Spring - When A Young (At Heart) Girl’s Fancy Turns to Solar Cooking

So spring is in the air here in North Central Texas.  The days will soon commence to getting longer.

Naturally, this makes me long to dust off my solar cooker and take advantage of all that free sun energy that’s just laying around.

So far the government hasn’t figured out a way to tax sunshine, so I want to make sure I can use as much of it as I can while the getting’s good.  I have a feeling it’s only a matter of time before they start putting “sun-use” meters on our solar appliances.

I think this will happen because of this: for years we Americans have been encouraged to drive less in order to decrease fuel consumption. Now that we’re actually doing that it seems Big Daddy (i.e. government) is looking for ways to track how much people drive in order to tax them on that.  Sometimes it seems you just can’t win.

But in the meantime, while sunshine is still free, I’m going to make hay while the sun shines (so to speak). I’ve talked about solar cooking in previous posts, but I think it’s worth mentioning again because it can really be a sublime Frugal experience.  And really, isn’t that what we’re all here for?

The other thing that brought it to mind is an article in the most recent Parade magazine (the one in the Sunday paper).  The Simple Tool That Saves Women’s Lives by Dr. Ranit Mishori adds another layer to the fascinating implications of solar cooker use.  In refugee camps, it seems that women and girls who venture out of the camps to gather firewood for cooking are in great danger of life and limb from evil marauders.  Solar cookers keep them away from these dangers - no firewood required.

Also, women in the camps can start small businesses manufacturing and selling the cookers.  Each cooker costs about $15 to make, and lasts for 6-9 months.  Charities around the globe supply raw materials and training. Now this is a charity I can get behind: saving lives, helping people help themselves, spreading the Frugal gospel.  What’s not to like?

For more info: solarcookerproject.org and solarovens.org.

In other news: I still haven’t figured out this Twitter thing. Whenenver I ask my husband about it this is how he responds: “Blah blah blah tweet tweet yada yada yada.”  I don’t get it.  So be patient with me, people who are “following” me. When my husband get’s some “free” time (how Frugal!), he has promised most solemnly to re-vamp my blog to make it even MORE frugaltastic (is that possible?).  I think Twitter will be in this re-vamp somewhere.