Home cooking advice?

...Of course there are many different Italian and Middle Eastern cuisines and cooking traditions, but these broad labels are enough for now.) I am neither Italian nor Middle Eastern–my native regional dish would be a steak with a corncob on the side–but I live in a Mediterranean climate, and the vegetables and herbs and fruits used in these cuisines thrive in my yard, and are easy to buy locally. This food just makes sense here. And we like it. If I...

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Best veggies to cook in a solar oven

...true to some extent. This is what I’ve learned about sun oven veggies. The cooking results are analogous to steaming. Vegetables which do well with steam cooking do well when tossed into a sun oven. Now, some people may counter that all veggies do well when steamed. Many people eat most of their veggies steamed as a matter of course. I do not. I rarely steam my food. I think most vegetables do better when they lose water and caramelize a bit (e.g....

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Solar Oven Triumph: Fluffy Egg Strata

...as to be out all day. But other dishes may only need two to three hours of cooking. Morning cooking is more of a “sure thing” while starting a dish at noon is risky, but possible. You learn to plan accordingly. Another learning curve is figuring out what kind of foods do well in a solar oven. Eggs, it turns out, really like solar ovens! This is logical, because eggs do well when cooked low and slow. (Have you ever tried the Eggs Francis Picabia re...

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Campfire Cooking: Fish in Clay (& Vegetarian Options!)

...rtunate to have taken their class on cooking with clay. This is an ancient cooking technique. Clay provides the insulation necessary to keep the fish from scorching on the fire. You can also try cooking veggies and firm fruit in clay, though Pascal also showed us that for veggies, a layer of grass can also work quite nicely. The principle is the same: insulation. We’ll talk the grass/veggie technique at the end of this post. For cooking a fish in...

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Announcing Our New Solar Cooking Initiative

...use it because, being a product of the 60’s, it has a very small, shallow cooking box, suited only for cooking hot dogs and frozen dinners. So, anyway, being cheap and not fond of TV dinners, I decided to make a proper, box-style solar oven (there are a lot of DIY plans out there) and test it out come the equinox, when the days are longer and the sun a little higher. Then, just as I was about to start construction, the good folks at a sun oven co...

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