Solar Chicken Soup

My favorite soup is chicken soup so last week I made a batch on the solar funnel.

Basic ingredients were-

1 whole chicken
4 cans chicken stock
carrots
onions
diced potatoes
2 or 3 bay leaves
salt and pepper

I put the whole chicken and bay leaves in my 3 gallon stock pot (I really need to get more pots) with the stock and enough water to cover the chicken. Put on the lid, bagged it and set it out to cook. The chicken simmered for a couple of hours on the solar cooker until I removed it to cool so I could remove the meat from the bones.

I added the carrots, onions and potatoes and put it all back out to continue cooking for about an hour and a half roughly. Once it was done and seasoned I cooled it, added the meat and portioned it into 3 bags to freeze for later meals.

Solar Spaghetti Sauce

We eat a lot of spaghetti here so it was inevitable I'd be cooking it outside when I could.

I made a basic meat sauce with-
2 pounds ground and browned beef
2- #10 cans of diced tomatoes
half a #10 can of tomato sauce (the other half was used for the Solar Chili recipe)
about 6 cups of onions
6 or 8 large garlic cloves chopped up
basil (dry)
salt and pepper

Simply browned the beef in the 3 gallon stock pot on the stove, added the onions and garlic off the heat to sweat, added the tomato product and seasonings and put it on to cook. This went out at about noon and stayed out till time to eat around 6pm. It happily boiled away a good part of the day and I turned it away from the sun once in a while just to slow it down a bit.

Putting it on to cook involved placing the covered pot in the turkey bag, closing it with a twist tie and placing full in the sun on the solar funnel.

The recipe made enough for dinner and 10- 3cup bags to freeze for later meals.

Solar Cooked Chicken and Potatoes

So far we have cooked chicken twice on the solar cooker. When cooking, it is very much like cooking with a crock pot so pretty much anything you can do with a crock pot you can do with a solar cooker and a big pot.

When I made our solar funnel I decided to go with chicken and potatoes again because it was familiar and I wanted to have a point of comparison to see how my funnel rated.

I put a whole seasoned chicken into a 3 gallon stock pot and surrounded it with cut up potatoes ( a good inch or so to a side) and onions and popped on the lid. I used this pot because it is the only dark pot I have big enough for a chicken, but when you do it, try and use something smaller if possible. The pot barely fit in the turkey bag so the advantage of the bag was largely lost.

The bag is used to allow in the suns rays while holding the heat created. It also serves as a barrier preventing the breeze from whisking the heat away from the pot. Basically it makes its own mini oven.

I kept an eye on it through the day and noticed the chicken was cooked through within 2 hours. Unfortunately that was much too early to eat dinner, but the good thing about cooking like this is everything is wrapped tight, the heat is gentle and the chicken stays moist. There is no crispy chicken when cooking this way, at least so far in my experience.

If it seems like things may overcook you can simply change the orientation of the cooker so it gets less direct sunlight and simply stays hot.

End results? Moist, falling off the bone chicken, tender potatoes and onions and great flavor. Another interesting thing, there was a good 2 cups of liquid in the bottom of the pot to make gravy with.

I imagine this could make a nice chicken cacciatore or any similar dish using a moist heat cooking method. Just keep in mind to use less liquid then normal because you will not loose any to evaporation.