Solar Cooking: Solar Pasta with Meat Sauce

Thought it would be fun to experiment with a 'put it out and leave it' recipe that would require little maintenance other than aiming to solar cooker.  To real lesson to learn is how much liquid based on the absorption of the pasta.  Changes are annotated after cooking by the *

Recipe:

1 box pasta (preferably a penne, ect)
1 lb ground beef - if you live in the San Antonio area, you need to check out Bandera Grassland for your meat.  You won't regret it!

1 can tomato sauce

1/2 can tomato paste

3 tbsp sugar (*Change to 4 tbsp*)

2 tbsp salt

1 1/2 tbsp oregano (*Change to 1/2*)

2 tbsp basil

2 tbsp dry onion

2 tsp garlic powder
2 cans water (from empty tomato can)(*Change to 1 3/4 cans water*)

1.  Crumble the ground beef in the container.

2.  Mix the rest of ingredients with the meat and stir well.
3.  Stir in the pasta (all I had was fettuccine so I broke it up).  I put it all together the night before so we'll see how much water is soaked up over night.  My guess is it will help the speed of the cooking bu it also could have been a bad move.  We'll see tomorrow.

3.  Preheat the oven and place dish in oven around 1:30 pm due to the cloudy weather today.  (This is for south Texas)

4.  Adjust the solar oven aim every 30 min.  Cloudy today so this is going to cook at a much lower temp so I had to adjust more.  If it were sunny would only aim for first 1.5 hours.  225 - 275 degrees instead of 340-360 degrees that I would see on a clear day.  Good to test in a worst case scenario.

5.  Let sit until you are ready for dinner.

Note:  Oven will slowly cool to a warming temperature when not directly aimed.

Results:

1. It turned out really good, noodles were cooked well with soaking.  
2. A little too much oregano but the sugar / salt contrast was pretty close.
3. Meat sauce came out really good.

Lessons Learned:

The weather affected the cooking temperature a lot more than I thought it would.  Good test though.
Next time, I'll add the pasta at the start of cooking.  I'll try it again like this to see the difference.

Other than that, thought I'd share our salad tonight.  Completely out of the garden.  Roasted beets, lettuce, tomato, radish, and cucumber.