Speaking of surplus food in abundance, which I was a few posts down. Yesterday I found an entire 2-pound bag of whiting fillets! Had been frozen, still cold-cold, just in time to rescue and put in the fridge. And today cooked them up in the solar oven with butter and garlic and veggies and seasonings.
The donation food is meant for low-income families. They pass out a lot of bags of groceries at the church. Unfortunately a lot of the food can’t be used unless the person has a kitchen to cook it in.
Can’t open the cans unless you have a can opener, and what will you do with a large bag of frozen whiting fillets if you don’t have a house let alone a stove.
So some people end up leaving part of their grocery bags along the sidewalk. If it sounds like I am a veteran of sidewalk rescue food, I am! The bag of fillets was inside of a big paper bag that also contained a can of beans, a can of tomato sauce, a pack of pasta. And some rolls. All of which I will use.
I will now separate the beautifully solar-cooked buttery whiting & veggie mix into portions, and either share with people who want to eat it immediately or freeze for later.
(I did also save back a couple of uncooked fillets and chop them up and put them in a bowl w vinegar, am doing a ceviche experiment in the fridge. At least I hope it will turn out to be ceviche, that’ll be my first time trying to ceviche with whiting so wish me luck! If nothing else I can finish cooking it the regular way.)
It was cool, some nice people passed by on their way to go fishing just when I was opening the solar oven and taking out the successful experiment. Sometimes the successful ones go unwitnessed except by me ha ha, and the less successful ones are the ones that get witnessed by others.
They complimented me on my yard and we ended up chatting. It’s good to be able to show the solar oven in action.
Update: And I’m eating some of the solar-cooked fish & veggies right now for lunch, and it is absolutely delicious!
Update after eating lunch and portioning the rest into jars: It’s still early enough in the day, and sunny enough, that the oven temperature is 350!
I just now filled the empty pot with chopped dandelion greens and water, and put the pot back in the oven to boil. I love to boil greens and then add sauces/seasonings that I mix up. And I use the water from the boiled greens also. Sometimes I use it in soup and sometimes I just drink it like a tea.
And bonus (for my lazy self): By boiling the greens in the same pot that I just used to cook the fish, it will make it easier to clean the pot at the end, since there won’t be as much “butter and fish residue” left in the pot as there would have been if I had gone to wash the pot directly after cooking the fish.
BTW the dandelion greens are delicious, I buy them (and many other fruits and vegetables) from a local small biz who buys them from local farms. Win Win Win!!!