Tham Hin Refugee Camp

From Solar Cooking

A new thing we brought to this installation was a solar box cooker. The solar cooker is a cardboard box with a cutout on the top that has glass covering it, which uses the heat of the sun’s rays to cook food. There are some theoretical aspects that should be followed, but that is basically it. It is really simple and easy to use. Food takes longer to cook in a solar cooker, but there is no stirring of the food, more of the nutrients stay in the food, and the sun’s rays are free. In places where firewood or charcoal are difficult to find or expensive, solar cooking has proved to be a wonderful tool for people and has simplified their lives in many ways.

So the cooking experiment began. I started out with several vegetable curries during the first week, which are difficult to screw up. I used mainly eggplant, okra, tomatoes, and green beans, and Si Si provided help with the spices. The curries actually turned pretty good. The following week, I tried baking in the solar cooker with banana bread (one of Arie’s favorites). The first couple attempts weren’t quite cooked completely, but after adjusting the recipe slightly for this type of cooking, I began to get better and better. At our one-day renewable energy training, I cooked a curry during the day and I taught the people at the two camps about the solar cooker. I was excited by the enthusiastic response that I received. They saw it as a useful tool for their own lives and they wanted to make one for themselves. We left them with materials and instructions, and have yet to hear if they have had success in making one.

[Text for this page was taken from http://arieandangie.livejournal.com/2998.html]

[edit] See also

• Refugee camps