Like a lot of families in Canada, yesterday was our turkey day. I had Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s, who cooked chicken instead of the traditional turkey. Chicken and gravy, mashed squash, basmati rice, home-made cranberry apple spiced sauce, and salad. Mini angel food cakes with home-made cherry pie filling (from their garden) and whipped cream. Yum! I thoroughly enjoyed the dinner, and Cody was definitely a gentleman by not whining too much under the table for scraps.
So, today I’m having a lazy day. I initially intended to get a lot done, but thought it would be fun to do a couple of things that have been on my radar to do.
1. Harvest a tray of worm castings from the Worm Farm I started in this post. I could have done it last month before I left for Italy, but never got around to it before my sister started to look after them. I will say that there are loads of worms now! I harvested over 1/2 of a large dish pan of castings, and put back about 4 good cups of mostly worms into the bin. Note to self, make sure that you don’t over water the bin before you go to separate the worms from the castings --- it was more difficult than it needed to be.
2. Break out the Sun Oven I bought, to see how I can cook a meal inside my house on a sunny day without using the oven! I’m still learning how to focus it, but I think it is a feasible thing to use, even in my house (I have a large window that faces south).
You can see by the temperature gauge that its getting up to almost 250 d. Fahrenheit (and that with just being focused for about 1/2 hour. I just read the temperature after 1 hour of it being in the sun, and its holding steady at 250 d. That’s about high temp on a slow cooker, and it is supposed to retain heat and be able to be used as a heat retained cooker, so I’m going to monitor the temperature and hopefully by dinner time, everything will be done! I still have 2 good hours of cooking, and have 2 casseroles inside, the bottom one with mushroom rice, and the top one with a 1 lb meatloaf and tomato sauce. Judging by the temperatures so far, I can see why they say that in the summertime the Sun Oven will get up to between 350 d. & 400 d. Fahrenheit! I know I’m going to be doing some baking when I’m camping next year!
Such a good day to count my blessings. Hoping you and your family have a great one too!
Update!
Here is what the meatloaf looked (temperature test), sliced, and with the rice I made. Its supposed to be sunny all this week, so I’ll be trying to make some dinner to be ready for me when I get home from work this week!
Ok, its about 2 1/2 hrs after putting the rice and meatloaf in the solar cooker.... I took the temperature of the meat loaf, and it is done, but the rice is still a bit crunchy. I'm hoping that the heat of it will help it absorb the remaining moisture after I stirred it up. If I would have heated the water/soup mix up in the microwave before I mixed the rice into it, it would have been done now too. Better plan would have been to put it in the solar cooker at 11:30 vs 12:30. It won't be that steep of a learning curve to use this oven though! I'm really looking forward to making some cookies when I go camping this coming summer!
ReplyDelete