Solar cooking

[Capt Len]

I have window screen type racks clip to the deck head over the oil stove. Cruising up the coast doesn't allow much solar drying but berries ,apples and plums are everywhere. So. I even dried kiwi fruit, mango and pineapple in the Beaufort The stove was on all the time and the fruit compliments of Dome Petroleum. Inuit 'dry fish ' is easy. Scale and fillet skin on and angled parallel slices 1/2 inch or so through flesh to skin .Hang in sun to dry. They use smoke to keep off flies but a net would work. I tried this with tuna mid Atlantic but big fish is better fresh or canned..

[aeventyr60]

Fish comes out great. Yes we salt it and sometimes season it in a teriyaki sauce. The smaller fish last longer as the moisture comes out quicker and it drys faster. We usually end up eating it fairly quickly cuz it tastes so good.

[Capt.aaron]

I'm gonna try it. I saw a thai guy cooking needle fish on t.v. the other day. never thought to eat those. Next time I'm a positon to do it I'm going to dry one of thes things. thanks.

[travlineasy]

Aaron,

I've traveled throughout the world when I was young, and there was no place on the planet, other than the U.S. and Canada where I considered the water purified enough to drink without additional treatment for various forms of bacteria. I've even encountered bad water in several U.S. marinas, locations where the marina is on a well, the water lines to the dock are very long and very, very old. Consequently, the lines must be used for quite a while in order to flush them thoroughly and provide relatively clean water.

I keep a couple cases of bottled water on the boat at all times, mainly for brushing my teeth. My water tank is 70 gallons, and gets cleaned regularly with a mix of chlorine bleach and Dawn dish detergent. I leave the solution in the tank for a couple days, which allows the rocking action of the boat to slosh it around like an agitator in a wash machine. I then pump it through the entire freshwater system before sending it overboard through the drains. Yeah, I know, it's not environmentally friendly, but then again, neither am I.

The next step is thoroughly rinsing the tank and system with a couple hundred gallons of clean, fresh, water, then refilling the tank. When the tank is completely filled, I add a cup of chlorine bleach, pump water through the lines until I can smell the bleach, then it's clean enough to wash dishes and vegetables.

I used to routinely test the water for bacteria, but after two years of testing and no bugs I stopped doing that. Besides, it was getting expensive. Somewhere on the Internet there is a formula for how much chlorine bleach to use per gallon when treating water. If I recall, it was about 16 drops per gallon, but I could be wrong on the formula. If you don't smell chlorine after 16 drops, add another 16 drops and wait 30 minutes. If you still don't smell chlorine, discard the water and find another source.

If you're worried about the chlorine bleach causing health problems, believe me, if you contract C-diff from contaminated foods and water it's a lot worse than anything you will experience from the chlorine bleach. Without proper medical treatment, C-diff can kill a healthy person in a matter of a few days.

Good Luck,

Gary

[Capt.aaron]

As a child cruising with Grand pa in the Bahamas our water alway's smelled of sulfur. He boiled it before we drank it and then made tang to mask the taste. I would turn orange by the end of those trips. Months of hot tang and spam sandwiches!!! As soon as I took over the boat I changed the water system and discvered it was his filter system that was causing the stink. I also enlightened the cuisine and now I have over 100 gallons of water storage, very picky on where I take it on. and bottled water stuffed into every nook. I wonder how a spam sandwich woud taste on my sprout bread?

[travlineasy]

Haven't had a Spam sandwich since I got out of the Navy. They tasted pretty good back then, though. We had fried spam with fried eggs for breakfast, fried spam sandwiches with a slab of American cheese for lunch, fried spam and potatoes, etc... Spam was considered a basic food group back then. After four years in the Navy I couldn't look at a can of Spam. Might be pretty good on Sprout bread, though.

Cheers,

Gary

[Capt.aaron]

I know, My Grand Dad was retired Army, Tang and Spam man, Breakfast lunch and dinner. Since I took over the boat I've been on a quest to find good food that keeps, and way's to prepare that is efficiant, Hence the sprouts and solar projects.

[bwalker42]

I am going to make a solar over out of a cooler.
I think it is going to be a neat project.
I believe it will be sturdy, and boat savvy.
Instead of foil I am using duct tape from a/c man. It is just as shiney as foil and it's like thick foil with sticky on the back.
It will double as storage for cooking stuff.
Strata glass instead of breakable.

[CapnBones]

I have no idea where I read this, I think it was on here somewhere, but it has been a year or two since I found it. Someone was using a crockpot, just the inside with the lid on and it was sufficing as a solar oven, they would use it to make bread by leaving it on deck for the majority of the day. Not sure what temps you can achieve simply with that, but it would be worth investigating I think.

[skygazer]

Originally Posted by travlineasy

..... When the tank is completely filled, I add a cup of chlorine bleach, pump water through the lines until I can smell the bleach, then it's clean enough to wash dishes and vegetables.

I used to routinely test the water for bacteria, but after two years of testing and no bugs I stopped doing that. Besides, it was getting expensive. Somewhere on the Internet there is a formula for how much chlorine bleach to use per gallon when treating water. If I recall, it was about 16 drops per gallon, but I could be wrong on the formula. If you don't smell chlorine after 16 drops, add another 16 drops and wait 30 minutes. If you still don't smell chlorine, discard the water and find another source.

If you're worried about the chlorine bleach causing health problems, believe me, if you contract C-diff from contaminated foods and water it's a lot worse than anything you will experience from the chlorine bleach. Without proper medical treatment, C-diff can kill a healthy person in a matter of a few days.

Good Luck,

Gary

Your cleanliness is admirable. Bleach works well. You could safely use much less. 1 cup of bleach for 70 gallons of water is way too much.

I used to be in charge of a strictly controlled public water supply. We had an instrument to measure the ppm of the chlorine. Yes it depends on how dirty the water is, but you would not use water so dirty you needed that much bleach. On clean water I would use IIRC about a cup of bleach to 3000 (three thousand) gallons of water. This would keep any green growth from forming on the inner surface of translucent plastic tanks in sunshine. For known contaminated water I would double that or more, but not 40 times as much.

It is important to realize that bleach loses strength as it ages. Sometimes I received bleach that would not show up in the measuring tubes, or just flash and disappear. This could explain not smelling the bleach. Try to buy your bleach at a busy store with a good turnover, not some dusty bottle that has been sitting around.

Even for pretty bad water you could cut your 16 drops per gallon to 8 drops per gallon.

I'm surprised your water was tested as is. I had to test regularly, and extremely minor amounts of bleach in the test water would cause the test to be voided.