Eco-houses, spinning wheels, and family pride

I can't resist. My mum and my sister have been doing some cool things - and I really want to link to them.

My sister and her partner are building a gorgeous eco-house in a suburb near us, and my sister has just a started a series of blogposts that explain some of the issues around the build and the choices they've made. Here's her first post on that - exploring timber treatments.  I for one am a lot more enlightened about the ins and outs of treated wood now!

Meanwhile my mother is marketing her book and website about New Zealand spinning wheels, and was interviewed about it by Granny at http://www.grannygcrafts.com/  You can listen to the podcast there, or visit my mum's website.

Speaking of the passions and pastimes that drive us, I have been bursting to write a series of posts about natural fragrance ... I hope to do it soon!

Pedal power

Wellington sustainable food fan David Stuart has started a blog about his and his family's adventures ... Take a look at their new pedal powered blender!

As an aside, David's wife Charity runs the very wonderful Honeychild cloth nappy business.

Earth Hour, and getting ready to go fridgeless

We will do Earth Hour tonight I think, yes. But Keith Ng makes some very good points about it on his blog at Public Address.

I'm getting excited about the challenge of going fridgeless, and heard from a friend last night that she is thinking of doing it too.

Also, I have really appreciated some comments from Kate about it, containing great ideas and advice. I'm especially interested in the Nigerian invention of zeer pots, and the cooling possibilities of evaporation.

But the first step is to start using up everything in our fridge's freezer box, in preparation for switching off. (I recently started stocking up on frozen stuff, so this is a bit of a reversal and it'll take some time to get through everything that's stashed in there ...)

Powershop update

We've now officially switched over to Powershop. The range of electricity packages and products you can choose from is not as huge as the advertising might lead you to believe, but I think there's enough choice to make it worthwhile. (Well, any choice is an improvement on the alternatives.)

What I like about Powershop best, though, is being able to keep track of and micromanage our power use. In fact I think I feel a new obsessive compulsive disorder coming on.

Almost hourly I'm on the Powershop website checking our meter reading against the Powershop estimated reading for us, seeing how much of our paid-for units we've used up, and running round turning things off to see if it makes any difference to how fast the units get used up.

I guess the novelty will wear off soon ...

More fridgeless living links ...

... for the doubters, much as I love them!

Little Blog in the Big Woods whose writer 'Greenpa' has been fridgeless for 3 decades.

'Don't Fight Room Temperature' - an Economist article ensuing from the discussion Greenpa started on his blog.

'Trashing the Fridge' - the New York Times gets in on the act.

Sharon Astyk asking - how necessary are fridges and several other appliances?

Robyn M's blog post pondering fridgeless living.

Or just google fridgeless ...

Fridgeless and fancy free ...

Ruth has written a great post about going fridgeless, which we hope to do this winter ourselves.

I think we would need to make some kind of outdoor cool store as we will have meat and milk ...

I wonder too about how much we would add back onto our powerbill by turning off the fridge, but getting a chest freezer instead. Apparently chest freezers use quite a bit less power than fridges, but I'm not sure exactly how much less ...

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 ....

Powershop replies ...

Oh well, that was nice. Ari Sargent from Powershop replied to my conspiratorial speculations about their new company.

I think he's on a mission to win over the public, one conspiracy theorist at a time. (It's kinda working ... I'm a sucker for personal attention!)

Well, 'they shall be known by their deeds' and all that. I'll wait and see how Powershop turns out ...

If you can't stand the heat ...

Kapiti blogging friend Nikki is an inspiring advocate for cooking with retained heat and residual heat.

Talking with her got me thinking about those recipes for meringues where you pre-heat the oven, turn it off as soon as you put the meringues in, and leave them overnight.


My daughter and I had a go at some chocolate chip ones this evening, using a recipe from The Uncommon Gourmet. (And when we'd dolloped about half the choc-chip meringue mix onto a tray, we also added some orange zest to the rest.)

Now it's approaching midnight. My daughter is tucked up in her bed, the meringues are tucked up in the oven, and everyone who's still up and about has strict instructions not to open the oven door till morning.

It may be foolhardy to attempt meringues on such a damp night, but we'd had this bowl of egg whites sitting in the fridge for two days, begging to be used. If you're wondering what we did with the yolks, we made kawakawa icecream - which I'd like to post on another time. It tasted divine, but those leaves are potent!

Back to meringues ... I've been wondering how much electricity our oven uses compared to our stovetop. Obviously making meringues with this residual heat method uses less power than baking any dessert that has the oven on for longer.

But how does it compare to making a dessert that only requires one stovetop element - even if it's turned on for longer? Like custard, or steamed pudding, or rice pudding? (Although I dare say desserts like rice pudding might work well using residual or retained heat - so perhaps really no need to leave the element on for a long time?)

I haven't done the research. If anyone else reading this has, I'd be interested to know.

Gather it, cook it.

I reckon wild food foraging is the perfect companion to solar cooking. Gather your ingredients wild, then cook them with the sun. As activities they complement each other perfectly.

Both are about utilising free, abundant resources that you can find almost anywhere. Both allow you to wander. Both promote self-reliance and independence from any system. And both, if you engage in them with care, are utterly sustainable.

Okay, it's not exactly solar cooking season yet. (Did you see that hailstorm today?) But I did manage to use our little solar oven as a haybox cooker last night, sort of. And I did forage for a little bit of the meal.

On the stove, I brought to the boil a pot of huakaroro potatoes (very waxy and dense), then quickly took them off and put them into the box cooker, which I'd lined with an old cot quilt.

I wrapped the quilt over the pot, tucked towels around it, and laid my son's folded swanndri over the top. I added a couple of my old jerseys over the top of that - just for good measure! Then I put the cooker lid on, and weighed it down with a couple of books. (Not sure if that last bit with the books was necessary, but what the heck.)

I didn't keep track of how long I left it, but I guess not long enough, because when I opened the pot, the potatoes were still too hard to eat. Since I'd now let a lot of the heat out, I put the potatoes back on the stove and brought them to the boil again before re-ensconcing them in the cooker.

Some time later (I really should have kept track!) I opened the cooker a second time, and the potatoes were nicely soft.

After draining and cooling them, I chopped them up and made a salad of them, using home-made orange mayonnaise and finely chopped onionweed. We had them for dinner on a bed of puwha, along with cold slices of the previous night's lamb roast.

The foraged bits were the puwha and the onionweed, both of which grow prolifically around our neighbourhood. I love wild onionweed! I'd choose it over store-bought spring onions any day.

Funny how things change. As a child helping my parents with their weeding I loathed the very sight of onionweed - and the stink of it as we pulled it up by the handful.

Now, when I see it down the road, or up the bank next door, or in our back yard, I think instead, 'Yay, onionweed.'

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 ...