Solar Cookin'

Summer cooking in these parts can mean producing a lot of heat, then desperately trying to get rid of it with the air conditioner or the whole house fan. That's one reason summer barbecue is such a damn good idea.

My wife recently made a shrewd purchase from Solar Cookers International, a locally based NGO. It's a simple solar oven that SCI apparently promotes in Kenya and Zimbabwe in addition to California. The oven is about as low-tech as you can imagine: a camping-grade black pot, placed in a durable clear plastic bag, nestled in an articulated piece of cardboard treated with a single reflective suface.

Here's a photo of Waylon checking out the cooker at work in our tomato patch:



Wife had already taken it for a test drive to cook a pork shoulder (that I didn't taste) and potatoes (delicious.) This weekend was my chance to take it for a spin.

I opted to try for a pot of solar-stewed green lentils and split peas, with sauteed onions, jalapenos, garlic, and paprika with a bit of lime juice and bay leaf. Green lentils often turn to mush, so I calculated that they would be a good match to the low-heat, slow cooking method of the solar oven.

In a matter of minutes, the pot became too hot to touch. Within an hour, a delicious smell of garlic and bay leaf wafted over the tomato patch. By late afternoon, about five or six hours after I put the pot out to cook, I had a decent batch of lentils-- soft, but not overly mushy:



Add some bulghur, yogurt, some delicious homegrown tomato sauce, and a little mint, and I was in vegetarian hog heaven:



If we continue to make use of the powerful Sacramento sun, I may try to make a slightly more durable version of SCI's product. We could make a larger, more permanent oven out of sheet metal relatively cheaply.