Today I needed to defrost 250g of mincemeat. Rather than use the convection oven, I decided to make up a quick solar cooker to do the job.

Looking around, I found a couple of aluminium trays and an oven bag.

To assemble this project, I positioned the foil trays so one was flat and one stood upright behind it. I marked where the two touched and cut a slot into each at those points. These slots fitted one into the other and I added clothespegs to hold it all together.

Two more slots cut into the front of the bottom tray allowed me to fold down a piece of the tray to make an adjustable front reflector.

I placed a small kitchen rack in the middle, put the meat into an oven bag and placed this into the solar cooker.

It was 16 degrees centigrade and fairly fine with a light breeze. Defrosting completely took just shy of 2 hours. The meat started to cook after that but wouldn’t have been ready in time so it went into the kitchen to finish off.

I think it was a success. My next job is to try the whole contraption inside an extra large oven bag.