Food 09 Jul 2006 04:32 pm
local food: solar cauliflower
My One Local Summer meal is a day late. Either that, or the week starts on Monday. Why? Because last week was doomed. First, I had the flu all week, and hardly ate at all until Friday. (Damn relapses, anyway.) Because of the flu, I missed the Thursday market. And then, though some bizarre database error, my SPUD order,which should have been full of locally-grown goodness, arrived with only a few canned goods. And then Josh and I had a misunderstanding about when things were happening Saturday, so I didn’t get a ride to the Saturday market. Ordinarily I would have simply hopped on the bus yesterday, but I was still getting an awful lot of dizziness, and that’s just no fun on the bus.
But today, at last! Today I can stand up long enough to cook, and I recognized that I had a few things around worth cooking. For lunch I had a very simple dish of cauliflower braised in its own juices, oop-style, with garlic, thyme, olive oil, salt, and pepper. The garlic and thyme came from my back yard; the cauliflower came, iirc, from Growing Things in Carnation, about a 25-mile drive. It’s pretty good. Josh says, “A++, would eat again.”
I made it in my brand new solar cooker. Finally, after meaning to make one for almost 25 years, I just went ahead and bought one already. It’s a neat way to cook food without heating the house or fussing with a grill. I haven’t quite figured out how to focus the thing, but it still gets up to 300 with no problem whatsoever, and when I get it focussed I expect it to be a fair bit hotter. I don’t know that I’ll ever get enough control over its temperature to bake well in it, but it’s functioned excellently as a slow cooker. I’m looking forward to slow-roasting plums in it next month.
on 09 Jul 2006 at 6:09 pm 1.Liz said …
Solar cooker… excellent! It’s up to you if you’re early or late… do you want to do two meals this week?
Glad you’re feeling better!
on 09 Jul 2006 at 6:20 pm 2.Erin said …
Roast plums?
Yum!
Are they sort of like baked apples? What spices do they require?
The solar oven looks really neat. I’m trying to think of how I would focus it without using shadows. Hmmm.
on 09 Jul 2006 at 6:40 pm 3.Cam Sculpin said …
The physical part of focusing the oven isn’t hard. In this model, there’s an extensible leg in the back that tilts the oven, and a swinging tray in the oven that keeps the food level. The trouble I’ve had is deciding when it’s focused. There are some homemade ones out there that have handy focusing doohickeys on them — just a little rod sticking up somewhere on the oven, and when it doesn’t cast a shadow, you know you’ve got the thing focused. I’ll probably glue something on.
How I’d do it without looking, though… Hm. Well, I think you could do it pretty well just by knowing the date, time, and latitude, and having a very finely-tuned sense of which way is which. That’s practically all I’m going on, since I’m having trouble getting a good visual identification of whether or not it’s focused, and it’s working out fairly well all the same. There are talking oven thermometers now, aren’t there?
It occurs to me now that if I wind up doing a lot of solar cooking, and if I ever replace the bark paths with stone or tile, it would be insanely awesome to have a compass rose large enough for the solar oven to sit on. I could probably
work out the mathfind somebody to work out the math to determine which angle and direction are optimal for which time, and write some little program that tells me what to do. Plus, it would look extraordinarily cool.As for the roast plums, I don’t spice them at all. Roast plums are what you get when you’re trying to dry plums in your oven and run out of patience.
I guess you could do all sorts of fancy things — thread them on to herb stalks, drizzle them with honey — but the most I myself would want to do is to top them with a dollop of cream when they’re done.
Two local meals may just happen this week! I have a whole quart of shelled peas from the backyard in the fridge. Hmm! If I got some tomatoes and made some paneer… *plot plot scheme*…
on 09 Jul 2006 at 6:54 pm 4.Rechercher said …
25 years?
on 09 Jul 2006 at 7:13 pm 5.Cam Sculpin said …
25 years. My longest-running procrastinated task ever. Well, more or less.
When I was a kid, I had Steven Caney’s Playbook. It’s a great book, with a lot of projects for children who aren’t television-obsessed: you can learn to make a knitting frame, a wave machine, pomanders, a salt garden, paper whistles, cardboard boomerangs, and all sorts of good stuff. One of the projects is a solar heater made out of scrap cardboard, glue, aluminum foil, and paper fasteners. I never got around to making it because it sounded so fiddly and we almost never had enough cardboard or any paper fasteners around the house. (It never would have occurred to me to say, “Mom, would you go buy me some cardboard and paper fasteners?”) But it sounded fascinating.
Okay, I am exaggerating a little when I say 25 years. I did forget about it for a few years. And then several years ago I got interested in solar whatsits again, and started reading about how to make the ovens. But making them appears to me to be just slightly too far over my own personal pain-in-the-neck threshold.
on 09 Jul 2006 at 9:11 pm 6.geekdiva said …
You are always doing the most fascinating things!
BTW, I don’t know if you still have that mirror and whatnot put aside for me after all this while. Either way is fine, but if you still have them, I’d like to work on clearing that stuff out of your way.
[Mail sent. - Cam]