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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (8970)	3/19/2009 12:45:58 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24213

Cooking with the Sun by Carl Etnier The sun is getting stronger every day, and I've started cooking with a solar oven again. Friday I cooked up a pot of potatoes in my oven from the Solar Oven Society. Yesterday it was a black bean stew--there wasn't quite enough heat from the day in the sun to cook the beans completely, but half an hour on low heat on the range finished their cooking. Today a pot of beets cooked in the sun. Fire and ice: A pot of potatoes cooks in the sun, while snow still covers part of the ground. There's something about the heat of a solar oven that makes potatoes taste at least as good as any other method I know of. You don't use any water in the cooking--just put the potatoes in a thin, enamelware pot, put the pot in the oven, and put the oven in the sun. The moist heat of the potatoes own juices cooks them marvelously. Solar cooking also gets rid of the green spots, somehow. I generally plant potatoes right on the surface and then mulch them with hay. It's easier to find them that way, come harvest time. Problem is, sometimes I don't add enough mulch later in the season to keep the sun off the tubers, and then they get green spots. When the potatoes come out of the solar oven, though, the green spots are gone. The green spots are said to be poisonous parts of the potatoes, to be cut off before eating. I've never had a problem eating solar cooked potatoes with the vanished green spots. On the other hand, I don't respond adversely to the green spots even when potatoes are cooked any other way and still visible when I eat them. I got a new toy yesterday--the beginnings of a parabolic cooker. I've been looking for a satellite dish on Washington County Freecycle, an email listing of things people want to give away or acquire for free, and one finally appeared. The former Wild Blue dish is about 1/3 m2 in area (average 27" in diameter), and it can really concentrate the sun. A couple friends showed up yesterday afternoon, just as I was about to cover the surface with self-adhesive aluminized mylar I'd bought at the ReStore. Six hands made the job of applying it (rather) evenly much easier! This baby can cook! Even at 5:45 pm, a sheet of newspaper held in the focal point ignites within about five seconds (photos below the fold). First smoke: After a couple seconds in the focal point, a newspaper starts to smolder. Flaming newspaper: Here you can see the flames on the newspaper. Scorched! I haven't tried boiling water with it yet--I need to mount the dish on a pole and build a way to hold a kettle or pot in the focal point, but I'm looking forward to cooking with this thing. My first solar oven was a version of a minimum solar box cooker, which worked pretty well on still days and cost $5 or so to build. But it gets pretty windy where I live, and the reflector kept catching the wind and coming down. That's why I turned to the low-slung design of the Solar Oven Society's model, with no reflector. The advantage of a reflector is that it concentrates more sunlight than would otherwise strike the aperture of the solar oven, and so temperatures get higher. I'd like to be able to cook beans completely with the sun this time of year. The converted satellite dish would probably do it, but I expect I'd need to be out there manually tracking the sun every 15 minutes or so--kind of a pain. Instead, I'm thinking about some heavier duty reflectors that I could anchor securely to the oven. There are lots of sites out there on solar cooking. A good one to start with is www.solarcooking.org. Bon appétit! energybulletin.net