A little natural recipe for you… it’s not solar (unless you have ALL DAY to let the stuff get to a boil, and if you DO adapt this for solar, please share your experience!) but it’s a defacto local specialty, and looks pretty easy to make. Rather than redirect you, I’ll reprint the recipe here. Hey, you KNOW you know where some dandilions are… what are you waiting for?

How to Make Dandelion Wine

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Dandelions are in season during the summer and spring months, but they lend themselves deliciously to a beverage you can serve year-round. April and May are the best months to harvest dandelions for this purpose in the Northern hemisphere.[1] Try it out and taste it for yourself.

Ingredients

• 1 package (7 g) dried yeast
• 1/4 cup (60 mL) warm water
• 2 quarts (230 g) whole dandelion flowers
  • Using 2 quarts+ of just the petals can make for a less bitter wine.[2]
• 4 quarts water (3.785 L)
• 1 cup (240 mL) orange juice
• 3 tablespoons (45 g) fresh lemon juice
• 3 tablespoons (45 g) fresh lime juice
• 8 whole cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon (1.25 g) powdered ginger
• 3 tablespoons (18 g) coarsely chopped orange zest; avoid any white pith
• 1 tablespoon (6 g) coarsely chopped lemon zest; avoid any white pith
• 6 cups (1200 g) sugar

Steps

1. Wash and clean the blossoms well. Think of it as a fruit or vegetable; you don’t want bugs or dirt in your food. Remove all green material.
2. Soak flowers for two days.
3. Place the blossoms in the four quarts of water, along with the lime, orange, and lemon juices.
4. Stir in the ginger, cloves, orange peels, lemon peels, and sugar. Bring the mix to a boil for an hour.
5. Strain through filter papers (coffee filters are recommended). Let the wine cool down for a while.
6. Stir the yeast in while the wine is still warm, but below 110 degrees F.
7. Leave it alone and let it stand overnight.
8. Pour it into bottles, poke a few holes in a balloon and place over the tops of the bottles to create an airlock, and store them in a dark place for at least three weeks so that it can ferment.
9. Optional: Rack the wine several times. Racking means waiting until the wine clears, then pouring the liquid into another container, leaving the lees (sediment) at the bottom of the first container.[3]
10. After that time, cork and store the bottles in a cool place. Allow the wine time to age. Most recipes recommend waiting at least six months, preferably a year.[4]

Tips

• Pasteurization uses sixty-five degrees Celsius for half an hour to avoid changing character.
• Pick the flowers right before starting so they’re fresh. Midday is when they are fully open.[5] Alternatively, you can freeze the flowers immediately after harvesting, then pull off the petals right before preparing the wine.[6]
• It may take more than three weeks for your wine to ferment if your home is cold. Try putting the bottles on top of your water heater or behind your refrigerator for faster fermentation. Be aware though, fermentation at higher temperatures probably won’t change the taste of the wine, but can lead to higher levels of fusile alcohols, which can cause hangovers.
• This recipe will produce a light wine that mixes well with tossed salad or baked fish. To add body or strength, add a sweetener,raisins, dates, figs, apricots, or rhubarb.[7]

Warnings

• Avoid using dandelions that may have been chemically treated. Also, try to stay away from dandelions that have been graced by the presence of dogs, or that grow within 50 feet of a road.

Things You’ll Need

• Coffee filters or straining paper
• Empty, clean wine bottles
• Large beverage container to strain liquid into
• A large pot you can boil the dandelion mixture in
• A place to store the fermenting wine

Sources and Citations

• Texascooking.com - Source of information

1. ↑ http://winemakermag.com/feature/196.html
2. ↑ http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/dandelio.asp
3. ↑ http://www.thecompostbin.com/2006/05/how-to-make-dandelion-wine.html
4. ↑ http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/dandelio.asp
5. ↑ http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/dandelio.asp
6. ↑ http://www.thecompostbin.com/2006/05/how-to-make-dandelion-wine.html
7. ↑ http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/dandelio.asp

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Make Dandelion Wine. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Hello again from the kitchen. Since I stay in a kind of industrial area, it is easiest to cook undisturbed on weekends. So, it’s Sunday and it’s also partly cloudy. Thought it would rain this morning, but it never did get around to it, and by 1 pm, the clouds were scattering.

At that same time, I assembled the cooker and set chopped sweet peppers out to steam. Back to basics for now. This time, I’m using two round black baking pans clipped together with magnetic memo clips. And in the bottom of the now upturned colander is a stone. Overall things seem much sturdier. But the sun is still deciding on whether to join the party. It keeps coming and going, which can’t provide that much heat.

The sun is officially out at 1:30. It’s windy, but nothing is blowing over today. Finally. The temperature in the bag is right below 100°, and it’s a “chilly in the shadows” day. That’s after more than 1/2 hour out. Obviously clouds are not going to be my usual dream-laden friends when it comes to solar cooking.

While we wait, I might as well review the book I just finished… Solar Cooking for Home and Camp by Linda Frederick Yaffe. This book is much less than some about how to construct a cooker or why you should try one (although both are discussed). It assumes you’re ready to get cooking but have no idea what to prepare. Sounds like me! The recipes are organized by groups as in a regular cookbook, and most sections contain at least one recipe with “easy” in the title. Most require few ingredients and little preparation. And they sound good, too, though there aren’t any pictures. Here’s a sample recipe that sounds delicious:

Pecan Salmon

1. Place in an oiled pot:
4 Salmon Steaks, about 1 1/2 inches thick
2. Mix together in a small bowl:
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 cup chopped pecans
1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3. Spread the mixture evenly over the steaks.
4. Cover and place in the solar cooker for 2 hours, or until the fish flakes easily with a fork.

Simple and easy to understand, yet gourmet. It doesn’t take more than an hour to get through this book, short of stopping to MAKE things along the way. Speaking of hours, let’s check in on the peppers one hour on the stove.

Right as I wrote that, the whole oven crashed off its ledge, so I got a chance to see what state things were in. As usual things SMELL great. The peppers are soft, but still have a tart edge. There is a tear in the oven bag so I taped it with aluminum foil tape. The magnets fell out of the clips, and the plates were hot. Everything reassembled, I moved to a wider ledge that allows for a bit of rotation leeway and set back up. It’s now 2:20 as I write this.

At the 2:45 mark, it was time to head out for the afternoon so I checked again. Everything was done to perfection! Some positive reinforcement at last, after the debacle the other day. Things smelled, looked, and tasted great. The pot was hot but not untouchable. Mental note… the less water, the faster things heat up. Veggies are good for this, as proved by my partially cloudy day results. Perhaps one of these days I’ll work up to main dishes. For now, bon appetit!

Mmmm! My first home-cooked solar meal.

The other day, being Easter, seemed like a perfect day to set up the cooker for a test run. As I mentioned previously, when I set up the unit the first time, the window-shade was so flexible that it had trouble standing up, much less resisting wind. So, as you can see, the oven now sports a cardboard shell which I attached with vel-cro and safety pins for ease of disassembly. It’s not as pristine as the older version, but it DOES work.

Initially, I placed my oven thermometer in the oven bag without a pot, and put everything in the sun at 11:50 am to see what would happen (right picture above). Twenty minutes later, the temperature showed 175° F! Wow! Another 15 minutes, and the temperature was… 150°? Hmmm, I did remember reading that it was the black pot, not the cooking bag, that created heat. Next, I went to the store to buy a round black baking pan to use as a top for my pot (or, in this case, the bottom), and by 2pm, everything was ready to actually COOK something.

Since the satisfaction of success seemed critical, I chose to stick with an oldie-but-goodie food staple, grilled cheese sandwiches. At 2:10 pm, I stacked two sandwiches in the pot and put them out. The temperature still registered at 150°, placed in front of the oven bag. By the time I came out to check on everything 15 minutes later, they were done! Pop them off onto a plate, and a quick wipe of the non-stick surface, and preparation and clean-up were finished. Now that’s my kind of cooking.

After the success of Easter, which convinced even my skeptical friend that this COULD work, I set out to cook something a little more ambitious. Today’s menu: carrots. I’m reading a book on solar food drying right now (you’ll be seeing a review here very soon), which listed carrots on the “great for drying” list. Well, the processes for cooking and dehydrating are a little different, but I had some carrots that needed immediate love, so I figured I’d just see how things went if I dumped chopped carrots into a pan and put them out sans water.

Result? Mixed. This time, I put everything out at about 12:30 pm, and left it there for about 45 minutes to an hour. The pot tipped off its stand once somewhere along the way, and I set everything up in a new location, which didn’t seem to get as much light, even though there were no shadows obstructing anything. So I compensated by keeping a better eye on the oven and rotating it a little over time. It didn’t seem like the pans were quite as hot to touch when I took them off the “burner”. When I opened up the bag, the smell was WONDERFUL. A big billow of warm steam that smelled like veggie soup. That alone let me declare the experiment a success. The food itself? Not very cooked (the carrots were still crunchy, though they were softer), but overall, good flavor. If I’d had longer to wait around the house today, I think they’d have softened up just fine. Next time, I’ll add a little water, too.

So, there you have it. Not a total success, but enough so to keep me very motivated toward refining this whole solar thing. And it’s seriously gratifying for an afternoon’s work of setting everything up. Even if you’re a glutton for success, you CAN bring solar into your life today!

Here it is, my first solar oven. One successful project down, and many, many to go! This solar cooker required almost no investment, took about five minutes to make, and looks pretty much like the result shown in my previous post about windshield shade solar cookers.

For the stand, I used the blue bin pictured above, which conveniently enough was on the trash in an alley this morning. I also managed to scrounge up an old wire grill surface from a naught-used corner of my house, and it just so happened that it fit into the blue container perfectly. Must be a sign. This is important, given the windshield shade’s flexibility, because it provides a solid cook surface on which the pots and pans can rest.

In fact, the windshield shade is SO flexible, I decided I will have to glue some cardboard to its rear sides to provide enough stiffness to withstand wind before attempting to actually cook a meal. Los Angeles has plenty of wind, and it wasn’t more than a minute before a naughty little gust had crumpled up my cooker beyond all hope of reflection. Which just makes me want to further investigate wind power, but, one thing at a time… In deference to the wind, I also decided to place a chunk of 4×4 wood in the blue bin, under the oven, in order to add weight and provide optimal support for the reflective surface under cooking vessels. So there it is! Now that everything is ready to go, and I’m dreaming of sun-baked breads, success is smelling sweet already!

The Complete Guide to Solar Cuisine with 150 Easy Sun-Cooked Recipes

Here’s a great read for someone getting started in the world of solar cooking. Not only do Lorraine Anderson and Rick Palkovic clearly explain the reasons for integrating a solar oven into your life, they also back them up with a variety of yummy-looking recipes that are tailor made for solar cooking. And there are no messy equipment lists getting in between you and your solar cooking dreams. You can purchase a copy through Amazon here.

Here’s a list, taken from the book, about what foods are best and worst suited to solar oven cooking:

Easy-to-Cook Foods (1-2 hours)

Fish, chicken, egg-and-cheese dishes, white rice, fruit, above-ground vegetables.

Moderately Hard-to-Cook Foods (3-4 hours)

Bread, brown rice, root vegetables, lentils, most meat.

Hardest-to-Cook Foods (5-8 hours)

Large roasts, soups and stews, most dried beans.

The first half of the book is a summary of important facts about solar cooking, including the history, the areas of the earth best-suited, and how to construct a few solar cookers, all under $15 for supplies. They also include great “cheats”, or ways that you can make everything work with the items you already own. Then come the recipes. They’re divided by ease-of-cooking. A sample”starter” recipe:

Applesauce

6 Golden Delicious Apples, peeled quartered and cored
Juice of one lemon
Dash of Cinnamon (optional)

• Place the apples in a dark pot, sprinkle the juice over the apples, and cover the pot tightly.
• Bake in solar sooker for 3 to 4 hours, until apples can be easily pierced with a fork.
• Mash apples with a hand masher or in a blender on low, adding cinnamon if you want.

Does it get any easier than that? Now that you’ve whet your cooking appetite, how about this artichoke frittata? It’s definitely on my “to try” list!

Artichoke Frittata

yield: 4 servings

6 eggs
6 saltines
2 (6-ounce) jars marinated artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
2 bunches scallions, chopped
1 clove garlic, pressed or minced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
2 1/2 cups grated cheddar cheese
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
dash hot pepper sauce
dash Worcestershire sauce

• lightly oil a dark 8-inch-square or 9-inch-round baking pan.
• beat the eggs in a large bowl until frothy. Crumble the saltines into the eggs and beat again.
• add the artichoke hearts to the eggs. Stir in the scallions, garlic, parsley, cheese, salt, pepper, hot pepper sauce, and Worcestershire sauce.
• Pour into the prepared baking pan, cover, and bake for 2 to 3 hours in the solar cooker, until firm.

Mouth watering yet? This is just the beginning. Get this book and get cooking today!

If you’re into off-grid living, then it’s quite possible you also like to escape to the great outdoors every once in a while. And though you’re super smart and careful, you may find yourself in a position one day when you need to literally go back to nature for some food. Even if you don’t find yourself in this unenviable position, it’s valuable to know what in your environment is toxic, and what plants are edible. It makes for great conversation when you can pick up a plant off the side of the trail and offer it to a friend! Read this survival tip from simplesurvival.net to help you understand the risks and processes for testing the flora of your area for edibility.

You can also learn a lot by reading books on Native American traditional cooking from tribes local to you. Though there are not always a wealth of cookbooks out there, several websites catalog user contributions on the topic. Here’s an interesting example with a few recipes and a different interface from most. NativeTech.org is another good site. Look out for salad recipes and vegetable side dishes. They often include native plants that are uniquely well-suited to grow in your area. These would be excellent candidates for planting in your own home garden. Finally, when you do have a crop of something native, experiment often with cooking it different ways (bonus points for cooking with solar or alternative energy sources!), and share that knowledge with others. You can do it here if you like! That way, the wondrous internet can do its job in spreading the word about native plants. And we can all enjoy an exotic meal together without ever hitting the supermarket. Yum!