Solar Cooking and Bread

I love to bake bread and the solar cooker is fun to use. It doesn't cost anything to use while fresh baked bread makes even the simplest meal very good. In most instances, the bread will cook in one to two hours. You may want to use sugar, egg, or honey to help the bread brown on the top. The best time to bake bread is starting at 11am when the sun in high and hot. I have changed the way that I eat so I don't eat 3 meals at normal times. Often, I will eat one large meal in the early afternoon along with a nice breakfast in the late morning. No use conforming to time constraints when you have so much freedom.

How to do it
The dough needs to rise before you bake it so let it rise once in a warm humid area. Now, you will need a black pan with a lid on it. The dough gets punched down after the first rise and placed in the pan. It will rise again in the pan even in the refrigerator. Let the solar cooker warm up to 220-230F before you start to bake. It will take 1 1/2 to 2 hours to bake the bread.

Bread recipes
There are a lot of bread recipes but here is one that doesn't use anything but basic bread ingredients. If you aren't familiar with making bread dough, find a good cookbook with the finer points of making bread.

French Bread

1 package yeast
2 cups water
4 1/2 cups white flour
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt

Dissolve yeast in one cup lukewarm water. Sift flour with sugar and salt into a large bowl. Stir in dissolved yeast. Add just enough of the second cup of water to hold dough together. Mix until dough is sticky. Cover with a cloth and let rise until doubled. Butter or grease a round roaster and add dough to dark pan. Let rise another half hour. Cover. Bake in solar oven until golden brown, about 2 hours.

Solar Cooking
Solar cookers work great, are inexpensive, and use no fuel but the sun. They work great when boondocking in the desert. There are a lot of things you can cook in them. They make a great slow cooker to have a meal ready in the late afternoon.

A monk without a monastery

I was thinking just the other day that I should have been a monk. The things that I love to do are traditional favorites of the monks. I have learned to travel alone on the road while gardening and making beer. So, just call me a vagabonding monk.

Solitude
While you don't have to live in solitude to pursue a relationship with God, solitude sure makes it easy to concentrate. Monks would stay away from the general population by living in a self sustaining abbey. They felt that being alone with do away with any concerns about how people saw them and left them with only the though of how God saw them.

Modern church members still like to get their members away from the daily distractions of life but they call these trips a retreat. However, as with many activities in the US, a retreat these days comes with restaurant food and staying in a hotel. Neither of which is conducive to getting back to the basics of relying on God to provide. Embarking on a 14 day trip to the desert with nary a soul around except your own is a really good way to concentrate solely on God. You don't have to go with just your clothes but the less you take, the more you rely on Him.

Gardening
I like to grow my own food and even have been known to forage for some of it. People are always generous with the vegetable gardens because they plant way more than they can eat. I never turn down free vegetables and can often go foraging to find many people willing to share.
In my limited space, I take the chance to grow what ever I can fit into a pot and carry with me. Since I never travel far between destinations, I just put the pots in the back of the pickup for transport.

Beer
Ah, one of my favorite past times is brewing my own beer. Monks would produce and sell goods to provide income for the monastery. Since they were not forbidden to drink, they produced alcohol for themselves and sold it for income. The first wine produced in the US was produced by Spanish monks in what is now Texas. Monks are also responsible for some of the best beer including the Trappist ales. I have had the pleasure of traveling to Belgium and tasting one of their ales.

Bread
Grains or flour, sugars, and yeast are the key ingredients. Beer has been called the liquid bread so there are a lot of similarities with making the two. This is also a stable of the abbey that monks would produce for their consumption and sell to provide them income. Bread is the best thing to add to a meal when outdoors. It goes great with those stews or soups. I even make tortillas over a wood fire. When you have more time to do your own activities there is more time for cooking a good meal.