When cooked over a wood fire or on a conventional stove, hard porridge is cooked by putting cornmeal into boiling water. To prevent burning, the contents of the pot have to be stirred very well. Then the porridge is put on a big flat plate and cut into pieces to be served with vegetables.
In a solar cooker of the box- or panel-type, it is prepared in a different way: you just put the corn flour into the cold water (1.5 parts water, 1 part cornmeal), stir well, and then put the covered pot into the cooker. There is no stirring necessary since the heat is very even and there is no concentrated heat coming from a flame under the pot. Another advantage of this method is that the pot almost never needs any cleaning afterwards. When I stayed in Kenya, the Kenyans told me it really tasted like the ugali they know.
Another tip: Beans, peas, etc. should be soaked in water overnight before cooking. The soaking and the cooking water should not be salted. Without salt in the water the difference in osmotic pressure between the water and the beans is higher, so the water moves more quickly into the beans and the cooking time is shorter.
[The original text for this page was written by Ursula Bremm-Gerhards.]