Cooking

Most of the time, besides being the construction worker (mostly plumber and electrician today), I am the cook and the maid. In return, Ana is the person who has to go looking for odds and ends in the stores As my goal is to get our house done, I want to minimize time away from actual construction work. But, I also want to eat three meals a day.

Breakfast is easy and no different from breakfast in the city. While the coffee maker is brewing coffee, I can whip up a batch of gallo pinto and/or some eggs with leftover tortillas. What I want, however, is a no prep time lunch and a dinner that requires little work after an exhausting day of work.

I have a solar oven. The one I have is too high-tech and too expensive to make a good candidate for rural Nicaragua but it is great for a proof of concept. (Once sanity returns, I want to design one that better fits Nicaraguan design considerations.)

After breakfast I take about five minutes cutting up something that can be baked, tossing it into one of the black stainless steel pans that came with the oven and placing the food inside a properly-placed solar oven. Other than moving the position into the best direction for sun rays two or three times, I then do nothing until it is lunch time.

At lunch time I take out the food and eat. Done. After lunch I might put in something else for dinner but typically I just put in something from a previous day to reheat for dinner.

So, what sort of things have I been cooking? The obvious start would be beans and rice. Without that, there would be no leftover beans and rice to make gallo pinto. But, you can be a bit more creative. For example, i made lentil-rice stew with tomatoes yesterday. Today was squash, potatoes and green beans.

While I have additional reflector panels to make the oven hotter, with just the regular reflector the temperature seems to end up around 150C. At that temperature, assuming a cooking time of "when I out stuff in the oven until I am hungry" seems to work great. If I am cooking something a bit more delicate (broccoli, pipians and some other soft veggies was on the menu yesterday), I just prepare another pan with them and put the pan in the oven about an hour before lunchtime.

While the average rural Nicaraguan may not be cooking with rosemary, a dash of white wine and such, that is an option. Beans and rice come out great and I expect you could even bake chicken pieces. The only serious problem is that, by default, you don't need to add a bunch of grease. But, it certainly is an option.

They guys working on the well (Nicaraguans from Yalí) decided to check it out. I explained to them what I was doing expecting to get a "crazy gringo" response. Instead, one said "¿Qué twanis?)