World magazine. Hopefully that'll be in their spring issue.

As a basis for our box cooker, we used the instructions in Cooking with Sunshine by Lorraine Anderson and Rick Palkovic - a detailed and comprehensive book. There are also instructions for making box cookers and other types of solar cooker here. (Take a look at the Cob Solar Oven - it's beautiful.)

I've been feeling impatient to try out our newly made cooker - but there are weeks and weeks to go before we'll have enough sunlight to do it. Then just last night I was reading about heat-retention cooking, and it dawned on me ... In its off season, our solar cooker can double as a haybox cooker.

A haybox cooker is just a box that's well enough insulated to retain cooking heat. You start your pot cooking on the stove, and once it's boiling nicely you take it off the stove, snuggle it into your haybox cooker, and leave it to keep cooking in its own retained heat. No extra energy needed. There's a lovely article about haybox cookers here.

Although the walls and base of our solar box cooker are well insulated, the lid isn't, so to use it as a haybox cooker I'll also need to find something thick and and insulating to wrap around and over the pot before I put the box lid on.

I think I'll have a go at this for tomorrow night's dinner. Hope my son isn't needing his swanndri ...