Food! When you spend all day running about outdoors, food becomes a very important part of life. Appetites increase, and things taste better. Our goal is one day to be able to grow, hunt, or gather all of our food from the land around us, although I think we'll always be buying some things, like olive oil, or Nicaraguan organic dark chocolate...
The first picture is part of our weekly harvest of Dandelion greens. We can usually find enough from the meadows in the rural development we live in, but we'll also bring some bags when we're out fishing, hiking, or visiting friends, in case we see a good Dandelion field and have the time to gather them. We chop them, wash out the grit, and dry a bunch in our solar dehydrator for winter soups and infusions (a strong herbal tea). We almost always keep a quart or so to make some Dandelion Pesto:
1 quart Dandelion greens, minced
1/4 cup of Olive Oil
1 or 2 teaspoons black pepper (really!)
3 to 4 cloves garlic
2 handfulls toasted Sunflower Seeds (or almonds, or Pine Nuts, or ?)
Grated raw cheddar cheese
Serve over your favorite whole grain carbohydrate, which brings us to the next photo:
I had some extra time one day and made up a batch of homemade whole wheat pasta, dried by hanging on one of the ladders to the loft (that's why the pasta tastes like bare feet!). It was delicious served with Dandelion green pesto.
Our next photo shows the solar cooker that we just built. The box is a large, heavy duty styrofoam cooler, purchased for $10. We lined the box with aluminum foil, glued on with diluted Elmer's Glue, cut out a piece of glass to fit the top, made reflectors out of cardboard lined with aluminum foil (glued on). The reflectors have tabs that insert into slots cut in the styrofoam, and are glued and/or tied together on the corners. Inside, we put a small baking pan. We prop the cooker at the correct angle to point generally towards the sun, put a dark colored pot in (we use a dark blue enamel-ware casserole pot with lid) to soak up the solar rays. This thing works great! We can cook a casserole meal in three hours. Jeanne even cooked a whole chicken in it! If we want soup for lunch without heating up a wood stove, we just stick the pot in the cooker and have hot soup in 30 minutes. It produces so much heat that the styrofoam box is starting to deform, and that makes us worry about fumes from the polystyrene, so our next cooker will probably be made out of wood. For our first try though, we're really happy with this one, a $10 cooker.
Here's the solar dehydrator that we made. This is what we use to dry both medicinal and edible herbs. It will dry herbs in 2 or 3 days of good sun. It will work for some vegetables and fruit, but we need to increase the efficiency as sometimes we end up with moldy dried food.
The first picture is part of our weekly harvest of Dandelion greens. We can usually find enough from the meadows in the rural development we live in, but we'll also bring some bags when we're out fishing, hiking, or visiting friends, in case we see a good Dandelion field and have the time to gather them. We chop them, wash out the grit, and dry a bunch in our solar dehydrator for winter soups and infusions (a strong herbal tea). We almost always keep a quart or so to make some Dandelion Pesto:
1 quart Dandelion greens, minced
1/4 cup of Olive Oil
1 or 2 teaspoons black pepper (really!)
3 to 4 cloves garlic
2 handfulls toasted Sunflower Seeds (or almonds, or Pine Nuts, or ?)
Grated raw cheddar cheese
Serve over your favorite whole grain carbohydrate, which brings us to the next photo:
I had some extra time one day and made up a batch of homemade whole wheat pasta, dried by hanging on one of the ladders to the loft (that's why the pasta tastes like bare feet!). It was delicious served with Dandelion green pesto.
Our next photo shows the solar cooker that we just built. The box is a large, heavy duty styrofoam cooler, purchased for $10. We lined the box with aluminum foil, glued on with diluted Elmer's Glue, cut out a piece of glass to fit the top, made reflectors out of cardboard lined with aluminum foil (glued on). The reflectors have tabs that insert into slots cut in the styrofoam, and are glued and/or tied together on the corners. Inside, we put a small baking pan. We prop the cooker at the correct angle to point generally towards the sun, put a dark colored pot in (we use a dark blue enamel-ware casserole pot with lid) to soak up the solar rays. This thing works great! We can cook a casserole meal in three hours. Jeanne even cooked a whole chicken in it! If we want soup for lunch without heating up a wood stove, we just stick the pot in the cooker and have hot soup in 30 minutes. It produces so much heat that the styrofoam box is starting to deform, and that makes us worry about fumes from the polystyrene, so our next cooker will probably be made out of wood. For our first try though, we're really happy with this one, a $10 cooker.
Here's the solar dehydrator that we made. This is what we use to dry both medicinal and edible herbs. It will dry herbs in 2 or 3 days of good sun. It will work for some vegetables and fruit, but we need to increase the efficiency as sometimes we end up with moldy dried food.
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