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 ....

Kapiti cook-up

Last Thursday my children and I went to a solar cooking get-together with a group of home-schooling friends in Kapiti, hosted by Nikki.

It was lots of fun and somehow we had managed to choose the only day of the week that turned out to be sunny!

I love to see an army of solar cookers all working away together.


Lynda made these ingenious frankfurter cookers (I think they are from recycled Pringles containers?)


We were so hungry by the time the food came out, that we all forgot to take photos. About three quarters of the way through the meal I stopped and managed to get a bit of the wreckage ...



It was a lovely day. I even scored a nice new red cardi, as Free brought along a huge bag of un-needed clothes to share.

It was great to finally get to see Nikki's impressive garden, after reading and hearing so much about it. Maybe Free will have to hold the next solar cook-up so I can have a nosey at hers too. :) (Lynda's gardens I'm familiar with already - and they have been beautiful for as long as I've known her. I still have fond memories of that fresh-off-the-vine grape juice ...)

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.

A post on the run ...

So many things I have been planning to post about, but work is full on right now, and everything made more tricky by having a broken ankle.

(I can't even carry my own cups of tea from the kitchen to my desk. I've taken to drinking iced coffee with lots of ice-cream in it, because it's the only thing that doesn't slop out of the cup when I hop. Yes - the sacrifices I am making! ;o)

Anyway, just quickly, I wanted to say I heard from Heather, who has made a solar cooked pavlova. Such a cool idea, and I feel very inspired to follow her lead and try one as well.

She is also an industrial chemist, and has an interesting blog about the things we use in daily life that rely on oil for their manufacture.

Self-reliance salad

Well, sadly, it wasn't really. The greens were foraged from a nearby park, but the snails were bought in a can from a store, and the potatoes were from our CSA.

But what I'm thinking is that this could be an almost wholly home-grown and foraged meal, once our small potato patch is ready, and once I get a bit more organised, protein-wise.

I'd been thinking about how Sandra said that she feels more secure now she is producing her own eggs and has a homegrown source of protein.

I totally understand that, and wish we had enough room to legally and ethically keep chickens. We don't though, and we're not planning on moving anytime soon. So what are my options for protein security? Growing mushrooms, and gathering wild snails seem like good possibilities, and I'm looking into both of these.

Sharon Astyk's latest post, a recipe challenge, galvanised me to think about all this further, and so yesterday I made this warm salad. (I love warm salads.) I'm about to go post it on her comments section.

At least one other NZer has posted some lovely food suggestions there. If you are keen too, I think there is about one more day to go.

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.

Wild concoctions

I've never been one for precision with quantities and measurements - as anyone who has ever tried to teach me cooking, woodwork, metalwork, or craft would attest to. (And so would the World Sweet World editors, who had to try and take a photo of my solar box cooker that didn't show up all its rough edges and irregularities!)

BUT - I've set myself a task to try and keep track of recipes I experiment with, so that as well as ditching the ones that seem hopeless, I can replicate the ones that work, and refine the ones that almost work.

I've set up another blog as an online recipe journal where I'm going to record the recipes that I'm completely happy with, and want to be able to repeat. It's here - at Wild Conconctions.

(Only one recipe there so far, and I'm not sure how fast I'll be adding them, but at least I can now.)

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).