Cooking Without Carbon

Solar Picnic

2007-09-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

As the sun was rising to its zenith on June 21st of this year, I was busy speiling about solar cookers, and soaking up the diluted solar energy which in concentrated form can fry crepes and bake pies. On June 21st I got a sunburn while cooking local organic food with solar energy at Kensington Car Free Day, together with Brook Kavanaugh, chef at La Palette.

Both Brook and I were profiled in an August 22nd Globe and Mail article on solar cooking in Canada. The article is behind a paywall, but you can read it here.

Ironic - I am writing about the Solstice as the Autumnal Equinox approaches, and the season changes once more. If we know one thing about the sun, it always comes back. And I get to my blog eventually....summer is my busiest time, as I work in the solar energy biz....

On June 21st Brook Kavanaugh and the Guerilla Gourmet whipped their sun drenched cadres into shape with a selection of locally sourced vegan crepes with Asparagus and goat cheese, and a strawberry tart that was perfection - all cooked with 100% local solar energy. This was the lowest carbon impact gourmet meal any of the diners had ever eaten.

Asparagus was gently cooked until tender in the Sun Cook solar oven.

Our two chefs and their helpers worked all afternnon, shaded by an awning in front of an emtpy shop on Augusta Ave.

Over the course of a couple hours, chef Brook cooked his tasty crepes on the El Sol parabolic solar grill, available from Sun Baked at www.solarcooking.ca . The Sun Cook solar oven is also visible.

Here you can see the crepe cooking with sunlight focused by the parabolic mirrors onto the bottom of the pan. It acts like a stovetop burner.

Brook's crepes were a "build it yourself" kind of project. Below are the raw ingredients, solar cooked asparagus and rhubarb, solar fried mushrooms, goat cheese and the locallest pesto - with basil grown in in Kensington.

Crepes were constructed by all....

The guerilla gourmet and Brook also made some strawberry solar tarts. Both berry and pastry were baked in the sun using the Sun Cook solar oven from Sun Baked at www.solarcooking.ca .

Imagine dining al fresco in the middle of the street on the summer solstice, on a bed of rose petals.....

The table was set so beautifully...a magic carpet of flowers, food and good feelings....

We aslo feasted on a tasty tomato salad.

The diners were slowly enjoying the solar feast, when along came the Toronto Samba Squad, marching to the beat of a different drummer....

...and they marched around our merry picnic....

...and the beat went on....

Solar cooked local food and tango dancing in the street....am I in heaven? Why can't life always be this slow, happy and enjoyable?

A fleeting moment of perfect satisfaction - captured on film!

Garden 101

2007-09-17T06:26:00.000-07:00

My Riverdale property boasts a large variety of perennial flowers and decorative plants such as ferns, violets and lilies. It's a great place to be.

This year I decided to turn every available square foot over to the production of heirloom food crop varieties. The goal was to see how much food I could grow on my own property in the city. This represents year two of an ongoing experiment I've been carrying out, to test - on myself - to see how self reliant it's possible to be with limited resources of land and solar energy.

Below you can see the garden as it looked in April. This was my first real gardening day, when I organized the plots. I also celebrated with a solar cooked feast of polenta and grilled veggies. Here they are, cooking away on my parabolic solar bbq...they were tasty!

Alas - the veggies were not local at this time of year. In our temperate climate before the advent of fossil fueled agriculture, the early spring was often a time of meagre rations or near famine, as the food preserved from the previous season would be running short, stale or even rotten. The expansion of fossil fuelled agriculture - where we literally consume the energy from oil and gas in the form of fertilizer and mechanized power - ended famine for a couple hundred years, and enabled us to enjoy peppers and eggplants in April. Despite the fact that it's second nature to eat this way today, eating out of season veggies is a luxury born of a temporary fossil fuel feast.

As frequent readers and friends of mine know, we're on the edge of two earth shaking developments, both growing out of the interactions of human beings with the earth. The first is peak oil and gas, which arises out of the depletion of finite stocks of fossil fuels limited by geology. The second is climate change, which arises out of the limited ability of the atmosphere and oceans to act as a "sink" to absorb the additional carbon released by the burning of the fossil fuel resources.

We're about to go back to a way of living that is governed by limits: limited energy from renewables, limited food, limited ability to pollute our environment with wasteful emissions. Used to living in a world where natural limits have been suspended by a feast of seemingly limitless energy, I've found that most people are allergic to the true implications of scarcity. Dealing with it, other than as an abstract, unreal idea, is difficult, because it confronts some of our most cherished ideas about progress, and our imagined place at the centre of the universe.

Eating local, in season food, and better yet - growing it yourself and learning to enjoy it, is an empowering way of dealing with the unpleasant realities of scarcity.

My project is to get ready for a future of scarcity by living the change I want to see. I'm growing my own food, and cooking it with renewable energy. The goal isn't 100% off the grid independence - at least not yet. The goal is to define the limits of my dependence on larger systems for the energy I need to live. I'm defining those limits by testing them in life.

I divided my garden into six plots: a small plot at the front (barely 2 square feet) was devoted to herbs and some Chinese long beans.

Against the south side of the house Matt's Cherry Tomatoes self seeded from last year. This year I added Market More and Lemon Cucumbers. Last year the Matt's Cherry Tomato literally took over a 12' X 12 ' area, and passively cooled the house as it absorbed incoming solar energy before it could heat up my pad. Cool!

Here are the self seeded Matt's Cherry tomatoes in May. Right now they've taken over the house, and I can't eat them all. More photos soon....

Here's one of the delicious lemmon cucumbers I grew. I'll be posting more photos of these soon too.

In the third plot, also against the south side of the house on the east side, I planted various heirloom tomatoes, including White Queen, Green Zebra, (my fave!) Caspian Pink, June Flame, and Blondkopfchen - also self seeded from last year.

Plot # four features Bok Choi, Peppers, Romanesco Broccoli and Purple Carrots. Here you can see the carrots being germinated under a board. Bok Choi is in the foreground. Those ended up getting stir fried on the parabolic grill.

Plot # five is my salad bed, devoted to arugula, dandelion, Oak Leaf lettuce, spearmint, lemon mint and chocolate mint, radicchio, tarragon, perennial sage, thyme and sweet peas. Here's the bed in early may, when I'd just planted radicchio and Boston lettuce seedlings. Interestingly enough, the seedlings all got attacked by slugs, while the heirloom varieties I planted from seed seemed totally slug proof. More on that later.

In the final plot I attempted to grow the three "Sisters of Life" corn, squash and beans. The corn failed alas, as there was not enough sun on this plot. However the New England Pie Pumpkin worked out just fine, producing both fruit and edible flowers, while the Aztec runner beans are only now beginning to fruit in August / September.

Above you can see the gorgeous five fold symmetry of the pumpkin flower. Like many other flowers (Hollyhock, many tomato flowers) the pumpkin flower is shaped like a pentacle. This shape embodies the golden ratio (1.618033....to infinity) because the ratio of the length of the petal to the width of the whole flower is exactly this ratio. I'm a golden ratio geek, it's true.

Above, pumpkin flowers battered and deep fried - using only energy from the sun! I used a Bengali recipe for the batter, just some organic cornmeal (substituted for chickpea flour) egg and some hot chilies....it was so tasty.

I'll be detailing my project in subsequent posts. There has been little time to keep this blog updated over the summer due to visiting relatives, lots of solar energy projects and gardening.

More updates soon now that I've got more time.....

Winter 2007

2007-04-24T18:11:00.000-07:00

Wow, did we ever have some nasty weather here in Toronto from mid January until late March. There was little sun, and when there was sunshine, it was cold. Brrr!

However, yours truly was cooking without carbon on sunny days. My solar cooking was limited to a few easy things I could prep indoors then cook outside on my El Sol parabolic solar cooker. I made some stir fries, some vegan dumplings and my famous "solarspresso."

Here's a shot of me "working away" on my Sunday morning coffee in early March. The red thingy in the middle of the parabolic reflector is my orange Palazetti stovetop espresso maker. The organic fair trade coffee came from the Zapatista Communities of Chiappas Mexico. Viva la revolucion! I put my money in the peoples' hands every time. If Hugo Chavez had a coffee, I'd drink a toast to him every morning! We need a leader like that in Canada. Hugo, this one's for you....

Sun Baked also participated in Toronto's "Seedy Saturday" organic seed exchange. I grow many of my summer veggies in the backyard (you can see the faded remnants of last year's Dinosaur Kale at the bottom of the picture above), so Sun Baked was happy to participate. Thanks also go out to the Riverdale Meadow Community Garden, which provided a shared table space for this event. Personal thanks also go to Kyla Dixon Muir who has been such a stalwart supporter of my efforts over the past winter.

Solar Solstice Vegan Patty

2006-12-26T15:07:00.000-08:00

I love a good burger, and so does just about everybody. This burger from Sun Foods in Toronto uses only vegetable ingredients. Sun Foods makes several different types of veggie burger. I'm using their Falafel patty today.

In late December on a clear day, there's plenty of energy you can get from the sun to fry your veggie burger using the El Sol parabolic solar grill. The El Sol is a 1.4 M parabolic reflector that focuses sunlight at the centre, creating a very hot spot like a burner. Anything you place at the focal point - in this case a lightweight steel frying pan - will become very hot. The El Sol uses only free sunlight, and thus has no polluting emissions.

I pre-heat my pan for about 5 minutes, and coat the pan with fair trade organic olive oil. The slices of yellow zucchini go in first for about ten minutes.

The veggie patty takes another five minutes to cook. Then it's time to dress the burger.

I just love St John's Bakery bread. It's baked in the traditional French method, using organic ingredients including flour from Mennonite farmers here in Ontario. St John's Bakery also has a social mission - helping people on "the margins of society" get training and job experience as bakers. It's a mission I support by buying bread baked from St John's. They're also as local as it gets, being located around the corner from my house!

I drizzle some balsamic vinegar onto the patty.

Next comes an orange organic tomato. You can use whatever fresh organic produce is in season. Live watercress spouts are also delicious. I like to dress a burger with live sprouts instead of lettuce, as the nutritional value of live, sprouted food is higher, and there are a wide variety of exciting taste combinations to choose from.

I've also sprinkled some Matt's Cherry tomatoes dried with solar energy, and picked from the massive 12 foot wide by 12 foot high vine that covered the south side of my house this past summer.

This burger was delicious, nutritious, made with vegetarian, organic, local or else fair trade ingredients.

Alternatively, you can also prepare this veggie burger with a salad, forgoing the bread for a totally vegan version of this dish. I used the live watercress again, with English cucumber, Chinese parsley, solar grilled yellow zucchini, the solar dried tomatoes, fresh orange tomato, and balsamic vinegar. When the solar day gets longer, I'm going to try making my own solar balsamic vinegar reduction using the El Sol.
This dish was prepared on December 21, 2006, the shortest and least intense solar day of the year, which also happened to be clear and cloudless here in Toronto.

Solar Cooking in Winter - Indian Style Kale

2006-12-26T14:27:00.000-08:00

Because Canadians live with winter and cold temperatures, we perceive that Canada has little sunlight to use. The reality is however that on clear days, of which we have many in December and January, we can concentrate enough sunlight to cook our food.

I grow Dinosaur Kale in my back garden. This kale is an heirloom variety dating back 200 years, and it tastes wonderful.

Using my El Solito small parabolic solar grill, I fried the kale Indian style.

First I heated organic, fair trade olive oil from the Zatoun Co-Operative in Palestine. From now on, I will be using Zatoun's olive oil exclusively in my solar cooking.

I fried some black mustard seeds until they popped., then added onions, organic sea salt and turmeric. If you've ever wondered how curry powder gets its lovely colour, all the credit goes to turmeric, which doesn't really have much of a taste. We use it for the colour.

Then I added the raw kale, and covered the pan with a black enameled pot lid. The moisture in the kale helped to steam it.

After about 10 minutes, I had an Indian style cooked kale dish that was simply delicious, in addition to being local, organic, fair trade and vegan. Though I'm entering this blog in late December, this dish was prepared in mid-November in Toronto on a clear day.

Sun Baked Lasagna

2006-11-06T14:14:00.000-08:00

Once again, I'm returning to a staple dish from my father's kitchen. Lasagna has graced our Saturday night table on autumn and winter evenings for many years.

Lasagna is literally an ancient dish, dating back to Roman cuisine. It was also eaten in the court of King Richard the Lion Heart, who is recorded to have feasted on a similar dish called "loseyns." (lasan) Perhaps the recipe was passed down to Richard? Thank goodness the original meaning of the word was not. The word "lasagna" actually comes from the ancient Greek word for chamber pot! (an ancient dish indeed!) The Romans somehow misappropriated the word to mean a cooking pot. Whatever the origins of lasagna, the original version did not use tomatoes, which were not introduced to Europe until Spanish conquistadores brought back tomato plants from Mexico and the Andes.

My father now makes his own tomato sauce from the organic, heirloom tomatoes he grows in the back garden, sprouted from the first seeds I gave him. We save our own tomato seeds, and we even provide them to others. It's his home made sauce that I'll be using today, which includes San Marzano, Caspian Pink, and even some Black Plum tomatoes. The peppers, garlic and onions he uses were all grown in his garden.

That said, my lasagna is a bit different from dad's recipe. Where he used ground beef, in the traditional way, my lasagna is 100% vegetarian, with eggplant and brown Crimini mushrooms substituting for beef. I still eat a bit of meat, though I'm trying to wean myself off of it. Meat eating, as it's practiced in North America at least, is not sustainable, and uses a tremendous amount of energy we could be saving.

For every food calorie we eat, 10 calories of fossil fuel energy are required to produce it. That's before we cook it.

Today, I'm going to make a healthy lasagna and cook it (with the exception of the noodles to save time) using 100% renewable solar energy. Because of the local nature of most of the ingredients and the free fuel used to cook the food, think of this as a sustainable lasagna, with low "embodied energy."

My lasagna includes simple, healthy ingredients, most locally produced, (in southern Ontario) with the exception of the pasta (Canada), olive oil (Greece) and the ricotta cheese (Quebec).

Catelli, healthy harvest whole wheat lasagna noodles
A large Mason jar of Dad's homemade pasta sauce
A tub of soft ricotta cheese
Mozzarella cheese
Crimini mushrooms
Two Chinese eggplants
Dad's home grown garlic
salt and pepper

First step in preparing lasagna is the "mise en place." Everything needs to be "put in its place." This is a dish that requires organization and a process carried out in a series of steps. Mozzarella needs to be grated. Noodles need to be cooked, mushrooms and eggplant cleaned and chopped. And of course the Sun Cook solar cooker must be correctly placed in the sun to pre-heat.

Today I'm also going to use my El Solito parabolic solar barbecue to fry the mushrooms and eggplant before these ingredients go into the lasagna.

Mushrooms go into a light weight steel frying pan from de Buyer in France, which has been making professional cookware since 1840.

Note how the mushrooms have browned. The sun did that.

Eggplant gets a similar treatment.

Keep in mind: these results are achieved in late October, 2006 in Toronto Canada, using local, concentrated sunlight. Note how crispy the eggplant turned out. We can fry foods outside, all year round in Toronto, using nothing but the focused energy of the sun. All we need is a sunny day.

These flavours of the fried eggplant and garlic will blend into the lasagna for a much more sophisticated taste than simply adding raw eggplant.

Once the veggies and noodles are cooked, I take my noodles and create a layer directly onto a lightly oiled baking dish, that comes with the Sun Cook. Spread tomato sauce thinly, then layer ricotta cheese and mushrooms.

The next layer is pasta, ricotta cheese, the eggplant and some mozzarella.

The final layer contains the last of the pasta, tomato sauce and a good coating of mozzarella.

Now the lasagna goes into the oven.

After 2 hours, I took out the lasagna and showed it to my neighbour Barb, who was cleaning up her garden after the summer.

It was an opportunity to thank Barb for her help. This lasagna was prepared on Barb's garden shed, which sits on the other side of the fence we share. Barb is kind enough to allow me to user her backyard for solar cooking sometimes, because it's sunnier than my own. Barb also gave me some fresh carrots that she grew.

It's important to remember the value of community and the maintenance of good relations with our neighbours. In the "post oil" future, we will rely on our local neighbours for support and assistance as many of the services and goods we currently purchase on the market will have to be re-created locally. I'm lucky to have a neighbour like Barb, who just happens to be the aunt of one of my oldest friends. I moved into the house next door to Barb in a complete coincidence.

We can't always choose our neighbours, but we can certainly choose to at least say "hello" to them, and hopefully share the bounty of nature with them too.

Sun Baked Garlic

2006-10-31T18:22:00.000-08:00

My father is an obsessive grower of his own garlic. This year the garden produced over 100 fat, hard bulbs packed with juicy cloves full of pungent flavours. Next year's harvest will be even bigger, and it's no wonder. Eating fresh garlic from the garden for the first time is like seeing a new colour. You never knew it could taste like that!

Those faded, desiccated, peeling and flaking garlic lumps that languish in the supermarkets this fall seem to be of a different order altogether than those magnificent, tightly packed, white spicy garlic bulbs that spring from the dense clay soil in my parent's backyard. It's not just seeming. They are much tastier. But garlic does fade with time, whoever grew it. In November, we can transform the flavours of the fresh summer garden into subtler combinations that bring their own pleasures before the fresh garlic goes too stale.

Today, on a rather average solar day with some intermittent clouds, I'm going to bake two uneaten half cloves of dad's garlic before I put them into a lasagna that I'm going to bake in the Sun Cook tomorrow. I'm using a terra cotta garlic baker my mom bought me for my birthday. To use it, simply soak the terra cotta in water for 10 minutes, then place the garlic bulb inside.

To bake a garlic, you can either split it open, or else chop the stem off to expose the tops of the cloves without cutting into them. Pour organic extra-virgin olive oil over top, being sure to coat every surface. Then douse the garlic with a bit of sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.

I placed my garlic into the pre-heated Sun Cook for two hours. The thermal mass of the terra cotta is relatively small, so it will not drain excess solar energy from the Sun Cook. I would avoid using denser ceramics, as the ceramic would absorb too much heat from the oven.

Baked garlic turned out lovely brown cloves with a creamy, mellow flavour, without any of the wassabi like sharpness that characterizes fresh, raw garlic cloves. The flavour of baked garlic is the perfect flavour to add depth to any pasta sauce. You can also use baked garlic paste to glaze a roasting chicken, for absolutely unforgettable results.

Sun Dried Tomatoes in the Sun Cook

2006-10-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

My garden is literally overflowing with many different and wonderful, juicy organic heirloom tomatoes. It's late October, and I'm still feasting on these delightful treats.

A massive vine of Matt's Cherry tomatoes easily measures 12 feet across and as many high. It's taken over the south side of my house, and is still producing tiny, sweet fruit. Mini-Kosmonaut Volkovs grow in pots, (growing them in partial shade has stunted their growth, these are not a new variety!) as do Green Zebra, tiny yellow Blondkopfchen cherry tomatoes, and some lovely Black Plum tomatoes. My kitchen table runneth over.

Because it is impossible to eat them all right now, we want to preserve them either in a sauce or by drying. Today we're going to dry them using nothing but concentrated sun light.

I cut the tomatoes in half, exposing their juicy centres and seeds. The seeds are surrounded by a jelly that inhibits germination, preventing the seeds from sprouting inside the tomato.
This jelly is mostly water, and we will be drying it out today with solar energy. If we were trying to save tomato seeds for next year, we would squeeze out the seeds and jelly into a bowl and let it go mouldy for about 3 to 4 days, replicating the process in a rotting tomato to destroy the germination inhibitors. Today we're preserving not just the tomato seeds, but the tasty flesh. Sun dried tomatoes pack intense, savoury and tangy flavours, combining sweet and sour. These fruits will flavour the pasta dishes of January, February and March 2007, by which time I will be sprouting the same tomato varieties in my kitchen window, and the whole process will begin anew.

I placed the tomatoes inside the Sun Cook, and instead of locking the lid down as I would normally do during cooking, I placed a small twig between lid and oven case to prevent the oven door from closing completely.

This allows moisture to escape from the oven, and also keeps the temperature from rising high enough to cook the tomatoes. An ideal temperature for dehydration is just under 140 degrees F, the temperature at which food starts to cook.

Here are the tomatoes early on during the drying process in the oven.
Raw food vegans can use the Sun Cook to perform all sorts of food drying and dehydrating. While not a raw food vegan myself, I plan to use these tomatoes in pasta dishes over the winter.

After about 3 hours on a partly sunny afternoon with some intermittent clouds, I had produced gorgeous sun dried tomatoes that look like they just came from Italy. But we produced these results here in Toronto Canada, in the middle of October. The Sun Cook solar oven is the essential tool we used for this work.

Solar Hot Dogs

2006-09-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

The "El Solito" (little sun) parabolic solar barbecue is increasingly popular with folks who want to cook outdoors, but who don't want to pollute while they do it. The El Solito features a highly polished aluminum parabolic dish reflector which focuses sunlight on a focal point, where the pot holder sits. Anything that you put at the focal point will become very hot, when the barbecue is properly focused.

During a sunny break, we set up our El Solito to grill some hotdogs for the staff at 2 Matilda St. Here are the results.

Before cooking.

During Cooking.

Ready to eat!

The results - crispy on the outside, incredibly moist and suculent on the inside. We're doing this again!

Solar Cooking Accessories

2006-09-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

When cooking with solar energy, it's very important to use the right pots and pans. If you use the wrong cookware, you might not get the highest temperature, or the best results out of your cooker.

Most of us have shiny stainless steel or copper cookware. There are many different quality grades in this type of cookware, but generally speaking the heavier the pot is, the better it is thought to be. Heavy cookware more evenly transmits heat to the food when used over a flame or in a gas or convection oven. High quality metal cookware often features a heavy, thick metal base. And of course proud foodies like to keep their pots nice and shiny.

When cooking with solar we want precisely the opposite qualities in our pots and pans.

Solar appropriate cook pots should never be shiny, because shiny pots reflect sunlight - fuel - away from the metal. Cookware should me matte black if possible. Dark coloured cookware is also OK. Avoid white. Aluminum foil is a big no no.

Heavy pots work less efficiency in solar cooking than do lightweight vessels. This is because of a quality called "thermal mass" - the same quality that makes heavy cookware desirable when used with intense, on-demand energy sources.

The heavier an object is, the more energy it takes to heat it up. When used over a flame (which is wasting much of the energy in the fuel, and this can be felt as ambient heat in your kitchen from the stove) a heavy pot or pan stores up energy - it stays hot long after you take it off the heat source. This can be very desirable, or not.

In solar cooking, there is not a great deal of extra energy to work with, very little heat is wasted, so we want all the energy we're collecting from the sun to go into cooking the food, not heating up a big piece of metal. Lighter pots work better in solar cookers. Less mass, less energy. If you try to put a massive cast iron pot in a solar cooker, you will see the temperature in the oven drop dramatically. This is because the heat energy is literally being sucked up by the mass of the metal. You want the mass of the food to absorb the energy, because that's where the real work is being performed. Solar cooking is highly efficient in this way.

The laws of thermodynamics tell us that the temperature of objects reverts to the mean, with a tendency of hot objects to become cooler. Objects in highly excited energy states (hot objects) tend to loose their energy over time, and cool down. This is one way of looking at entropy.

For a practical example of this phenomenon, if you put a hot plate of food outside, the temperature of the food will cool off to equal the ambient temperature of the room, or of the outside air. This is why a solar oven is well insulated - to trap collected solar energy and to prevent it from escaping into the ambient air. We're holding off entropy so that our collected solar energy can do some work for us before dissipating.

Solar pots and pans - they're out there

It's easy to find a great variety of solar appropriate cookware from high quality manufacturers. In addition to the solar cook pots provided with our Sun Cook, and in addition to the black enameled steel roasting pans that most people have in their kitchens, there are many other types of cookware that can be used in a solar oven or on a parabolic solar cooker. Here's what I picked up.

This 10 cup espresso maker is from the Italian manufacturer Palazzetti. The red model, which I use in my kitchen, also works just fine. The grey colour will absorb the solar energy that is focused on the base of the pot. Use it at the focal point of your parabolic solar cooker.

Here's a lightweight, restaurant grade black steel frying pan from the French maker, de Buyer, which has been making cookware since 1830. It cost me ten dollars at a sale, and it's a quality, restaurant grade product. This could be used in the Sun Cook, or in a parabolic cooker.

Lastly, here's a non-stick loaf pan that's solar appropriate. Use it in the Sun Cook.

When you need it fast

2006-08-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

Can solar cooking integrate with the lives of busy "on the go" people?

Yes. I'm busy and "on the go" all the time, and I find it easy to cook much of my food with solar energy. I've just developed different habits, and now I don't notice them. They are now second nature to me.

Solar cooking doesn't have to be a big deal all the time. Though I consider myself a "foodie" and I love cooking and trying new dishes, sometimes I've just got to have lunch fast and get back to work or run out the door. At times like these, making salad from the organic tomatoes and arugula in my garden will take much more effort and time than putting a solar cooker outside and heating up a frozen Jamaican Beef Patty or a slice of yesterday's pizza. The solar cooker works while I work, mostly without my intervention. Here's some left-over solar pizza that I made (see photo above) and re-heated in the Global Sun Oven. Note the crispy bacon!

That's exactly what I did today. I only pre-heated the oven to about 275 degrees F, and put the patties inside. In about 1/2 hour the patties were too hot to handle with my bare hands, and they hit the spot. I spent less time heating up lunch with my solar oven today than I would have spent walking to the Chinese take away down the street, and I spent less money and of course I released no GHGs.

Solar Breakfast Part 2: Using the Global Sun Oven and El Solito Together

2006-08-21T12:55:00.001-07:00

My sister's family is in Canada from Ireland for more than a month, so I am going up to Uxbridge Ontario each weekend to visit with them.

This past weekend I finally got to make that solar breakfast of bacon and eggs for the whole family that I've been wanting to do. The weather was perfect for it, and I came prepared.

I used my parabolic "El Solito" solar barbeque to fry up the bacon and sausage first. You have to pour out the excess grease and water from the pan to allow the meat to crisp up. This also helps prevent heart attacks and excessive weight gain. My brother in law Desmond just could not believe that solar energy was capable of crisping his bacon and sausage. He's a believer now.

Because the focal point of a single parabolic cooker acts like a single stove top burner in full sun, producing "sun flames" we had to prepare breakfast in stages. First bacon and sausage. Next the eggs.

In order to prevent the meat from cooling off, as the laws of thermodynamics say that hot things like to do, I pre-heated my Global Sun Oven, and placed the bacon and sausage in the hot Sun Oven as they were cooked to keep them warm for the table.

If you kept bacon in a hot convection oven for a half hour, it would dry out and overcook. Basically there's far too much energy being directed at the food in a convection oven, so timing the food's stay inside the oven chamber is one very important key to successful cooking. Extending the food's duration inside the Global Sun Oven is much less critical. Inside the Sun Oven, just enough energy is going into the food to keep it hot, but not overcook it or evaporate all the moisture out of it, as would be the case in a large convection oven being used to heat up a small dish like bacon. With a convection oven you're wasting most of the energy you're paying for by heating up the mostly empty space inside the oven, and often your kitchen too. With a solar oven, you're capturing the right amount of free energy to do the job, and no more.

The Sun Oven kept the bacon hot, moist and juicy - with all of the nice crispy bits intact - for between 10 minutes and a half hour, depending on the batch.

Let's put it this way: if solar fried bacon can satisfy my Irish brother in law, who puts butter on roast beef and likes his bacon done just-so, it can satisfy anyone.

Breakfast was served, and there was much rejoicing.

Tiverton Trade Show

2006-08-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

Sun Baked recently made its debut at the Energy Solutions Expo in Tiverton Ontario. Tiverton Ontario is in a lovely part of south western Ontario on the shores of Lake Huron just north of Kincardine on Hwy 21. The weather was absolutely perfect for demonstrating solar cooking: not a cloud in the sky. I got "Sun Baked" quite literally with a very red sun tan. Thank you Tiverton for a fantastic two days.

We had a great time serving up food prepared with 100% solar energy using our Global Sun Oven, and the El Solito parabolic solar barbeque.

My best friend Tim served hot dogs grilled on the El Solito, as well as fresh roasted coffee from the Merchants of Green Coffee, brewed at the focal point of the parabolic dish, while I presented our solar cookers to local Bruce County residents. We also served small snacks which were heated up in the Global Sun Oven.

Everyone was amazed at the way the Sun Oven worked to cook delicious food. Everyone was supportive, and we made some great sales and contacts.

Sun Baked's products can now be found in the following locations, thanks to our presence at the Renewable Energy Expo:

If you live in the Kitchener Waterloo area, see Mike and Trish Robinson, who carry both the Global Sun Oven and the El Solito parabolic solar barbeque at their store, Natural Power Products.

If you live in the Ottawa area, stop in to see Sean Twomey, who carries the Global Sun Oven at the Arbourshop, which has provided ecological products since 1990.

Sun Baked owes Tim Lam a big thank you for his help throughout the weekend. Here's the big El Sol parabolic solar cooker that Tim put together over the weekend. The El Sol features as 1.4m parabolic reflector, and can achieve temperatures of 450-500F at the focal point. It can prepare food for 12 people. We sold one at the show to a customer who wants to cook his family's food off the grid.

Without Tim's dedication and hard work, Sun Baked could never have done this show. Thanks Tim!

Thanks also go out to Cam Mather from Aztext Press for his generosity and support for our new business. Cam is a dedicated promoter of all things solar, including off-grid living. His articles and books are must reads for anybody who wants to live a more sustainable life. Bill Kemp's Renewable Energy Handbook, published by Aztext, gives the Global Sun Oven a good write up. Buy the book and start living as many aspects of your life as possible off the grid!

Things to do in Kincardine when you're Sun Baked

After Day 1 of the show on Saturday August 12, we trucked back into Kincardine for dinner at the end of a long day. At about 7 PM we were driving down the main street of town, Queen St, which runs parallel to the beautiful shore of Lake Huron. There was no other traffic, and ours was the only vehicle on the street. Quickly we noticed that people were gathered by the side of the road, sitting on lawn chairs, as if in expectation of a parade or something. We had no idea what was about to happen.

As we got to the end of Queen St, a police car with a flashing light pulled round the corner, and right behind them - a marching Scottish Pipe Band! As a Scots Canadian myself, I was quite surprised and proud to see and hear the band, and see that townspeople march behind it. Apparently the band marches through town every Saturday night during the summertime, according to the young lady at Shipwrecked Lee's Bistro who served us a really tasty fish dinner. She felt the march was boring, as it happens every week. I thought it was rather fun!

Solar "Stir" Fry and Rice

2006-08-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

For years I've loved to eat fresh vegetables cooked in the Asian way, with the rich flavours of soy, garlic and sesame, and the rich flavours of the vegetables themselves. It was only around the age of 20 that I learned that the veggies I was raised on were overcooked, with much of the colour, flavour and nutrition literally boiled out of them!

Asian cooks keep their vegetables fresh and crunchy when cooked by applying high heat to them for a short time, most often in a wok.

Solar cooking keeps vegetables fresh and flavourful after cooking by using the opposite technique - longer cook times at a lower temperature. You will be amazed at how similar the results are.

For this "Stir" Fry, there will be no stirring.

Place the Sun Cook in your backyard and orient towards the sun to pre-heat. 275+F will do the trick. (Tip: the lower the temperature, the longer the cook time. If the oven's not at 350F, it's no big deal. Plan for a slightly longer cook time than if you used the gas stove.)

Take the following ingredients and mix them in your solar cook pot. Slice the pepper and eggplant relatively thinly, separate the bok choy leaves.

Bok Choy (can be baby, Shanghai, or other Asian green like Gai Lan, which is also yummy)
Yellow pepper
Onion
Chinese Eggplant
Garlic
Sesame oil
Sesame seeds (white or black)
Soy sauce

Mix these ingredients in the cook pot, and place in the Sun Cook.

Now go about your business. Read. Catch up on some neglected correspondence. Rest. Be at peace for between 1 and 2 hours, depending upon oven temperature.

When the time is right remove food from the Sun Cook.

Here's what my dish looked like once I plated it up, and served it with some rice I had made the day previous, also with the Sun Cook.

For more about solar cooking and to purchase the Sun Cook, go to Sun Baked's website

Solar cooked rice and Peak Grain

2006-08-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

Making rice in a solar cooker is a bit different than making it on the stovetop. Because of the intense energy applied to food (and wasted heating up your kitchen) in stovetop cooking, pots boil over and water evaporates into the air. Not so with a solar cooker. Therefore you should use about half the water you would normally use for making rice. The proportion should be 1 cup rice for 1 cup water.

I crushed some fresh garlic that my father grows in his garden into this pilaf. There will be no stirring, so all the ingredients are going in together raw. Add some chopped onions, and fresh peas. I also added saffron, salt and pepper. You can add whatever strikes your fancy.

Here's what my pilaf looked like before I put it into the pre-heated Sun Cook, which reached a temperature of 300 F in about 40 minutes with some intermittent clouds.

Cooking took only an hour, after which I had a pot of rather delicious rice pilaf. No greenhouse gases were emitted while cooking this meal. Of the ingredients I used, only the garlic was grown by my family. Peas and onions were locally produced organic. The rice came from Vietnam, and the saffron from Spain.

Here's what my rice looked like immediately after cooking was complete.

I'm going to start looking for more locally produced cereal grains to eat, inching ever closer to that "hundred mile diet" goal. Finding locally produced grain products is nearly impossible, given the total dominance of global grain and agriculture by conglomerates such as Cargill, Monsanto, DuPont and Archer Daniels Midland. These companies turn oil and gas into corn, wheat, soy and canola to be consumed and wasted in a thousand processed products we don't really need, and which only offer a false promise of a future free from the limits imposed by the earth.

Peak Grain

Recently it's come to my attention that global stockpiles of cereal grains are at historic lows not seen since the early 1970's.

NOW Magazine has an excellent summary.

Harvests of grain all around the world are being damaged by the great global drought of 2006. Today in Toronto where I live it's 36 degrees C, and it feels like 45C. Some of the areas affected by the drought on the USA and Africa can be seen graphically here.

This global drought is pushing up prices for cereal grains, and some experts fear shortages as predicted crop yields are going to be down in the USA by as much as 23%, in Spain as much as 50%.

This drought is being caused by man's introduction of billions of tons of pollution and greenhouse gasses into the environment through our oil, coal and gas driven economy.

What will we eat when the inputs which are necessary for mechanized agriculture are no longer available, or too expensive for some? The false promise of "techno utopia" will be exposed as fossil fuels decline, and our dependence upon them for our food is revealed. The way into man's heart is through his stomach, someone once said.

I am attempting to gain a small measure of food independence by growing organic heirloom vegetables in my tiny backyard. However not even in my wildest dreams could I feed myself full time on what I can grow. Right now my diet is supplemented by a tasty crop of chicory, various herbs including basil, oregano, thyme, sage and mint, a number of organic tomatoes including Black Plum (so tasty) Purple Cherokee, Green Zeebra, Kosmonaut Volkov, Blondkopfchen, Matt's Wild Cherry, (a 10 foot tall vine laden with tiny sweet fruit) as well as kale and some small beets. No, I don't like tomatoes at all!

Though I started this blog to document how to cook your food in a "first world" country using as much solar energy as possible, I don't think I can separate the cooking of my food from the food itself, where it comes from and how it gets to me. In order to really cook without carbon I need to take a holistic approach to explore all areas of my relationship with food, cooking, the natural energy flows of mother earth, and the temporary high our civilization obtained from cheap fossil energy. This blog is about coming down off that high.

In the near future, Canadians are going to have to confront a world that is fundamentally different from the one we're used to dealing with. Our relationships with each other will be tested, and one of the biggest ones is going to be the relationship between food producers and food consumers.

If you look at the history of the last 150 years in Canada, or the history of any developing nation today, one of the bigger observable demographic trends has been the decline of the use of manual labour on the farm, and the substitution of mechanized labour, powered by oil. Of course this has led to increased yields of some crops that were suited to monoculture and industrial transport. But it has also resulted in soil erosion, decreased soil fertility, the loss of species diversity, the death of ocean life from toxic fertilizer runoff, not to mention our total dependence on declining supplies of oil and gas for feeding the world.

As industrial agriculture grew, labour moved from country to city factory in search of industrial work. From being a servant of the fields, we became the slaves of, and also dependent on an industrial machine.

That industrial machine is beginning to break down now, and we're going to have to re-connect with each other and with the natural rhythms of the earth if we want to maintain our life on this planet.

My mother's family were settlers and farmers in Canada for four generations until my mother's family finally moved off their Saskatchewan farm in the early 50's. Her son will return to the land for sure, just like other members of my generation, who are not used to producing the food they consume, or producing the energy they use to cook it. Here's to our forthcoming lesson in adaptation. Bon appetite.

Solar breakfast and thoughts on food security

2006-07-31T15:38:00.000-07:00

On Sunday morning I decided to take advantage of some of the only sun we had over the weekend to make my breakfast using solar energy. Once again, I turned to my parabolic solar cooker from Germany, which is the only solar cooker that can fry up bacon and eggs, which were on the menu at my mother's house where I was visiting.

I had initially planned to cook breakfast for the whole family, mother, father, sister, brother in law, nephew and family friend. The sun came and went, but my family was more interested in eating "on time" using "on demand" fossil energy than in eating renewable energy. So I was able to get away with a single solar meal, for myself. That's the way you use solar energy. Go with the flow. Take it when it appears, just like you'd eat whatever's on the plate your mother serves to you.

We're used to consuming energy "on demand." Want to cook? Turn on the gas. But the world is changing, and we're going to have to get used to capturing "flows" of renewable energy where we can. Up to now, energy demand has governed energy supply. If we wanted more energy, they pumped more oil. Not any more. Peak oil has arrived. North American natural gas production is in permanent decline. Now supply limits demand. In the world of peaking energy and runaway populations (at least for now) all available fossil energy will be consumed, no matter what the price. Somebody will pay for it.

Many geologists and scientists who have investigated these facts and thought deeply about them expect the future of the fossil fuel economy to look something like this:

This future would be one of decreasing per capita energy availability, economic shock, and social upheaval, to say the least. Can we afford NOT to use solar energy wherever we can? I think not.
So how did my breakfast turn out?

Bacon placed in the hot cast iron skillet started to sizzle straight away. Pre-heating took about 10 minutes. So did cooking.

Next, two eggs. Sunny side up. Neither bacon nor eggs stuck to the pan, and both yokes were perfect. Three minutes.

Food Security and Solar Cooking

A decreasing number of my friends think I'm nuts for being so concerned with solar energy, the environment and peak oil and fossil energy. Would that they were right, and there was nothing to worry about. Unfortunately their approach to the questions of sustainability, food security, environmental collapse and peak oil is one of denial. "Things will just keep on going. They always find a new energy source. Peak oil is just a scary conspiracy theory." Would that these were true. The real facts of life would be a lot easier to deal with.

The real facts of life as I see them are these.

Earth's "resources" of land, plant and animal life, water, minerals and fossil fuels are finite.

There are 6.5 billion people and growing, demanding an ever greater share of these finite "resources." (are these things only "resources" for humanity, or do they have an existence outside their "use value" for people? Does that existence impose limits on our behaviour?)

Exponential population growth of any species in nature always leads to a crash and "die-off" once the indispensable resource present in the least amount is consumed. This is Leibig's Law, or the "Law of the Minimum" (for those of you who remember your Dune.) Think algae in a pond once all the dead leaves are consumed.

Global peak oil is happening now. The US military thinks it's already happened. Oil is analogous to the food upon which algae depend.

Runnaway climate change seems to be happening: acid oceans, massive droughts and hurricanes, Europe's bees are dying, I haven't seen a toad in my yard for ten years, melting ice-caps, global ocean conveyor is slowing down, Europe could become like Siberia while the Amazon dries up and burns.

Climate change is directly linked to increased C02 emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Conclusion: we have to do something, whatever we can to reduce our footprint, scale back our use of fossil fuel energy, and get into a harmonious relationship with the cycles of the earth. We all have to eat. Everybody should try to cook with as much renewable energy as they can.

We are living at the peak of human achievement, and at the edge of humanity's hubris. The sane way of living, from my perspective at least, is to take advantage of all that we can accomplish to equip ourselves for "the prosperous way down."

For me, that meant different things than it may have meant to somebody else.

I rent my home right now, so I can't invest in a solar water heater, build a strawbale house, or put a windmill in my backyard. Yet.

I've had the good luck to work in the Canadian solar energy industry for the last several years, but in 2005 we suffered a body blow when the new Canadian federal government under the Tory Stephen Harper decided to suspend funding (recently released) to solar energy projects. A more foolish government could not be imagined. This policy hurt many small solar energy businesses and people who wanted to use solar.

My response was to start my own business selling small scale solar powered products that somebody in my situation could use. I love cooking and really care about where my food comes from, so why shouldn't I care where the energy to cook it comes from? Ten calories of energy from oil and gas are required to produce every single food calorie we consume. That's before cooking.

There are millions of other people like me, who want to use solar energy, but who won't be investing in a PV system any time soon, either because they'll never have the money, or because they'll never have a house to put one on.

I'm turning off my gas stove, and going to spend more time outside in my backyard, making healthy, delicious food. One day in the next couple years I hope to build my own Strawbale house, help create or move into an eco-village. I'm moving towards living sustainably, one step at a time. For now, I'm cooking without carbon.

info@solarcooking.ca

Solar Espresso

2006-07-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

This past week I put together my new "Long Life Single" solar cooker from Germany. I will be selling these cookers to Canadians who want to cook some of their food without burning scarce and polluting fossil fuels.

I placed my old espresso pot on the cooker, and aligned the parabolic solar dish reflector towards the sun. (The best type of pot would be black. There are a couple black espresso pots out there, but none in Toronto. I have looked.)

I use only Fair Trade certified green coffee beans from the Merchants of Green Coffee www.merchantsofgreencoffee.com which just happens to be co-located in the same building as my Solar Cooking supply company, Sun Baked. www.solarcooking.ca . Fresh roasted coffee tastes 100% better than stale coffee, which is what most people are used to drinking. The Merchants' coffees are solar dried. Now they can be solar brewed! In the future we will try solar roasting. I am unaware of any other coffee in the world that is solar dried, roasted and brewed. If there is one, let me know.

See the "sun flames" lick the bottom of my old Ikea espresso pot? This is concentrated solar energy, boiling the water for my java.

The parabolic mirror - made out of highly polished aluminum - focuses sunlight on one spot, where the pot holder just happens to be. The pot quickly became hot to the touch.

And in about 7 minutes I had a perfect pot of steaming hot, black espresso to start my work day.

It was actually tastier than many coffees I have made with my gas range at home. There was no sputtering coffee pot begging to be removed from the hot stove. No burnt taste, just tasty, fresh fair trade coffee made with free solar energy, with no carbon dioxide emissions, and no fossil fuels wasted.

Enjoy a cuppa solar energy! For more information, contact info@solarcooking.ca .

Solar Pizza

2006-07-25T21:09:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to cook my pizza in the Sun Cook solar oven from Sun Co, a Portuguese company that makes the most sophisticated solar cooker in the world.

The Sun Cook is also the sexiest solar box cooker I've ever seen. The design has been refined to appeal to European sensibilities, and you can tell every aspect has been thought through. This cooker should be in all the High Street appliance stores. Soon it will be.

The package is elegant and streamlined. The colours are fun and cheerful. The durable and long lasting shell is resistant to dents. This cooker will travel well, and has two discretely hidden handles, one on each side, for easy lifting. The solar sundial shown projecting from the front in this picture should be removed and stored inside the cooker when not in use, or in transport. The Sun Cook also comes with two cooking vessels; a pot and pan, lightweight and dark coloured for solar cooking.

Open the cooker's lid with the self locking latch and you can see how the side reflector folds away neatly for easy storage. The other reflector is integrated with the lid. I love it!

The double glass oven door with lock prevents heat from escaping the cooking chamber and unwanted access to the solar oven, from children or animals. Thick insulation on the sides prevents solar heat from escaping into the ambient air. There is also a little vent to release steam.

The solar clock allows you to time cooking using a sundial. Orient the cooker so the sun's shadow falls on a number, represnting the cooking time in hours. Adjust the reflectors so that there are no shadows in the cooking chamber. Walk away. Again - I love it! They've thought through everything.

Inside the cooking chamber, reflective mirrors focus sunlight on a flat plate solar absorber, which heats up, as does the lightweight cooking vessel. I like to pre-heat both the cook pot and chamber together if possible. Not all recipes allow for that.

I added my own oven thermometer to monitor the temperature inside the cooking chamber.

The Sun Cook pre-heated to 300 degrees Farenheit on a July day with intermittent clouds. This took 50 minutes, which is how long it took to prepare my pizza for the oven.

So to the pizza.

I use a thin crust, pre-made. You can make your own pizza dough if you have a good recipe.

I take an organic heirloom tomato, one of the first to ripen in my garden. Store bought tomatoes are often tough and flavourless. Mine are sweet. Remove all the seeds and watery juices, and chop into fine peices. (It's important to remove the watery juice around the seeds, as extra moisture could make the crust soggy in the solar cooker. This juice prevents the seeds from sprouting inside the fruit.)

Add fresh basil and oreganno to taste, salt, pepper, olive oil and a touch of lemon juice if you like. Mix this fresh "sauce" in a bowl, and then sprinkle on the pizza crust.

Add sliced onion and mushrooms. I finished this pizza with organic goat cheese and some ground pepper. You can use whatever cheese and toppings you like. I simply used what was close at hand.

Pop the pizza in the solar oven.

The top of the oven door fogged up somewhat. But that cleared up after an hour. It's amazing to see steam comming out of the steam vent, and to think that - that's solar energy cooking my food! I'm not burning any fossil fuels or emit any greenhouse gasses to cook my dinner.

Clouds lenghtened my cook time to about 1.5 hours. No matter. Everybody at 2 Matilda St. devoured my solar pizza. The onions melted, the mushrooms browned up and the cheese melted nicely. The crust was crispy and good. I'm making this one again!

info@solarcooking.ca

Solar pie

2006-07-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

Canada Day, July 1st, 2006. Parry Sound.

Welcome to Cooking Without Carbon, which chronicles my attempt to cook more of my food without burning up fossil fuels, or emitting carbon into the environment. "Cooking without carbon" is something most Canadians can do.

Please visit the website of my company, Sun Baked, at www.solarcooking.ca. Sun Baked is promoting the mass adoption solar cooking in Canada. Yes, Canada. Contrary to popular belief, we have enough solar energy to cook with. Don't beleive me? I'll prove it too you.

Here's a recipie for my strawberry solar pie, cooked with the sun in Parry Sound Ontario at 45.20 degrees north lattitude on Canada Day 2006 and consumed with relish by my friends and I.

Filling

I like to make the filling first.

Clean and cut enough strawberries to fill your pie dish. I like to use a scalloped, non-stick French tart pan.

TIP: The tart pan works with solar cooking because of its dark colour, and because it weighs almost nothing. Heavy, ceramic cooking dishes don't work well with solar cooking. The mass of the cooking dish sucks up all the energy from the solar oven. You want your food to be much heavier than your cooking vessel.

I also used Rhubarb with this dish, donated by my neighbour Barb from her own garden. Cut the Rhubarb into small peices, and put in a small pan with sugar to taste and a tiny bit of water. Put the pan in the solar oven, and let it cook for 1/2 hour until Rhubarb is soft.

TIP: Preheat your oven with the pan inside first. Cooking time will be shorter.

For the dough, I am sharing here for the first time my favourite recipe for the flakiest pie crust you will ever eat. I'd been making this crust in both gas and convection ovens for a decade before I "went solar" on this recipe. It works with solar ovens too.

Crust ingredients

2 1/4 cups organic all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon of salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 orange, grated
10 tablespoons unsalted butter
5 tablespoons cold (put it in the freezer first) shortening
8-10 tablespoons fresh organg juice

How to make the flakiest pie crust.

It's not just the proportions of ingredients in baking, but also the process of making the dough that creates a magical, flakey crust. Here's my secret.

Mix the dry ingredients above in a large mixing bowl. I like a heavy, ceramic bowl for this. Lightweight stainless steel bowls I like less, but are still ok. Chill the bowl beforehand.

Cut the butter and shortening with knives. Don't know how to do this? Hold two butter knives, one in each hand. Place the tips of both knives in the centre of the bowl, and cut outward rapidly, breaking up the small peices of butter and shortening, and "cutting the butter into the flour." Do this for 5 to 7 minutes, or until the butter and shortening are the size of peas, and well blended with the flour. This "cutting in" will tire your arms, but it's the frist step to flakey short pastry.

When the butter and shortening have been cut in, give your arms a rest for 20 minutes and put your bowl back in the refrigerator. (Yes, you are using some carbon energy in your fridge. Renewable refrigeration can be had if you have a cool basement.) Cooling down the dough prevents the butter and shortening from melting into the flour as its temperature is raised while being worked. Prevent melted butter at all costs during dough making.

When the mixture is chilled, you can add the orange juice. Use no water. I add a bit of juice at a time, and blend it in with a fork until the dough starts to stick together. Then I use my hands to gently knead the doough and work the moisture through. Seperate the dough into two balls, roll in flour, wrap with two clean cloths and put back in fridge or basement to cool down. (Kneading the dough raises its temperature. You want cool dough to work.)

Roll out the dough. I like to use my hands, to press the dough flat with the ball of my hand and work it outwards in a cricle from there. Or you can use a rolling pin, which is not as warm as your hand. (I run my hands under cold water first, then dry them off and flour them before kneading. What can I say? I'm a die hard baker.)

Place the crust in the bottom of the pan, and use a small dough ball from the side to gently work the dough into the grooves of the pan.

Now add your filling, the cut up strawberries and cooked rhubarb together and spread evenly in the crust filled pan. Take an egg and beat it. Glaze the outer edge of the bottom crust with the egg mix, then place the top pie crust on top. Cut away the excess with a knife for a nice clean edge (my preference) or else bunch up the crust between your thumb and fingers for a thicker more homestlyle pie crust. Glaze with the beaten egg mixture, and cut some holes.

I chose to write something in the crust. "1oo% made with solar energy."

Now the pie is ready for the solar oven.

In Parry Sound, we had some early clouds, so I didn't get cooking until around 3:00 PM, well past solar noon.

No worries. Though the baking took more than two hours, we enjoyed a lovely solar pie, together with whipped cream. I added some lemon juice to the whipping cream. It tastes better and also whipps faster, due to the acidity of the lemmon. There were no leftovers.