Water System for Peace Demonstration Farm, Uganda

Cooking with the sun is fun and easy, so long as it is a beautifil sunshiny day! Fortunately for us, that is exactly what we had when we held our VGIF funded eco-solar cooking training workshop at Peace Demonstration Farm.

We trained about 40 women to use solar reflector stoves to cook beef stew, vegetables, pasturize water, hardboil eggs, cook rice, and even make super delicious solar cakes.

The solar reflectors are basically just cardboard which is covered in a laquer to make it water resistant, with the inner side covered in a film of mylar. The box is shaped and made adjustable so that the sides can be adjusted to focus as much of the sun's rays as possible on the cooking pots- which are just light weight metal pots painted black. The pots are contained within a special (non melting) plastic bag which contains the heat. While the stoves do not reach temperatures hot enough to bring water to a rolling boil, it DOES heat things up enough to leave burn blisters of the fingers of those silly enough to touch the pots in the oven! (Yes, that would be me.)

We also trained the ladies how to use energy efficient charcoal stoves, and cooking bags -which work similar to a crock pot as you bring the boiling food up to cooking temperature, then immediately put it into the insulated bag for 1-8 hours and the bag maintains the temperature and continues to cook the food.

The training was hugely successful with a big tasty solar cooked lunch, but the solar cake was definitely the biggest hit of the day as people in the village cook over fire, they do not have ovens. We distributed the solar cookers to some of the participants so now they can make their own solar cakes whenever weather permits!