This picture is my attempt at cooking acorn squash in my solar cooker. I bought nice dark colored squash thinking that this would be best for absorbing the sunlight. I also thought that at 2:00 in the afternoon there would still be enough sunlight to cook this squash. I was wrong on either one or both of these ideas. I'm not sure which, but if I had to guess, the fact that I waited until two to put the squash out was the biggest problem. Squash like this takes a long time to cook and the sun isn't really that hot much after 4:00ish. I should have started this between 9:00 and 10:00. I would think that six hours of cooking is what it needed. I'm not entirely sure how much effect the lack of pan had on my poor results as well. I noticed that the black pans both put off and retain quite bit of heat throughout the cooking process. I'm sure the dark colored squash would get warmer than light colored squash, but probably not warm enough. I also need to invest in an oven thermometer so that I can see how hot this cooker is really getting. Cooking beans and squash it doesn't matter a ton if I over or under cooke them just a little bit. If I start getting into more complicated dishes then I will need to be more precise. Oh well, I learned a lot through this failure.
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