Category — Solar Cooking

Here’s another solar cooking idea that is so easy I would feel guilty calling it a “recipe.”

Wash 4 or 5 potatoes. Put them in a covered pot. (Do not poke holes in them. It’s completely unnecessary. Poking holes doesn’t help them cook faster. Plus it encourages oxidation, so your potatoes will end up with a series of little black dots in them. This is the voice of experience speaking.) Peel and quarter one large or two small onions and distribute them throughout the potatoes. Peel and add 2 or three whole cloves of garlic (or more, if you adore garlic). Cover the pot and place in your solar cooker until dinner time.

The result, depending on your family size and level of hunger, can be two meals accompaniments. We usually have a couple potatoes for dinner. They are moist and roasty, never mushy, with a lovely hint of onion and garlic.

For breakfast the following morning, we have potato hash. The cold potatoes are firm enough for dicing into neat cubes that are easily browned in a little oil. (Note Jim’s safe and efficient chopping technique.) When they are nearly done, add the onions and any garlic that wasn’t smushed on bread and eaten the previous evening. The onions are unbelievably sweet and almost caramelized. With a couple eggs, this is a wonderful meal to start the day.

We are finally experiencing enough sunny days to make solar cooking fun again.

A couple of weeks ago, I experimented with making cornbread in the solar cooker. I used a Jiffy mix, which is pretty good to start, although not as good as my slightly more involved from scratch recipe. It is, however, mighty quick. Just stir it up, pop it in the solar oven for 6 or so hours, cut and enjoy.

There were a few problems with the resultant cornbread. One was that one side of the round loaf was more “done” than the other. I made a note to rotate the pan in the future, at the same time as I adjusted the cooker to get more sun. The other was that the cornbread was just a little dull.

When I made cornbread yesterday, I reminded myself to turn the pan as well as the cooker. I also added 4 pickled jalapenoes to the batter. That made a wonderful difference. Spicy cornbread isn’t a favorite for everyone in our house, but Jim and I enjoyed it.

After a week of disappointingly cloudy and rainy and/or cold days, today was absolutely glorious. The sky was clear and blue; the sun shone brightly all day long.

It was an inspiring day for working in the garden and for solar cooking. Since my cupboard was bare of easy short-cut baking mixes, I had a look around a great site for solar cooking, specifically the recipe wiki part of the site. The desserts, as usual, caught my eye and I decided to try the recipe for solar baked brownies. The recipe called for ingredients I had in my kitchen– another sign. I adjusted the baking time from “one hour”, surely California standards, to my usual Michigan “as long as it’s sunny” period. Again, you can’t burn food when solar cooking so go for it.

These solar baked brownies were a hit. They were utterly delicious and close to my ideal of chewy brownies. The ease of preparation was another big plus. We’ll be making them again soon.

Today I discovered how simple and perfect solar cooking is for reheating already cooked rice. We consume an enormous amount of rice in our household. We cook a good-sized pot of it for a meal and then store the left-overs in the refrigerator so there’s usually cold rice in there. We’re fairly skillful at reheating it in the microwave but I thought I’d give the solar cooker the job today and it performed marvelously.

I put 3 cups of rice in the pan and added 1/3 cup of water. The lid went on and the pot went into the solar cooker. Five hours later, when a rare treat– venison steaks– were coming off the grill, the tender, fluffy rice was ready to accompany our meal. Again, minimal effort with wonderful results– all while saving energy.

I’ve only come to appreciate spinach more fully in the last couple of years. Prior to that, I merely tolerated spinach’s raw presence in salads or cooked form in other dishes. I would avoid anything where spinach was the main ingredient in any form.

I guess my taste buds are still maturing because at some point I found out a culinary secret: spinach is pretty good. Moreover, spinach is enormously flexible and generous. Not only can spinach dress up a vegetable lasagna, an omelette or something florentine, spinach can stand on its own… with the right ingredients.

This is my new favorite way to make spinach and I do it in the solar cooker.

Start with 10 oz of frozen spinach. Defrost it in the microwave or however you like. Combine the spinach with 1 beaten egg, 4 ounces softened cream cheese, 1 tsp garlic powder, 4-6 ounces of a favorite cheese, like mozerella, cheddar, whatever, depending on your mood. Mix well and put into a pre-sprayed small pan. Bake it in the sun all day while you go to work or do your laundry or run errands.

When you return, when you are ready to eat, lovely creamy flavorful yet mild and light spinach bake will be waiting for you.