A Simple Solar Cooked Meal

This exceptionally hot summer has given us tomatoes worthy of the name in July.  I usually have to wait until August for a good garden tomato.  Pretty soon here, the fresh tomatoes will be coming in like gangbusters, and hardly a meal will squeak by without the addition of tomato in one form or another. In a week or so, I may have enough tomatoes at one time to do some canning.

Sometimes after a long day of gardening and other chores, I want a break with dinner preparation. Less frequently, I have foresight enough to know when I'm going to need that break. When that happens, this is a recipe that gets me a long way towards having dinner taken care of before I've eaten breakfast.  I like it and share it with you because it's a solar-cooked dish that can be prepared by anyone with a place to set a bowl in full sunlight for several hours during the day.  I made this back when I was a college student, long before I thought about investing in a solar oven.

Here's what to do:

Ideally you've got a large clear pyrex or glass mixing bowl.  Barring that, a ceramic bowl with a dark glaze is a good choice, but any non-reactive bowl will work.  Cut up the equivalent of a few large tomatoes (about 1.5 lbs/ 0.75 kg) directly over the bowl into rough chunks, allowing all the juices to fall in too. You can mix and match your tomatoes - anything ripe from the garden is perfect.  Then peel a few cloves of garlic, chop them, and add them to the bowl. Drizzle in some olive oil, add a generous amount of salt (preferably kosher) and freshly ground pepper, and stir everything once or twice. If you want to, you can add a fresh sprig of thyme, oregano, sage, or torn up basil leaves. Or you can wait until the sauce is "done" to season it further. Cover the bowl with saran wrap (plastic, I know, but this is a good use for previously used pieces) and poke several tiny holes in the plastic with a toothpick.  Place it where it will get sun as much of the day as possible.  If sunlight is limited where you are, placing it on a dark surface such as brick or macadam will speed the cooking.

At the end of the day, this delicately cooked tomato sauce will be warm, luscious, and still chunky. A little bit of the moisture will have escaped by the holes in the plastic, but it will still have quite a bit of liquid.  Taste it and adjust the salt and pepper if you wish.  Now all it needs is the addition of an herb if you didn't add any before cooking.

You can cook some pasta and add the sauce, dressing it up with extra veg if you have any. Or you can toast thick slices of bread (stale bread would be okay), tear them into bits and toss with the sauce and some mozzarella cheese for a simple panzanella salad. You can mash stale bread cubes into the liquid, add some chopped cucumber, pepper and onion, and have a warmish sort of gazpacho.  This stuff is also superb over thick slices of grilled eggplant. If you happen to have some cooked white beans on hand, they pair beautifully with this sauce and some extra olive oil. If left to sit with this sauce overnight, freshly cooked beans will soak up much of the extra liquid.  The sauce would probably compliment steamed or poached fish beautifully too, though I haven't tried that.

In any case, I like having dinner half made and already in a bowl when 7 o'clock rolls around.  And I especially like a dish made largely from garden ingredients with free energy.  Try it; I think you'll like it.

Harvest Meal: Futomaki

We had some respectably hot and muggy days this month, which is nothing out of the ordinary for August, and it did finally make our eggplant and peppers get busy. But temperatures in the high 80s with humidity above 90% make me wilt. Add to that the need to preserve garden bounty, which too often involves heating up the kitchen, and I'm one cranky homesteader sometimes.

So I decided to make sushi rice in my solar cooker and whip up some garden futomaki for lunch. Futomaki means "big roll" in Japanese, and most often includes vegetables. My futomaki is most always entirely vegetarian. I like a cold lunch on a hot day. Being able to get the rice cooked outside without using any gas or electricity is pure bonus. Best of all, the filling ingredients in my futomaki all came out of my own garden this time.

The eggs came from our girls. The tamago, or Japanese egg omelet, was the only part of the dish I had to cook inside, and it takes almost no time. It's just a few beaten eggs seasoned with the barest whiff of sugar and soy sauce, then gently cooked over a medium flame until firmly set, and then allowed to cool.

The carrots and chives also came from our garden. I like to use a lot of chives, but the carrot slices can't be too thick, or they'll overwhelm everything. If I had an avocado tree, you can bet that I'd include some avocado in these rolls. This fall if I'm successful at digging up any volunteer burdock roots, I may pickle them and try them in futomaki. Burdock is commonly pickled and eaten in Japan, where it's called gobo.

Once the rice is cooked, it is splashed with rice wine vinegar and allowed to cool. Then one uses wet hands to pat it onto a sheet of nori, arrange the filling ingredients, and roll it up tightly with the help of a bamboo mat. Assembling futomaki looks and sounds more difficult than it is, and it's something you get better at through practice.

Oh, and that drink in the picture above is flavored with some peach shrub I made with gleaned peaches. It's quite addictive stuff!

More food posts coming this week!

The Parvati Solar Cooker, 1st report

A short while ago I decided to build the Parvati parabolic solar cooker, which I first heard about at Homegrown Evolution. Made from cardboard, glue, aluminum foil, and some twist-ties, it cost me nothing more than a few hours of my time and pennies' worth of materials. You can find a pattern for making a parabolic solar cooker here.

Apparently, tall and narrow pots are best with parabolic solar cookers like the Parvati. This is just the opposite of what is recommended for solar box cookers, which work best with short, squat pots and pans. In both cases, black metallic cooking vessels are recommended. Fortunately, just about the time I finished my Parvati cooker, I was given the chance to look over a box of kitchen equipment that a family friend was getting rid of. In it I found an old fashioned coffee percolator pot, which was higher than it was wide, and not too tall. I spray painted it black.

I didn't have much to go on when it came to the actual cooking. I was waiting on a solar cookbook from the inter-library loan program, but I had finished the cooker and the coffee pot was ready to go. I decided to make an experiment on a mostly sunny day. The experiment would consist of taking a shot in the dark with 2 cups of basmati rice. I can't say the cooking was a resounding success, but I think it's worth making a report to illustrate what went well, and where the obvious mistakes were made.

I put two cups of rice in the coffee pot and rinsed it with a few changes of water. I poured off most of the water and added back three cups of water. I put the lid on the pot, and put the pot in the solar cooker, with it aimed at the sun.

The temperature outside was about 80 degrees when the rice began to cook at 11:30 am. I decided to take regular measurements of the temperature with my cooking thermometer. After half an hour the temperature of the water inside the pot was 108. At 12:20 it was 135, at 12:50 - 156 degrees, and at 1:45 it was 170 degrees. Then I had to go run an errand. I got back at 3:20 and the thermometer registered 192 degrees. Just 20 degrees shy of boiling in an unsealed solar cooker on a partly cloudy day! I had shifted the cooker slightly a couple of times to track the sun across the sky.

By the third temperature check, the delicious popcorn-like aroma of basmati rice was wafting out of the cooker. Flies buzzed around, drawn by the scent. But there was no way they were going to even think about landing on the coffee pot; it was far too hot. Instead, they buzzed around ineffectually, perching sometimes on the rim of the cooker. I imagine they were pretty well blinded by the concentrated rays of the sun anytime they got near the inside of the cooker.

After four hours in the solar cooker, the temperature of my rice was 192 degrees F. Using a hotpad, I picked up the coffee pot and carried it inside, where I eagerly removed the lid. Let's just say I'm going to need to do some further experimentation. The rice was indeed cooked. But I probably should have stirred it once or twice during the cooking process, or perhaps allowed the rice a 20-minute soak. The rice on top was fluffy to the point of being waterlogged, while underneath were small grains that hadn't absorbed enough liquid.

But I certainly learned that the parabolic cooker works well with the spray painted coffee pot, even on a partly cloudy day. The heat built quickly at first and then rose steadily. Getting the temperature up to 140 degrees quickly is important, because at that temperature, most food borne pathogens are knocked out of commission. While a few bacteria can survive at that temperature, they certainly won't be thriving or multiplying. I also learned that burning food is not going to happen with a solar cooker. This may not be a fast or fool-proof cooking method. It may not work for all kinds of cooking, and it may not work in my area during all parts of the year. But as a low-effort, low-input source of cooked food, I think it's worth a little more experimentation.

In the meantime, my inter-library loan request has come in. I'll be reading up on solar cooking advice from someone who purports to know. We have overcast weather predicted for the next few days. But the next time the weather's clear, I'm giving this solar cooking thing another shot. Stay tuned for further reports.

It's Tea Time - Sun Tea Time

I'm a devoted tea drinker. I can't get my morning properly started without it. I know the difference between a teapot and a tea kettle, and I know that hot tea will not brew in a paper cup with kinda hot water. Most of the year, a couple of blisteringly hot cups of tea are welcome in the morning. But right now, I'm waking up to temperatures in the high 70s Fahrenheit (mid 20s Celsius), and the mercury only rises through the day.

So I made my first annual batch of sun tea a few days ago. The process is simple: just put teabags or loose tea in a large glass jar and put the jar somewhere where it'll get a strong blast of sunlight for several hours. The heat of the sun warms the water and brews your tea for you. After that, you put the jar in your refrigerator and enjoy the tea chilled. It keeps for several days and you don't even need to strain it if you don't want to.

Sun tea is one of those tiny tips that I employ to save money. But it's a little unusual in that it saves me tiny amounts of money in several ways. The first and most obvious is that I don't have to pay for any energy to boil water. Not a huge savings, granted. But in the summer months, I also save a little because the heat of that boiling water would make my house warmer too. So if I'm running any fans or air conditioning, I get a tiny savings that way. Thirdly, it seems that I get more tea out of the same amount of loose tea or tea bags when compared to brewing it in a pot. Maybe it's the slow and steady brewing done by the sun, but I can get more than a gallon of sun tea from just three tea bags or a generous tablespoon of loose tea. Ratchet up another savings by making my ingredients stretch farther. Finally, I save (potentially) another tiny amount on cooling by keeping myself cool with a cold drink instead of a hot one.

I have two large glass containers for sun tea. One is specifically a sun tea jug, which I got for 75 cents at a charity thrift store. The other is just a very large (1 1/2 gallon) glass jar with a screw top lid. I picked it up in a bulk foods store for less than $3. I don't need anything else, other than tap water and tea leaves to make the most necessary of morning beverages.