Solar Sweetness

A few months ago we bought a solar oven--mainly for emergency preparedness, but also in the hope that it will help me bake in the summertime without heating up our little apartment. The fact that it doesn't use fossil fuels is also a nice bonus. Every little bit helps the environment and our utility bill.

Today I finally worked up the nerve to try the oven for the first time. I opted to start with an apple crisp recipe that uses dehydrated apples. Here are the apples sitting in plenty of water with some sugar, cinnamon, etc. I don't know how much water we'd actually have in an emergency, but hey, I'm just trying to figure out how the oven works at this point. And we like apple crisp.

I put the covered pot in the oven, fastened on the lid, and turned it toward the sun. The white thing in the corner is an oven thermometer. The oven heated to around 250 degrees, and it would have gotten hotter if I'd put the reflectors on.

After a couple hours the apples had reconstituted. I removed the lid, sprinkled the crumbled topping on top, and let it all cook until the sun went down (you can already see that the shadows are getting longer).

We sampled the crisp after dinner, and it was pretty good. The apples were great, but the topping was too sweet for my taste. Of course, that was the recipe's fault, not the oven's, and I look forward to experimenting with it more in the coming months. I may try bread or twice-baked potatoes. I've also had solar oven roast that was excellent.

Meanwhile, as I was endeavoring to escape the bondage of fossil fuels and hot ovens, my kids just wanted to escape out the back gate and explore the big, wide world.