I’ve been meaning to write my What I Did at Burning Man report for weeks, but have been kind of uninspired, because our solar-cooking results were kind of uninspiring.

Which is a major turnaround from the beginning of the project–when Jonathan Reynolds’s article on solar cooking in the New York Times magazine singlehandedly inspired me to go to sunny Burning Man in the first place. (OK, Todd and Sarah’s wedding had a little to do with it too. And Peter’s enthusiasm for nudity–was it just a coincidence that we ended up camped right at the end of the Critical Tits bike ride route?)

Solar cooking seems like the optimal combination of savor and languor–it would appear as if we weren’t even cooking, and then, voila, a tender and luscious and flavorful stew would be set before us. I did a little research at solarcooking.org, and decided that the “Windshield Shade Solar Funnel Cooker” was cheapest, easiest and handiest for constructing on-site. I didn’t want to lug a complex system of foil-covered cardboard bits through security and then wedge them in an overhead bin.

Because we weren’t going to Bman till Thursday (yeah, total tourists), Reno’s Wal-Marts and grocery stores would be horribly picked over, so I booked us to fly into Sacramento instead–another two hours’ drive away, but hopefully less stripped of bicycles, camping gear, glittery clothing and drinking water.

Sacramento turned out to be a good des-kision because we got to do all our shopping at the Sacramento co-op: Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk cheese, raw-milk butter, organic goat-milk yogurt with apricot-mango flavor, Valencia peanut butter, assorted fancy crackers, blood peaches, the fattest raisins ever, etc., etc.

It was in the co-op, though, that we had to decide precisely what we were going to put in the solar oven. I had loosely envisioned some sort of boeuf en daube situation, some slow-braised stewy business with wine and herbs that would seem hilariously poncy when consumed in the midst of gypsum dust and naked freaks. Peter, just like a man, was thinking of ribs.

I had misgivings (messy, can’t throw away the bones), but I yielded to the ribs scheme because they had some wildly expensive free-range, frisky, life-loving pig meat–two different rib cuts, in fact, so we could do a taste comparison. We got some health-foody BBQ sauce to dump in there with it. (Personally, I’m a big fan of that Longhorn BBQ sauce, but we would’ve had to go to [shudder] a regular grocery store to get it.)

A hundred and fifty bucks later, we were trundling toward Reno. We’d also picked up our bikes, and we had more drinking water than we could possibly need. But we still had a list of solar-oven-related items to buy. For some reason, we pressed on to Reno, even though I could practically hear the echoes from Kmart’s empty aisles.

Indeed, every big box store appeared to have been looted, with a few dazed employees roaming around picking up stray cooler lids, but we did manage to find one reflecty windshield screen. Just one. I’d been hoping for two. I bought another cheesy thing with flames on it, just to use for our car.

And it was that package that gave me the real inspiration:

Duh! Everything I’d been reading about solar cooking explained it as working for the same reason your car’s interior gets so broiling hot in the sun.

So (the gears turned slowly as I ate my half-pound Carl’s Jr. burger), why not just cook in the car?

I was mildly worried about destroying our rental car in the process, but I could not resist the tidiness of the set-up. (Once we got out there, we discovered it was also very, very windy, and our original windshield-screen-and-box plan would’ve been too unstable to leave unattended.)

So this is what we did:

A little bit of “prep.”

Then, into the oven:

The Wal-Mart in Reno didn’t have any turkey-roasting bags, which are recommended for putting around the pot to create a greenhouse effect. Instead, I bought a glass bowl to set the pot in, which would theoretically contain some heat there. The bowl wasn’t a perfect fit, though, so I wedged a little newspaper in to sort of seal the gap between bowl edge and pot–not an ideal solution, but I was also banking on the windshield having the same effect.

Rare for us, we did have some health concerns. We were letting raw meat sit around in the sun for hours. Fortunately, Karine had given us a parting gift: a meat thermometer with a wireless transmitter. She envisioned Peter and me lounging in the shade while our ribs stewed away in the broiling sun, and us being roused from our languid naps only by a helpful beep from our wondrous modern technology.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out quite that way, because our car was parked more than 100 feet (the alleged range) from our tent, which wasn’t perfect for lounging and eating chilled grapes anyway, because our shade structure was only about three feet tall and flapped incessantly.

(Just a little snarky “burners/Californians are ridiculous” aside: The guy we parked our car next to had a small freakout on us, because we’d encroached on the space that he’d allegedly marked out with flags, which were clearly stomped down and incomplete, and at any rate, invisible in the dark when we’d arrived. And never mind that he had his whole parking space, and the space behind with his tent in it as well–he was also deeply aggrieved that he’d lost the precious space adjacent to his car, that we’d just snuck in overnight and disturbed his whole universe.

Practical Peter said the NYC equivalent of “I think you’re nuts, but let’s move on”–which comes out as “OK, what do you want us to do?” The California guy just took many deep breaths and kept repeating, “Dude, I’m really just trying to get over this. I mean, it’s like… This upsets me so much.” We seemed at a communications impasse. Mature, calm Peter finally got in the car and scooted it over and back, like, a foot and a half, without yielding to the urge to roll his eyes.)

We did use the thermometer, though. Sticking it directly in the meat would’ve meant a not-quite-perfect seal on the pot, which, considering all the other ways we were fudging the specs, was not a detail we could afford, so we just placed the sensor in the area around the pot.

My note-taking was less than thorough. I’d say our pot full of two racks of ribs, a bottle of BBQ sauce and about half a bottle of water was sitting on our dashboard for maybe four hours? Maybe six? We didn’t really get it going till a little past prime sun hours.

We went out exploring–and even got some pulled-pork sandwiches from one camp (which was using the same wireless thermometers we were, I couldn’t help but notice)–and came back in the late afternoon. The temperature around the pot was 180 degrees, which wasn’t great, but at least it was out of the food “danger zone,” so we weren’t stewing a huge pot full of trichinosis. We poked inside the pot and looked at the meat–a little unappetizingly grayish, but cooked pretty much all the way through. And this was after only maybe two and a half hours.

We sealed the pot up and went out again, to Todd and Sarah’s marvelous wedding ceremony, which articulated all the great things about love and marriage so beautifully, like I suppose Peter and I could’ve done if we hadn’t been lazy, so we were very grateful they did it so we didn’t have to.

After the ceremony, we dashed back and pulled the pot out. Still very, very warm. Creepily warm, in fact, considering the sun had now set, so there was no longer any evidence of how the pot had got that way.

In the dark, we sampled the product of our efforts–if you can call putting two ingredients in a pot and locking it up in the car an effort. Enh. Porky. Very porky. But of course, as Peter now realized his failed rib logic, there was no flame on which to char and caramelize the ribs at the end, so what he’d been imagining was in fact impossible. By our tent, we hunkered and gnawed, gnawed and hunkered. We felt obliged to eat as much as possible of the frisky, free-living pig that had died for us. I suppose we could’ve given the extra ribs away, but they didn’t look or smell appetizing (that extra glug of water had made everything very soupy), and our closest neighbor, Mr. Tetchy Boundaries, didn’t look like he ate meat.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of gnawing, we put the lid on the pot and slid it out of sight, very underwhelmed with our solar cooking experience.

Happily, all our other food was delicious, and Camp Pulled Pork and Giant Teeter-Totter, or whoever they were, had given us a great taste of what we’d been striving for (impossibly). The best purchase at the co-op was a pint container of mixed grape tomatoes–about five varieties, each one fantastic and sugary and delightful. The second-best purchase was our organic cheddar cheese, Valencia peanut butter and crazy tasty crackers. Oh yeah, and a lot of dehydrated fruit, which worked magic when soaked in tequila and/or vodka. Proof that sometimes really not cooking is the best route of all.

For the record, for the next time I make one of these little fuckers, though I can’t imagine when I’d feel magnanimous enough to do that again, here’s what we did:

4X Saveur mag pate a choux recipe: yielded about 210 1.5-inch puffs total
3X Saveur mag pastry cream recipe, and then oh duh, of course we ran out and had to make a fourth batch in the middle of everything on Sunday. Why can’t I just follow the recipe like a normal person? (I’m totally glossing over the one night I spent trying to short-cut on both items, and having to chuck everything.)

We spent a lot of time trying to sort out the math and the architecture, and then of course ended up just winging it, much to Karl’s horror, though he was nice enough to be quiet and just go buy sandwiches for those of us who could keep solid food down. The base circle was 14 or 15 puffs around, but we did another concentric circle inside just to strengthen the whole thing. Two more layers like that, with the same number of puffs. Then we started tapering in, and did only a single-wide circle. The whole thing was not quite two feet tall, I’d guess, and used about 180 or so of the puffs. Val’s expert eye saw where we needed to patch, and we used the tops of another four or five puffs to fill in some weird holes (I’m guessing that girl would be good at jigsaw puzzles too). It fed 55-ish people generously, even when you take into account Katie eating at least ten of the puffs all by herself.

For caramel, I went the route recommended on an egullet thread (which I’m too lazy to find now to link to, but there’s the site), using 8 oz. sugar, 12 liquid oz. water and 1/2 tsp of cream of tartar. It always took longer than I thought it would to caramelize (but watching the bubbles beforehand was a beautiful, hallucinogenic thing), but when it went it went–trick was to take it off the burner just as it turned light gold, and the color darkened as it sat. I probably did 6 or 7 batches of the caramel in three different pans on three burners, kept at different stages of readiness.

Oh, and we put honey, vamilla and almond extract in the pastry cream. Next time I’d cut down on the sugar a bit, because with the caramel coating and the extra honey, you’d eat one bite and feel like the veins in your temples were going to pop and all your teeth would fall out. So, yes, it turned out well.

Last weekend was spent not averting what I was afraid would be a total disaster, on both personal and culinary levels. By which I really mean there was no disaster, but not through any action on my part.

It was Deb and Joel’s wedding, and three weeks prior, they were still finalizing their self-catered menu. I was as usual swamped with work and couldn’t help on such short notice, as was Tamara, so we advised they make lots of lists, and crossed our fingers.

Also, magnanimous Tamara and I volunteered to do the cake, which we decided would be a croquembouche. I thought this would go nicely with the ice-cave theme Deb and Joel were creating (look in the March 6 NY Times Vows column for pics), and envisioned a freeform ‘bouche shaped like a mountain and doused in unorthodox white icing or hard sauce to resemble snow, and studded with plastic woodland animals and lugers and ice-skaters, or some such nonsense. Tamara voted for the traditional route, with plain ol’ caramel and spun sugar, and as our patience and schedules wore thin, I began to see the error of my thinking, and the rightness of doing things as you have successfully done them before, and not fucking around.

Ironically, Tamara and I, the skeptics, were the only people who were stressed out and frenzied and behind schedule the day of the wedding. As usual, we had to make last-minute batches of stuff (I under-guessed the pastry cream), and there was another hitch that slowed us down: Tamara was violently ill Saturday night, the day before final assembly. She, the martyr of pastry, had to occasionally pause to gather her strength as she dipped her hands dangerously near the molten sugar, and, honestly, no sooner did she place the final puff at the tob of the pyramid than she ran to the bathroom to barf.

(Sorry for the brutal realism–I know no one likes to hear the word “barf” anywhere near stories of food prep, but I don’t think what she had was contagious, and besides, the vicious caramel would’ve killed anything it got close to. Also, if you only knew how often cooks come to work sick….)

Anyway, we finally got that baby whipped out around 4:30pm, T minus 1:30 till curtain and 3.5 hours behind schedule. Karl, the freakin’ champ, wrapped it up in a little cage of wire mesh, and we hopped in a cab while Tamara retreated to bed, cursing weakly.

And oh, what an anticlimax when we arrived Chez Deb and Joel–because as usual, Peter was utterly calm and everything was under control, and Deb had made millions of very effective lists and delegated responsibility in a sensible way. Serves me right for naysaying.

But enough build-up. Here’s the croque-critter itself:

(Note the glittery threads of less-than-delicate spun sugar…)

Peter’s head and tongue help give you an idea of scale. Karl had rigged up a pin spot with a Mag-lite and masking tape to add some extra gleam:

And here it is in action. Courtney, to the left, was utterly obsessed with the thing, drawn like a moth to the flame. She’s trying to use a knife here, but of course the only way to do it is with your hands.

Actually, I read the traditional way to do it is to hack the croquembouche open with a sword, but Joel “Safety First” Murphy nixed that idea. I guess because the whole giant ice cave was already a huge fire hazard, and he didn’t want to risk conflagration and beheading on the same night. Not in front of a NY Times reporter, at least.

After all that, you’d think I would’ve taken a picture of the happy couple, but I think I was so wiped from the croque construction that I couldn’t keep my hands steady enough.

You’d also think I’d have a picture of Tamara and my ravaged hands, seared by hot caramel. But weirdly, neither of us burned ourselves once. Strangely disappointing. Really, thank God Tamara got sick, otherwise there’d be no story at all.