Despite looking like an outer space receiver of some sort, this is how we cook the majority of our food. This huge solar oven was hand made by a man in northern California who we met at a fair this summer. It has all the little details of someone who has carefully crafted something after using and observing a how a tool works and how it can be improved. It swivels in two directions, and has a hole in one of the reflectors that allows the sun to hit a target and help one align it for most heat, and has a large gimbaled shelf inside which fits multiple dishes at one time. It gets quite hot. Right now, a big pot of soup is cooking. There is a cow that is slaughtered once a week in town, late Friday night, and then for sale at the grocery store Saturday. We've gotten in the habit of buying "chambarette" which are slices of leg bone, with marrow and some meat, for soup, that gets cooked and eaten with all sorts of other ingredients over the course of a few days...
It has also turned out some nice loaves of bread, and kept a pot of chai simmering constantly through frigid January.
And below is the old version of the solar oven, smaller and portable, but mostly I wanted to post this picture because it shows our first four legged friend, who was grazing on the land when we arrived early in the winter. Unfortunately, his owner eventually showed up to retrieve him, but not until I'd gotten quite attached.
And it is actually quite sunny here most of the time. All of my pictures show dramatic cloudy skies, but that is just when I like to take pictures I guess because the clouds are usually wonderful when they do appear.
So, do you all also have a regular gas powered stove? What fuel do the locals use to cook? How do you keep the meat from going bad (I don't see a refrigerator)?
ReplyDeleteLove the horse pic.
The roof is looking good. Are there wooden supports you are using to hold it up while you are building it?
Thanks! Yes- We have a propane stove- though we do cook most of our food in the solar oven. We have a small homemade fridge that works by evaporative cooling- I'll take a picture of it later. But so far, we've just cooked the meat soup when its been near freezing at night, so we leave it in the solar oven over night, and then it reboils.
DeleteThere are no wooden supports in the building of the vault- this is a technique where no formwork is needed, that is specifically used in areas where this is not a lot of wood available.