Here’s a great way to take urban outdoor cooking to the next level: solar ovens. Box cookers and parabolic solar cookers are a fantastic way to slow cook just about anything without the risk of accidentally burning the food, and they cook without raising the gas bill or the temperature in the home. Solar ovens are a great addition to regular gas grills, too: you can slow cook chili, baked potatoes and corn all day, then just grill steaks or burgers for a few minutes when you are ready to eat.

It would be especially nice to have a solar oven installed in the home so that it can be left unattended, but I don’t know if there are any contractors who will retrofit a wall to make a solar oven…yet. However, people with fenced-in backyards shouldn’t have too many problems beyond curious neighborhood cats and squirrels coming to investigate.

Check out these links for more information on solar ovens and solar cooking:

• The Farm.org: Solar Box Cooker
• Solar Cookers International
• The Solar Cooking Archive
• Solar Now, Inc.: Make a Pizza Box Solar Oven
• Journey to Forever: Solar Cooking Resources
• Cook with the Sun
• Treehugger: the Sun Cook Solar Oven: Cooking without Carbon

Thanks to Safiyyah for her inspirational post about solar cooking on Green Vaccine!

Check this out: Brunton makes a solar-charged portable power plant that supposedly has enough juice to power or recharge a laptop. This brings a whole new meaning to the word “telecommute.” You can charge up the Brunton Solo 7.5 from any regular household outlet, or even better, with Brunton’s Solar Rolls or Solaris Foldable Solar Panel.

Think of the possibilities: movies on a portable DVD player by the campfire, web meetings from the middle of the forest or desert, endless music from an iPod. All the comforts of home.