A productive solar cooking day

by Joyce Lee
(Hurricane, Ut)

Today I wasted no time setting up my hot pot and my sport oven for a good productive day of solar cooking.
I was needing to bake some goodies and snacks for my husbands lunches this week and he had specifically asked for peanut butter cookies.
These are easy and fast; having just 4 ingredients and no mixing with an electric mixer so I figured I could be done pretty quick and try out the new recipe I found for oatmeal snickerdoodles as well.
Before I started on the cookies I put out the Hot Pot cooker to heat while I mixed up the ingredients for dinner. A turkey and Bulgur casserole. (Bulgar is wheat kernels that have been steamed, dried, and crushed. It is not exactly the same as cracked wheat, which is simply a wheat kernel broken into fragments without being cooked)
By the time I was done with that my sport oven had heated to 250. Perfectly on target to hit around 300 degrees by the time I could mix up the cookies.
I bake a dozen cookies at a time in my Sport oven. It took 35 minutes per pan for the peanut butter cookies on this beautiful warm Fall day.
Only problem was I was cooking in my daughter's front yard which has perfect sun for solar cooking but lots of hungry little neighborhood kids roaming around with my 4 year old grandson.
There weren't many left of the 36 cookies I baked so had to start over.
Never did get around to the snickerdoodles but that will wait for another day!
Meanwhile, I got a lot of Grandma points for the cookies and for helping to make a comfortable bed in a box for a very pregnant praying mantis the kids found. I love cooking outside!
The casserole for dinner was done by 3 so I wrapped it with a blanket to keep warm till time to eat. It was a very productive solar cooking day!


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Thanks again Joyce,
Great narrative of a "typical solar cooking day" ...I took the liberty of defining Bulgar for those of us who were not familar with it.
Nathan
Admin.