My Garden of Earthly Delights

Gaging your chile pepper heat

I have several types of peppers growing that I'm not sure how hot they are.  I found this handy pepper heat chart at about.com Home Cooking

I have a Big Jim plant and the Sweet Bananas and some Fresno Chiles as well as some various bells and a few others.  I was surprised to see the sweet bananas have no heat at all.

The chart below rates chile peppers, with 0 being mildest and 10 highest heat.

Scoville Chile Heat Chart
Variety	Rating	Heat Level
Sweet Bells; Sweet Banana; and Pimento	0	Negligible Scoville Units
Mexi-Bells; Cherry; New Mexica; New Mexico; Anaheim; Big Jim	1	100-1,000 Scoville Units
Ancho; Pasilla; Espanola; Anaheim	2	1,000 - 1,500 Scoville Units
Sandia; Cascabel	3	1,500 - 2,500 Scoville Units
Jalapeno; Mirasol; Chipotle; Poblano	4	2,500 - 5,000 Scoville Units
Yellow Wax; Serrano	5	5,000 - 15,000 Scoville Units
Chile De Arbol	6	15,000 - 30,000 Scoville Units
Aji; Cayenne; Tabasco; Piquin	7	30,000 - 50,000 Scoville Units
Santaka; Chiltecpin; Thai	8	50,000 - 100,000 Scoville Units
Habanero; Scotch Bonnet	9	100,000 - 350,000 Scoville Units
Red Savina Habanero; Indian Tezpur	10	350-855,000 Scoville Units

You looked hotter online hat

 

Eating on 50 dollars a week or less

I've found a couple of interesting blogs that are documenting efforts to eat on a reduced budget.  My reality TV instincts kick in and I find myself reading these things with a weird fascination.  My own food budget gets out of hand regularly giving me a constant guilt complex, the result of growing up the 4th in a family of 5 competitive children with a father who felt it was his honored right to eat anything in the fridge that didn't have a screaming daughter attached to it.

Eating Well on $50 a Week

30 Bucks a Week

The Paupered Chef

Learning solar cooking through trial and error

Most solar cooking advice says that food won't burn.  I've found otherwise.

This weekend I tried the roast chicken and it was wonderful.  All I did was take a roasting chicken, rinse it off and put it in the lidded roasting pan with a few potatoes inside and more around the edge.  I dotted it with butter and mushed garlic and sprinkled on a bit of rosemary on top.  I put it out and had my husband check it ever so often while I took my daughter and her friend to the local ren faire.  At the end of a long hot interesting day, we came home in awful heat and the chicken was perfect.  It was brown on top and absolutely tender.  A real successful dish.  Even my daughter's teenaged friends could not resist trying a bit and were enthusiastic about it. 

The next day I wanted to make some more potatoes since we finished off the ones from the chicken, but the pan was still in use as the chicken wasn't quite finished off.  I didn't have anther dark casserole dish with a lid that was big enough, so I thought I would just use a dark baking dish without a top.  I had heard it was smart to put something dark on top, so I thought to use some dried tomatoes.  Having a bunch of peppers to use from the garden, I simply topped raw potatoes quartered with strips of peppers and then a layer of the dried tomatoes along with a bit of butter and lots of garlic (why yes, I do use a lot of garlic, thank you for noticing.)

Here's what it looked like:

We then left to run some errands and a few hours later, I went out to turn the cooker to the sun and found the tomatoes burnt to a charcoal black:

The tomatoes were a complete loss - black through and through, although the potatoes were still edible.  I noticed that they were dryer and tougher than what I usually get for potatoes cooked in this cooker.  When I went out to put away the cooker, I found the bottom full of water with a bit of oil from the butter.  So with this evidence, I made these conclusions about working with this cooker.

This particular cooker seals the chamber in which you put the food.  There is a rubber edge to the top and glass seals down and keeps the water inside the cooker, making it mostly a steam cooking.  The steam condenses on the underneath of the glass top and rains back down.  This time I put the food in what amounted to a stoneware pie pan. If I was baking biscuits or a cake, this would have been fine, but I was making vegetables.  If they had been in a dish with a lid, the steam from the food would have stayed mostly in the dish to be constantly recycled, boiling into steam and condensing back down.  When the lid is off, the liquid in the dish boils over, drips down the sides and sits in the bottom of the cooker, to boil down there below the food and not being effective at all in the cooking and essentially removing the moisture from the food.

Now if what you want is dryness, that might work, but not in this case.

So understanding better the tool I am using I go on to try more recipes and write about the results.

Easy solar cooking recipes

Wow - cooking in a solar oven is easy!  Yesterday, I simply put a couple of sweet potatoes in a pot and left them in the cooker for the day as I went off to work.  When I came home, they were perfectly cooked.  No worries about burning or drying out.  In fact there was a bit of water at the bottom of the pan that hadn't been there when I put them in.

This is what they looked like:

I've tried putting in those biscuits in a tube and they cook very easily, but I would recommend keeping an eye on them as they could get too dark on top to be tasty. I simply put mine in the bottom of the above black pan (which has a matching lid) and put the top on.  It was about 11:00 am when I put them in and I took them out 45 minutes later.  The tops were a bit darker than I like but the bottoms were perfect - no burning on the bottom at all.  I would think they might not burn on the bottom no matter how long they were left.  Might be an interesting experiment to see what would happen.

I've also tried granny smith apples - about 3 cut into wedges and dotted the top with butter, added a dusting of Cinnamon and no more than 2 teaspoons of sugar.  It was delicious.

Today I went on a creative binge and started with cherries (pitted) that were given to me as a thank your for extra artichokes I gifted someone with and to that added sliced nectarines in my mexican ceramic casserole dish. On top of that I added a scant handful of sliced crystallized ginger for zest and sweetness and finished it with a layer of granola.

When I took it out,the granola had browned a bit and the fruit on the bottom was more watery than syrupy.  My husband doesn't like sweet deserts so I try hard to keep the sugar low.  A handful of sugar might have created a syrup, another test to try in the future.

It definitely wasn't a perfect dish, I think next time I would dice the ginger finely so it would disperse better and would have added some honey.  I think I would also try a different granola too - one that you get in a cereal box rather than the one from the organic food bins at Raleys, as this one came off a bit limp, although not bad.  It was like stewed fruit with oats with a ginger pow ever so often.

One problem I've been having is the glass top steaming up which as far as I can tell reduces the temperature about 25 degrees.  It's not enough to worry about since the temperature on this oven goes so high, but I do open up the oven and wipe it off every time I go out and check it for orientation to the sun.  I'm never sure if that cools it off more than I want or if it makes little difference.  The thermometer doesn't move much.

It helps to keep the oven oriented to the sun, but it's not vital.  Mostly I like to wander out and see how things are going about once an hour.  I like that when you open the oven, you always get a wave of fragrance from whatever you are cooking.

Solar gift

A couple of weeks ago was my birthday.  I asked my husband for a solar cooker thinking that not only were they cool, he could make it himself.  We've been hit by the recession and he doesn't have much money.  But Curt being Curt had more important things to spend his time making (this time it was a box to store his compost in) and so he bought me one from Solar Cookers International, a local group that sells them online.  My daughter joined in and got me a pot to use in it.  It took a bit of time to to be shipped though, and it came just last week.  I was impressed with it when it got here.  Well designed with a wood top with a glass lid and a folding reflector, the inside was black metal with a swinging shelf to put the food pot on.  A good idea since you have to tilt the cooker at times to aim it right at the sun.  I had to wait until the weekend to try it and I was impatient.

Beans

So Saturday I tried it out.  I had been planning beans - it sounded delicious since I had some leftover slab bacon to put in it.  I found a recipe and started there - dark red beans that had been soaked overnight, onions, peppers, tomatoes and the bacon.  With oregano, cumin and a lot of chili pepper to spice it with, don't forget the garlic!

So I set it up and put it out and watched the temperature sore to 300 almost immediately.  For a solar cooker that's good.   Several hours later I opened it up and wiped away the water condensing on the glass cover.  I tried a bite of the beans.  Good flavor, but the beans were still hard for the most part.  I put them back and went into the house to look it up on the internet to see what was wrong.  (don't you just love that about today - you can look up any stupid problem on the internet and immediately find out just about anything), anyway I found the problem right away.  The original recipe had called for cooking the beans first and putting the tomatoes in later, but I wanted them to cook with the beans, so I put them in right away.  Apparently there was an important reason to not do that.  Beans cooked with anything acidic don't get soft. 

It was late at that point - no more sun, so I gave up on the cooker. An hour boiling them on the stove top helped a bit but didn't make me happy - so learn from my mistake.  Don't cook your beans with tomatoes.

Potatoes

Sunday I tried potatoes - some new ones I had never seen before - red-skinned yellow potatoes, I didn't notice if there was a name on the package, but they were small and thin skinned.  Anyway, I just put them in the pot with a bit of butter on each one and peppered them well.  They came out black and good, the texture just perfect.  The flesh was a deep yellow and fairly sweet, so I suspect they were some kind of cross between red potatoes and sweet potatoes.

Green Beans

The next day was a Monday, I prepared something quickly before we left for work.  A bunch of fresh green beans on the bottom, then layered over with a sliced white onion and then a cut up tomato.  On top, a scattering of more bacon on the top and into the oven, safely on top of the generator cover to keep it out of the reach of the neighbor's dogs.  The end product was more than a bit drab looking but very very good.  The beans were perfect and the bacon browned.  Maybe garlic would have made it better, but we finished it off quickly.