When life gives you lemons.... - Food Storage Made Easy

You know that saying… “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. Well let me tell you about my front porch. It is quite possibly the hottest place in the state at about 5pm each night. We also have a lot of windows on that side of the house, which allow way too much heat into the house but that is a different story. Last summer I was always using my sun oven in our side yard and getting decent results, but never could get it quite up to 350 degrees. It never even dawned on me to use it on my front porch.

Yesterday was one of those days. My kids were kind of wild, it was way too hot to even play outside, and I didn’t feel like cooking. Knowing that the family still needed to eat and the kids needed to be occupied I had to come up with something. Why not do a cooking challenge with my kids and pull out the Sun Oven. So we set the oven on the front porch this time instead of the side yard. Then we went inside to make some bread dough. If you read my post a couple weeks ago about involving kids in the kitchen, you’ll know my son is into cooking “classes”. I told my boys for the challenge we had to come up with THREE things to make out of the bread dough.

The recipe we used was our “Best Wheat Bread” recipe found here.. I told the boys we had to cook whatever we made in the Sun Oven. Kids are so fascinated with how things work, and with being involved. Well before we were even done making the dough, we went to check on the Sun Oven and it had gotten to 350 degrees in NO time out there. I have the Global Sun Oven, but I’d be curious if the new and improved All American Sun Oven would get hotter. I was so excited! In case you want proof, here it is:

The boys decided on bread, pizza, and pizza hot pockets (more on hot pockets here). We got the pizza and bread cooked in the Sun Oven, but by the time we were ready to cook the hot pockets it was getting too late. Even though we fell a little short on the challenge of cooking the whole thing in the Sun Oven, I think I’ve found a new place to cook this summer. Tomorrow I think I’ll cook some quinoa out there.

So YES my porch is scorching hot, but I got a GREAT place to cook this summer and practice my powerless cooking skills! How’s that for lemonade?