Solar Cooking Archive Discussion Forums

Bill Bradley · Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 21 Location: Springfield MA USA

On Saturday July 26 we cooked a complete meal for 15 people totally in the sun and did a power point presentation on solar cooking after dinner. It was a full meal including appetizers, main course, and desserts. This attracted enough attention to entice a local TV station (WWLP Channel 22 in Springfield Massachusetts) to send a photographer and we had our moment of fame on the evening news and again on the morning news. They introduced the story as "A Solar Feast in Springfield" We taped the story from the air but unfortunately the station did not put the video on their web site to make it more widely available.

The Sun gods must have been with us this time because on Friday and Saturday we had perfect sun even though it rained most of the two weeks before and the week after the dinner. The appetizers were apple slices and nachos. The main course was a chicken, potato and veggie dish supplemented by baked beans, corn on the cob and corn bread. The desserts were chocolate chip cookies and blueberry cake with non solar cooked ice cream. One guest brought several bottles of his prize winning homemade wines.

We set up nine cookers in our front yard. Four of the cookers were our own EB Cookers www.earthboundtech.com . Four were box ovens of which two were homemade solar ovens similar to Radabaugh's Heavens Flame oven and the other two were a Global Sun Oven and an SOS Sport. The final cooker was a Cookit. All the cookers got used except the Cookit. We used the solar ovens for baking and did most of the other cooking in the EB Cookers. I have some pictures of the array of cookers that I can post later.
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Bill Bradley, EarthboundTech

SharonID · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 74 Location: northern Idaho

Glad you lucked out on the weather! Sounds like an amazing event (you'd be a good person to add something to the Organizing Solar Cooking Events on the wiki, I bet Wink

).

I wasn't so lucky with my first solar cooking holiday event. Didn't quite manage to lure any reporters (though the local paper did put it on the calendar and the food co-op newsletter gave me article space beforehand), but it might be just as well, as the weather was not co-operative. Still, at least a couple dozen people came through and hung out for various parts, and considering the weather maybe it's better we weren't swamped with reporters. I was impressive—not everyone could have managed eight pounds of chicken wings in the clouds (up to 50% much of late morning and early afternoon) and winds (probably gusting to 15-20 mph at the worst of it) we had that day! I actually pulled off an amazing amount of cooking in far from ideal conditions (it cleared somewhat more around 3pm, which at least got the solar kettle cooker going good for fast quesadillas), but it took a lot of running around with boosters and extra covers, etc, so I was really grateful my husband was there to help chat up the visitors, because it was more than a full-time job keeping the cookers going at max efficiency in those conditions, and the girl who was going to be my primary kid assistant (a great girl from the Roots & Shoots project who has been using her EZ-3 lots) got sick and couldn't come, so we were beyond short-handed. Still, a lot of people saw that it works and ate some great solar foods and took away information hand-outs.

Anyway, yours sounds like a fabulous success! Kudos! Very Happy

Regards,
SharonID
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Idaho Regional Representative, International Women's Writing Guild
Visit the Guild at: http://www.iwwg.org/