Recipe - Pea Soup in the Solar Oven - YUMMY SUNNY

We have received our solar oven (mail ordered it from some river in Southern America) on Saturday late in the afternoon and there was only about one hour of sunshine left, so we planned to test-cook on Sunday.  Note, Roberto's reflections. He is still suspicious at that point.

Then on Sunday it was pretty windy in the morning and the collectors flew all over our backyard, so that we really cooked for the first time on Monday; Oma Elkes Erbsensuppe (Granny Elke's Pea Soup) :

Ingredients (for 4 people):
1 lb of bacon
1 lbs dried peas (I used 1/2 lbs yellow and 1/2 lbs green split peas)
1 large red onion
2 potatoes
4 carrots
optional: 2 celery

I had soaked the dried peas for 24 hours and then chopped the bacon, the red onion in small pieces as well as the potatoes and carrots and put everything into a pot.


To cook with a solar oven, you need a shallow pot of dark color to attract and store the heat better. Here is ours.

Add water (it's a soup, duh!); enough to have about a half of an inch covering the ingredients and put it all it the solar oven. I put it in at around 11am.

After only a few minutes, the temperature started to rise.

Then, at about 3pm, it was 375 degrees and I thought, "I could bake with that thing!"

Then at around 5pm, we had dinner ... yumm!

We certainly love our solar oven. While it takes a day to cook and you have to plan and prepare your dinner at breakfast time, you do not have to tend it at all (Set it and forget it!) and you use ZERO electricity. Of course it helps to live in SoCal with abundance of sunshine almost everyday. It works best when there are no clouds and no pollution, so the folks in the LA basin may have a harder time but it should still work perfectly.

Needless to say that my thrifty man now wants one meal per day from this magic cooker.


















"Nature never says one thing and wisdom another." Decimus Junius Juvenalis