I am impressed with myself I thought earlier. Four months after acquiring my solar cooker and not only am still using it, but my cooking has progressed in leaps and bounds from when I first started out, with roast chicken and potatoes being about as adventurous as I would get.
In fact, sunny Sunday afternoons, of which we have plenty of at this time of year, have become almost ritualistic insofar as they present an excellent opportunity to do some bulk cooking (part of any bachelor's arsenal in saving time, effort and preventing starvation during the busy week ahead). A good bulk dish appropriately apportioned and punctuated with the occasional toasted cheese and tomato sees one well into the week without having to even come close to the proverbial hot stove and the slavery associated therewith.
Granted, most of my solar meals still consist predominantly of something on the wing, but I have moved on from the roasting pan to the casserole dish and to good effect. This particular solar cooking experiment consisted of the following ingredients in rough quantities:
- About eight skinned chicken thighs and legs
Ingredients of the solar meal - A large onion - chopped
- Two tomatoes - chopped
- Half a large, yellow pepper (capsicum)
- Two thirds of a cup of cheap white wine
- A cup of Mrs Ball's Chutney (a South African favourite)
- Some honey for good measure
- Half a teaspoon of chopped garlic to keep the nasties away
I also cooked a steaming pot of basmati rice in the solar cooker (copious amounts of it considering the week's nutritional battle plan). The casserole took about 3 hours to cook (probably less in fact, but the nature of solar cooking is that once the meal is in the cooker, you forget about it, comforted in the knowledge that it will not burn or dry out, and then you go about your normal weekend behaviour).
As I consumed the first apportionment of my bulk meal that evening, I added a healthy dollop of self-righteousness to the mix by considering the negative environmental impacts I had avoided from not having cooked the same meal in an electric oven. I assumed that it would have consumed about 2kWh of electricity, and, courtesy of tables in ESKOM's 2006 annual report, I calculated that my meal would have been responsible for the following negative environmental impacts:
It would have been the cause of emitting....
- 1.96 kilograms of carbon dioxide
- 320 grams of ash
- 0.44 grams of particulates
- 25.34 grams of NOx and SOx emissions
It would have consumed...
- 1.08 kilograms of coal burned at the power station
- 2.8 litres of water, converted into steam in order to drive the turbine and thus generate the electricity.
After a bit of back patting, I pondered a little on the embodied energy of my solar cooker, made in Portugal and shipped to South Africa; on the food miles in getting the ingredients into my cooker (including the 20 km scooter ride to Stellenbosch and back); on the embodied energy of the packaging material that my ingredients came in, and on the fossil fuel energy that had to be used in rearing the chicken, growing the tomatoes, onions, peppers and garlic, collecting the honey, growing the grapes and making the wine (not one of these items was organic); not to mention the energy-guzzling airconditioning that was laid on in the supermarket in order to make my shopping experience a pleasant one. I pondered further on the report that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had released this past week after their meeting in Paris.
Suddenly I didn't feel quite so self-righteous after all.
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 Ingredients in and ready for ignition |
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 The first apportionment |
