After a long hiatus, I am finally back to blogging! The clinical doctorate program was more intense than I anticipated, which left little time for cooking, much less writing about it. Thank God my husband is a good cook! During one of the most difficulty stretches, my blog started receiving hundreds of spam comments every hour. Fortunately, they weren’t getting through, but it was enough that I had to take down the blog for a couple of days, and lost all my photos in the process. At least the recipes aren’t lost!

To celebrate my graduation, I signed up for a solar cooking class. Registration included a solar oven. Little did I know that my husband had already ordered a different solar oven for me as a birthday gift. My plan is to try different recipes in both ovens, to see how they compare. For my first trial, I cooked white rice on a partly cloudy day.

The Solar Hot Pot is the oven that came with my class. The oven consists of a black metal bowl inside a glass bowl with a glass cover. The pot sits inside an aluminum reflector. The rice cooked in glass dish inside the black bowl.

My husband bought me the Sunflair Solar Oven. This oven is a fold out oven made out of the same material as a windshield shade. It came with two collapsing plastic pots. This would definitely be better on a backpacking trip.
The rice took approximately 2 hours to cook in the Hot Pot, and about 3.5 hours in the Sunflair. The rice was good from both-stickier than what comes out of our rice cooker.

Rice from the Solar Oven

Rice from the Sunflair Oven
I served the rice with one of our favorite stir fry recipes.

My plan is to try out the solar ovens with veggies from time to time. I’ll keep reporting back! I would love to hear from others who have tried solar cooking. What was your experience?