Under the Choko Tree By Nevin Sweeney

Introduction

Cooking your freshly harvested, organically home grown veggies requires energy – somewhere between 5% and 20% of the household energy budget depending on where you are and who you read. So after going to all that trouble to grow food that does not waste energy on pesticides, herbicides, fertiliser, transport and packaging it is worth working out how to cook it using the minimum energy and as sustainably as possible.

This section looks at a number of ways of doing this, and some of these ideas (like the haybox cooker) are well tested, having been around for a couple of hundred years or more. Others, like the solar oven have a more recent lineage. Most can be built and repaired at home, often out of recycled materials but you will find it handy to have a number of these around, like a rocket stove for when the sun isn’t shining and a solar oven for when it is.

I have made all of the items here that can be home produced and if I can do it, anybody can! The main point though is to understand the principle and then apply it to the materials you have at hand. Just because I made it this way or that doesn’t mean that is the only way, keep your mind open and experiment, and above all else, have fun!

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