Thursday, September 18, 2008

Frozen to simmering in 2.5 hours




I've been fighting migraines for over a week now, and haven't felt like cooking much. Between the pharmacy switching one of my meds to a different generic and the hurricanes and cold fronts blowing through... I've been a zombie for a week.

I bought some frozen dinners this week, just to have some instant food in the house, when I don't have energy to actually cook. Today was absolutely perfect for solar cooking... no wind, no clouds, a very comfortable mid 80's air temp.

At 1: 30pm I put my roaster oven in the sun to heat; 30 minutes later, I got my food ready.

I grabbed my new Stansport Black Granite bowl (a bit of a disappointment, since it only holds one quart). Dumped a frozen Marie Calendar's Chicken Pot Pie into the bowl, put a glass lid on it and put that into the roaster oven. I readjusted the oven a couple of time through the cooking stage... the oven topped at almost 300F.

At 4pm, the roaster lid was completely covered in condensation, so I pulled the lid off and wiped it down; checked the inter temp of the pie (200 and simmering). I left the lid to the bowl off, and put it all back into the sun for a while to let the crust get crispy... I may have waited too long for that, but it looks beautiful!
OH, removing the roaster lid, dropped the interior temp by 50 degrees... gotta learn to not do that very much.
Added the next day: I left the pie in there for about 30 minutes longer, without the lid on the pot. The soft and gooey crust got beautifully crisp in that short time.
Yes, I will do this again! Effortless meals are a blessing when you don't feel like cooking.

2 comments:

Diana on the move... said...

i love your blog. i want to join it but cannot figure out how. it is helping me to understand solar cooking. i want to make a windshield cooker to start. i have 3 cookers in the making, but it seems forever getting just ONE started and finished. can u email me your reply to: gdiana07@gmail.com

thanks so much!

diana

Diana on the move... said...

that was my first post. just testing to see how it works.