Parts! Lets see, cardboard boxes – check, aluminum foil -  check, stuffing for insulation – check, pane of glass – no dice! It was a good excuse for a few minutes and then I went outside. There I was reminded that we are camping in, for lack of a better word, a junkyard. Bleh. No more excuses! The only thing to do was wander around the desert for hours searching for a piece of intact glass until Johnny got worried about me, came to look for me, and said that he didn’t want me out doing that again. Brilliant. Another new excuse. Unfortunately, either I gave up too soon , Johnny thinks I am superwoman, or  just doesn’t mull over all of the possible things that could happen to me while I am out. I am going with superwoman.

After that defeat, I decided to formulate a new plan to guide me on my quest for a pane of glass.

Step 1>  Sit around and drink with the neighbors.
Step 2>  ….
Step 3>  Pane ‘o glass 4 me!!!!!

After much contemplation, it really did seem like the best course of action, and it turned out way better than I thought it would. Not only did a pane of glass appear (intact, amazingly enough)  within a few days, but it had a solar oven attached to it. Check this beauty out.

OK. So it’s seen better days, and I think those days were a couple of years ago, but it does have potential. After I cleaned the mud that had caked on the reflectors, knocked the things that looked like rats nets off and (mostly) cleaned up the glass, I decided it was probably a self cleaning oven an tossed it out in the sun. Well to my dismay it didn’t clean itself up, but it did get to 200F degrees. That was yesterday. I gave the self cleaning thing another shot today. It got up to a cozy 250F. Not too shabby. I think with a little love I might be able to coax it into making us dinner.

Another thing that I thought for sure I would do on the road is master the banjo. Ya um… that didn’t happen. At least not yet (see, I am still optimistic!). I was supposed to have so much time to practice. Once again, nada. I don’t think that I have taken the darn thing out more than 3 times in the last two years. I can make plenty of excuses though… “It’s in the outside storage compartment buried behind 30 other things and the camper is on the truck which puts the compartment about 6′ in the air.”, “Oh darn.. we have neighbors here. Well, I sure don’t want to disturb them with my failing frailing.” Oh ya, I have a million more. Excuses I am good at. Banjo…. eh,  not so much.

I am getting better, though! One of the local musicians who graces the stage of The Range (the local nightclub/stage) is giving me music lessons. He is mainly teaching me about the mind boggling fascinating world of music theory. He says that once I have that down, I will be able to play any instrument and will have a well trained ear. I hope he is right. Right now I am struggling with just one instrument. And, my ear? Well, I think it might be broken….along with my rhythm bone and my timing muscle.

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The first thing to do, is go to an Asian food store and pickup red curry paste. Yes, I know you can occasionally find curry paste in your chain supermarkets, but you can actually get a large enough container to make several dozen meals for the same price as the tiny one meal container you might find in a chain supermarket.  In fact, the last curry paste I bought was in the neighborhood of $6 for a 35 ounce container. I don’t recall off the top of my head what the tiny containers you might find in supermarkets are, but I’d guess they’re under 2 ounces for a similar price. We hit an absolute dearth of Asian food stores in Alaska and thankfully couldn’t find the tiny containers either or I’m not sure I’d be able to live with myself.

Okay, that’s the big secret. I don’t have an actual curry paste recipe as that’s way more advanced than I want to be in the kitchen. Once you’ve got the obscure shopping out of the way, it’s one of the easiest meals you can make and still look fancy. As long as you’re in the Asian food store anyway, you might as well grab some coconut milk and whatever you like in your stir fry. Often the prices there are better than chain supermarkets anyway.

You can make stir fry, right? If so, curry is a breeze. Just make stir fry anyway you like it (but without soy or teriyaki sauce!). Depending on what we have on hand, I will use chicken or pork, broccoli, carrots, green pepper, onion, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, baby corn and bean sprouts. I recommend adding things like baby corn, mushrooms, bean sprouts and bamboo shoots last in order to keep from overcooking them. Once you’re done with the stir fry, set it aside and start on the curry sauce.

My personal method is to add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil to the pan over low heat and squirt out some curry paste into the oil. How much is up to you. I tend to like it fairly spicy so add perhaps 2-3 teaspoons. Next, add in coconut milk. Anywhere from half a can to a whole can for two people will work – depending on how hungry you are and how ’soupy’ you like your curry. Getting the right amount of curry paste and coconut milk may take a little trial and error, but you can always add more paste if it’s not spicy enough and more coconut milk if it’s too spicy.

The next bits are optional, but I’ll just tell you the way I do things. If you want a more panang style curry, you can stop right here.  For a sweeter curry, add about a tablespoon of sugar and stir it in. For an even more diverse mix of flavors, I usually add some small pineapple chunks along with pineapple juice. Depending on what you’ve added to your stir fry, you may or may not need to add a little salt. Bean sprouts definitely negate the need for extra salt. Just let this simmer and cook to your own taste. Remember that the flavor will be a bit diluted by your stir fry and rice.

Once you’re happy with the curry sauce, toss your stir fry in and let it simmer for a few minutes. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Serve over rice. We just use white rice, but get as fancy as you want.

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Many thanks to Caro, Tony, Siobhan, and the ladies roosting down by the sound. We have enjoyed the “fruits of your labor”.

This post was brought to you by the letter E.

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After we left Quartzsite, our next ‘destination’ was Slab City, just outside of Niland, CA. First though, we really had to do some shopping before I broke into the emergency can of baked beans. So, we hit Brawley, which is about twenty miles south of the Slabs. As long as we were in town, Jenn wanted to get some work done on the freecampsites website, so we endured horribly slow internet for a night, under the assumption that we’d have no internet at all once we hit Slab City.

Go figure. Slab City had the best EVDO connection we’d seen since we left Phoenix. In fact, it’s so good they have an internut connection in the lending library. Speaking of the library, I was really impressed with the selection of books available and found my share very quickly. I rather wish I’d spent more time in the library as I could have dug around for a few gems instead of grabbing the first half dozen titles that looked interesting.

Like Quartzsite, Slab City was quickly emptying out for the summer. However, there were still a few folks around and the area was a bit more active than Quartzsite. Since Ryan and Nicole were joining us the next day in their tent, Jenn kept me driving around the area looking for the perfect campsite longer than I could handle. Her requirements: a nice shade tree (preferably three or four), not too close to the neighbors, close enough to the center of things to be a close walk but not so close that we’re in the middle, and easy to find so Ryan and Nicole wouldn’t have to spend too much time looking.

Now, we’re talking about the desert here. If there was any tree large enough to provide shade that met the rest of her requirements (or even one of them), someone had parked under it. Even more likely to me, was that they had parked next to it and dumped their gray water on it for a few years until it grew into a shade tree. Eventually, I quit listening to things like ‘turn left behind us twenty feet’ and let my own pioneer spirit take over. I found us a spot that met all of the requirements if you considered a more liberal translation of the phrase ’shade tree’. I think it could be a nice little tree in a few more years if only someone would dump their tanks on it for a while.

Once Ryan and Nicole showed up, we all got to demonstrate our cooking abilities for a few days. It turns out Ryan is actually a pretty good chef and Nicole makes a mean chili dog. They even brought along their starving dog, Kay, to handle dish detail. She wanted to play with the cats and Hunter was ready to ‘play’, but cooler heads prevailed and Kay didn’t get any kitty snacks.

Between cooking, I gave Ryan a quickie archery lesson and he proved to be a natural. In fact, I gave him my slingshot as I’d long ago given up actually hitting anything more specific than ‘the ground’ with it. Apparently, Ryan grew up playing with slingshots and hadn’t lost the knack.

Once Jenn saw Ryan and Nicole driving around without their trailer, she started pestering me to work on the moped. That piece of junk had crapped out on me in Phoenix and hadn’t been started since I’d walked home from the police station. Lacking a good excuse, I was forced to unload the scooter and make at least a token effort.

Once I got the fancy sides off, it wasn’t too hard to see one of the problems. One of the fuel lines had dry rotted and was causing a loss of vacuum to supply fuel to the carburetor. Now, I’m far from a mechanic, but I did manage to snip a bit of uncracked line from elsewhere and get it replaced, albeit a bit tighter fit than is normal. I had to recharge the battery a couple of times to get enough fuel in the lines to start it and keep running. The kickstart is worthless on that thing; it probably still has a few small vacuum leaks and definitely needs a new spark plug, but it did finally fire up. Since I couldn’t do anything about the rest of the problems, I declared it ‘fixed for now’.

The first day or so, it seemed most of the neighbors viewed us as transients and would ignore our campsite as they drove past. Once we got the scooter ripped to pieces in the backyard and the hood on the truck up to charge the battery, I guess we were starting to look like locals. The neighbors started waving as they went past and one even stopped to invite us to a party, which we didn’t actually make, as it was the day after we all pulled out.

To stress test the scooter, Jenn and I rode it out to the ‘abandoned’ county park on the Salton Sea while Ryan and Nicole took their truck. It turned out that the park was a bit further than we thought and Ryan and Nicole beat us there by about twenty minutes since we were poking along at twenty-five miles an hour. The sun was pretty brutal, but we were determined to have a picnic, so we utilized some Slab City engineering of our own. We found some random boards scattered along the beach and used them to hold one side of a tarp up to form a shelter. One side was jammed in the truck windows and the other was held up by a broken board tied to a big log and the other half of said board tied to the scooter.

While Nicole, Jenn and I were building a squatters camp, Ryan was frying up yummy quesadillas. Since we had set up in the main parking area of the abandoned park, we shouldn’t have been surprised that a few people came along to check out the area. What was funny, though, was watching how studiously they avoided looking at the crazy people under their makeshift shelter. You could practically hear them chanting “Don’t make eye contact. Don’t make eye contact.”

Knowing how slow we’d be, Jenn and I started back a bit ahead of the rest, after watching Ryan circumnavigate a small sand bar in his inflatable boat. I think we made a bit better time than the inflatable raft would have, but that’s about it. The ride was really a bit too long for two people on a moped on the highway, even if it was pretty lightly traveled and had a nice shoulder to stay on. The scooter did pretty well, all things considered. It lost power a few times for a couple of seconds, but picked right back up with just enough of a hiccup to make us nervous. I think a little more work on the fuel lines and a spark plug will fix it’s major woes. The rest of our time at the Slabs, it cranked within a few attempts and purred along nicely, provided Jenn remembered to curse at it by the third attempt.

So, how do I feel about the Slabs after spending a few days there? I loved it. You’ve got a free place to camp without any real rules except “don’t piss off the neighbors”. Unlike your average HOA, these neighbors are pretty accepting. I mean, one of the old timers, Leonard, has been building a giant, multi-colored monument to God out of adobe, paint and random junk he found in the desert over the past twenty-five years. Maybe it’s only becoming a tourist attraction because people want to see what some crazy old coot has been working on, but some of the neighbors actually come out and help him construct additions to  Salvation Mountain.

At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a few folks living inside the old military bunkers. Their idea of fun is burning old tires and shooting at each others bunkers with the biggest guns they’ve got. I’m not all that keen on burning tires, but I’m not about to argue it with a neighborhood full of folks that are hunkered in so deep that they get a kick out of firing off a few rounds at each others houses. We skipped the ‘bunker party’ invite under the rash assumption that alcohol, guns and burning tires might not be the healthiest combination.

And in the middle, you’ve got a lot of just ordinary folks. People are running businesses out of Slab City. Some of them are actively involved in trying to keep a community feel to the area. You can tune into CB channel 23 weeknights at 6pm and hear the daily news, which primarily consists of the TV Guide and a list of goods and services people are selling. I guess there’s just really not that much going on and gossiping about the neighbors over the air may not always be the brightest idea. During the winter months, there is a lot more going on, but even in the Spring, we were invited up to the Range for live music, over to the Oasis for a chili dinner and the infamous bunker party. Your neighbors might have concertina wire strung around their camper or a line of old tires delineating ‘their yard’, but they’re not likely to complain about the pink flamingos stuck in your own yard.

Water might be scarce in the desert, but Slab City has it’s own hot spring and a shower fed from said spring. If nudity offends you though, best to go to the spring when you’re sure no one else is around. I certainly wouldn’t drink the water from the spring, but it’s nice to jump in for a hot soak on a chilly evening. During the day, the shower is quite cool and can be a nice contrast to the desert sun during a warm spell.

If I had to sum Slab City up, I’d say it’s as close as you’re likely to get to an Old West frontier town in the United States today. In the middle of nowhere, you can get away with just about anything you want, but once you bring people together and form a town, you get a lot of rules about what you’re allowed to do or barred from doing. At the Slabs, you’ve got a unique situation where there really aren’t any laws because the state owns the land and doesn’t care enough about it to run folks off. It attracts all kinds of people. Some just want a free place to live. Others want freedom in a truer sense. What most of them have in common, though, is a ‘live and let live’ attitude. If you aren’t bothering your neighbors, they aren’t likely to bother you.

Libertarianism, anarchy, call it whatever you like; but, even in the Slabs you’ll be reminded that you better not get too rowdy by the occasional Sheriff and Immigration patrols as well as the military choppers, hummers and trucks that roll through every day. At least you get to see some of the fancy hardware your tax dollars are paying for!

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Grandma’s Chocolate Pie

Grab a medium sized pot and toss in everything but the pie crusts (duh!), Cool Whip and butter. Set your stove to medium or medium high heat and begin mixing it together. Once the mixture seems to be warming up a bit, toss the stick of butter in and keep stirring. You’re going to do a lot of stirring. Basically, you want to keep stirring until it achieves the consistency of a thick pudding. I recommend a whisk for this… or even a small hand mixer if you can keep it from splashing all over.

Once the mixture thickens up, remove it from heat and pour into a couple of pie shells. Personally, I like Oreo or graham cracker pie crusts, but it’s pretty hard to ruin this pie by picking the wrong crust. Next, I like to leave the pies sitting out under a paper towel so that the steam doesn’t form condensation and make the crust soggy. About an hour should do it. Once they’ve cooled a bit, toss them in the fridge or freezer to cool further. Before serving, cover them with Cool Whip and grab your own fork and plate so as to be sure of getting a slice.

Uncle Mike’s Limoncello

Limoncello is a fashionable after dinner drink all over Italy. There are many commercial limoncellos sold today, but only the homemade liqueur has the fresh and refreshing edge that makes it such a wonderful drink. The popular way to serve limoncello is from the freezer and syrupy thick, but it is often served at room temperature as well.

The key ingredient to limoncello is, of course, the lemons. The fresher the lemons, the more oil can be extracted from their skins and the more flavorful the liqueur. Traditional recipes call for a few green lemons as well as the yellow, but green lemons are difficult to find in the US. Mottled yellow and green lemons are an excellent choice. Green (or mottled) lemons will add more fragrance to the drink, while yellow lemons will add more flavor.

Peel the lemons, being careful not to remove any of the white pith along with the lemon zest as it gives a bitter taste. A lemon zester works best for this task, however a potato peeler or knife will do in a pinch.

Put the lemon zests into a half gallon container along with the grain alcohol. Store this in a cool, dark place for 3-4 days, taking out to shake several times a day.

Once the lemon zests become pale and crisps, you’ve extracted all of the lemon oil from them. Strain them out of the alcohol and discard the zests.

Grab a pot and mix your sugar and water together. Heat this on the stove over medium-low to medium heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Do not let the water boil. You are aiming for a clear sugar syrup. Once achieved, let the sugar water cool down to room temperature.

Mix the alcohol with the sugar syrup and you’re all set. You’ll need a couple of liter bottles to store the limoncello. You can drink it at this point, but the flavor will round out a bit if allowed to sit for a week. As for the leftover lemons, need I suggest lemonade?

Happy turkey day everyone!

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While we are here, we have been doing some caving. Our good friend David visited us and we headed over to Camp’s Gulf Cave. We had a great adventure. Either Johnny or myself will post about it as soon as we get the pictures . Hopefully he, Pam and Chaos will join us for some more caving fun before we head off once again. We are surely going to miss them when we leave this side of the country. Its not often that you find good people who are great company and are willing to meet up in various places to do the things you like to do. We really lucked out when we met them. We would have probably left the east coast sooner if our paths had never crossed.

For some reason, when I get to my parent’s place, I turn even more domestic than usual. Tonight, for instance, I decided to make a batch of pasta. It was my first time, and I would have to say it turned out well. While it smelled just like the stuff in the box, it wasn’t quite like it. The best way to describe it would be to say that it was much more hearty – not so much thicker, but more… wholesome. I have to say that I prefer it to the boxed stuff. Not only is it more hearty, it is better tasting and I know exactly what is in it. Which is a major plus for me. I hate turning over a container and seeing 3425437 ingredients in an item that I know should only have 5. Not only that, but now I know that I can make it, too.

Next time we are out in the boonies and out of pasta, I will not fret. I will just make some. Ah… self reliance. Its a good feeling. Lately, my staples have been milk, eggs, flour, sugar, and olive oil. More and more I have been finding that those, some meat, a few spices, and veggies are all I need to make just about anything. Quite a far cry from the old days of ordering in for every meal. Life is good. There’s no way I could have found the time to experiment like this when I was working 9-16hrs a day.

So, have I convinced you to make your own pasta? Its incredibly easy, and it only takes 5 ingredients. Water, oil, flour, salt and eggs. Here’s the recipe:

* 1/3 cup water
* 2 1/3 cup all purpose flour (or whole wheat)
* 1 teaspoon of olive oil
* 2 eggs
* 1/2 teaspoon salt

Mix 2 cups of flour and salt in a large bowl and create a depression in the center. Beat eggs. Add water and oil to eggs. Pour egg mixture into the depression you’ve created in the flour mix. Mix well. Use remaining flour to cover your work surface. Knead dough on the floured area four about 8 minutes. Dough should have elasticity and be smooth. Cover dough and allow to sit for 10 minutes. Divide the dough into 4 quarters. Lightly flour working area and roll each quarter out with a rolling pin into a 12×12″ square (1/16″ thick). Set them aside for 20 minutes. Cut into desired shape.

You can also use this recipe to make egg noodles. Just substitute the 2 eggs with one egg and two yolks. You can freeze the left over egg whites for use at a later date.

If you want to store them, you should allow the pieces to dry for at least 1 hour. Dry them by hanging them or placing them on a rack. After they dry, you can seal them in a Ziploc and put them in to the fridge for a couple of days. You can also freeze them for up to 8 months.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t stop thinking about the possibilities. Herb flavored pasta, spinach, raviolis, unique shapes, etc. Heck, with the right packaging and ingredients, it might even make a nice gift.

Tonight, I served it with my “almost from scratch” marinara sauce. Yum yum! Maybe someday I will post that recipe too. Or, maybe my homemade alfredo. Tomorrow, I will be making another batch of beef jerky. I am going to try it a little differently this time. I might also go ahead and make that new twist on pesto sauce that I have been thinking about. Oh, the possibilities!

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Before we headed to Karst-O-Rama, yet after our time in Gatlinburg, we spent a good deal of time hanging out at my parents place in Tennessee. We had only planned on spending a few days there, but those few days turned into a month. I was having such a great time that the days were passing as quickly as hours. If it had not been for Wormfest, Johnny would probably still be trying to think of a gentle way to coax me out of my parent’s yard.

Its been a long time since I have been able to spend more than a couple days with my parents. We have lived pretty far apart for the last 10 years. The first part of that was because I was getting my career together in a far away city, then they semi-retired and started traveling around. They did end up settling down and getting a home base, but they can’t seem to stay there for more than 2 months at a time. So, the majority of the time we saw each other was a quick 3 day weekend once or twice a year and Christmas every other year. That’s just not enough!

So what did I do in that month since I wasn’t writing weblog posts? Well my mom and I spent a good deal of time in the kitchen. We made jam from the fresh picked blackberries (yummy!). We (mostly she) made desserts like keylime pie, cheesecake (David helped), (fresh picked) blackberry pies, peach pies, chocolate pies, rhubarb pies, and decadent chocolate cake. My Aunt Joyce made some excellent desserts as well.

My mom and I also tried our hands at granola bars. While they tasted very good and disappeared , they were a failure. We aren’t sure if it was us or the recipe, but the stuff ended up with a cake texture. Good stuff, but not quite the pack for the trail bars that we were looking for. We will have to try again.

I guess this whole post is going to be about food.

While there, I tried to make beef jerky. The first batch turned out pretty well but disappeared almost instantly. Most of the second batch evaded my hungry nephew’s bottomless tummy and became cave snacks for us and our new found friends at Karst-O-Rama. I still have most of the third and fourth batches. My experiments with the fourth batch didn’t go well. I tried to use a lot of liquid flavoring and it turned out kinda spongy looking.

I also caught my first catfish. My dear uncle let us come over and fish from his pond.
Thanks Uncle Mike! After I wacked it 1346523 times to kill it, my father taught me how
to clean it. I don’t really like catfish, but I did want to know how to clean and prepare
them. Its always great to have another skill. So, then I cut the fillets into little pieces and
soaked them in milk for about 30 hrs. The next day, my uncle helped me cook them. I know,
its just battering and frying and everyone from the south knows how to fry food, but I never
fry anything. Even though I don’t like catfish, I did have to try some. Most of it was
pretty good but parts of it still tasted like mud.

I have lots more to say, but we are about to lose Internet access again, so I will cut it
here. That way I atleast get part of it up.

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Without further buildup, here’s the recipe. In a one liter bottle, add:

(using 190 proof grain alcohol)

• 1.75 cups of grain alcohol
• 2.25 cups of filtered/distilled water

(using 151 proof grain alcohol)

• 2.1 cups of grain alcohol
• 1.9 cups of water

• Roughly 20 grams of Jack Daniels wood chips. (I found these in the home & garden section of Wal Mart near the charcoal)
• 2 pepper corns

Allow to age for at least four weeks in a cool, dark place. Agitate every day or two for twenty to thirty seconds. Filter through a paper towel or coffee filter.

Add ice and enjoy! You’ve just made the world’s cheapest scotch.

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• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups water
• 6 2/3 teaspoons instant coffee (or 1/8 cup + 2/3 teaspoon)

Bring to a boil, then simmer for one hour. Turn off, cover and let sit for twelve hours. Add:

• 4 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 2/3 cups of vodka (or 1 1/3 cup everclear and 1 1/3 cup water)

This made roughly 1.25 liters of kahlua… err coffee liqueur. The cost of making it is in the neighborhood of $6 versus approximately $24 for Kahlua.

Once it was completely done… yes, about 10 am on Saturday, Jenn and I both mixed a couple of white russians, using one part everclear, one part water, two parts kahlua… err… coffee liqueur and four parts milk.

Jenn has long been of the ‘grey goose, kahlua, milk, not cream, no ice’ school of white russians, while I’m more of the ‘can you give me two since it’s last call?’ school. Both of us were quite happy with our beverages. Grain alcohol is quickly becoming my magic bullet. After the last couple of recipes, I am going to attempt to create a whiskey… details to follow.

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So, off I went in search of something, other then banana bread, to do with bananas that are on their way out. We don’t have an oven in the camper, and I haven’t made a solar one yet. Even when I did have one, I don’t think I ever had the right number of left over bananas anytime I tried to make bread. Anyway, after sorting through 100s of bread recipes, I finally found something unique.

Banana Liqueur

Yield: 1 quart

2 medium Bananas
1 teaspoon Vanilla extract
3 c Vodka
1 c Sugar Syrup (Dissolve 1 cup of sugar in 1/2 cup of water and bring to a boil. Cool before using.)

It perked my interest, and I had all of the ingredients. Well, I had Everclear instead of vodka. The Everclear is 151 proof, 190 is illegal in Florida, so I cut it with equal parts water to make it around 80 proof.

So, I mashed up the bananas, boiled up the sugar water, mixed everything together and tried to squeeze it all into the empty bottle of Everclear. It didn’t quite make it. So, I was forced to make a drink with the left overs. It was pretty good. Now, the bottle has to sit for at least ten days. After that, we strain out the banana bits and the drinking can commence. I can’t wait!

Since I made the banana juice, I have found a ton of liqueur recipes. I will probably try out a Kahlua one tomorrow night. There’s a pretty good collection of homemade liqueur recipes here.

Cheers!

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It has many benefits. One of which is unattended cooking. Its a lot like a crockpot, which I love, in that you can pretty much set it up and walk away as there’s no chance of burning your food. It uses energy directly from the sun. No draining electricity from our batteries or gas from our tanks. That means more boondocking time. Yup, no fuel needed at all. No gathering of firewood or spending time tending the coals. No fire = no smoke = drawing less attention to ourselves. No fuel also means that cooking will have less of a health and environmental impact as well as no risk of forest fire.

Yes, it is pretty creepy to leave a roast out to bake in the sun.
However, done correctly, it is completely safe. You can use it disinfect water. You can also can your fruits and veggies with it. It even works on a cloudy day. There just needs to be sunlight 30% of the time. However, I wouldn’t try it on a stormy or a cold day. I also wouldn’t feel comfortable without a thermometer. You shouldn’t try to can anything that wouldn’t be save using a bath. In other words, only things that are highly acidic are safe to can with it.

I had heard about solar ovens in the past but had never really looked into them. I ran across them again while looking at more primitive cooking methods. I know that we cannot rely on it all of the time. There are also things that the solar oven cannot do, such as drying and smoking, that we will need a fire for. But, weather permitting, I plan to use it as our main cooker as much as possible. For the days that using it is not feasible, we will have the backup options of a wood fire and a propane stove.

Well, off to search for more ways to make life easier, safer, and more ecologically friendly in the kitchen.

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