Although cooking is not the biggest consumer of energy in the home, it has proven the most challenging to adapt to fossil fuel free sources. Solar energy is, of course, intermittent and dispersed, so collecting it for cooking, especially in our at-times sun-starved climate, is certainly possible on good days, but often not at all. The wood stove works, when it's burning, of course, but it's always been our goal to use it as little as possible. As our older home has been tightened up and insulated over the last few years, we've been able to reduce our needs for it, which is good, unless we're trying to cook on it. Plus, it doesn't just "turn on." It takes a least twenty minutes until it's hot enough to even make some tea.

I couldn't resist posting this cartoon when I came across it, especially to pass on to any readers who might be experiencing some of the same challenges when it comes to renewable energy cooking. We have an ethanol cook stove (an origo) that we use, but we have to buy the ethanol and, obviously, it's not energy we're producing ourselves. We've added a toaster oven and an induction cooker (both electric), significant additions to our relatively modest PV system. The idea of cooking with electricity is still not my favorite idea by a long shot, but it is the one renewable fuel we can produce that we can also use to cook with. There are other ideas out there, and I still have dreams of using our chicken and human poop for making biogas to power a cooking range, but unfortunately that's stayed at the bottom of the to-do list for a while now. One day...At any rate, I sympathize with the hungry diner in the picture as I wait for my water to boil for my morning cup a joe and poached egg on kale (a recent favorite) to cook.