These smart cooking tricks make it easy to cook healthy and delicious meals. You can try one or more of these tricks now before you actually need it. Now for the list of cooking tricks.

Use a Solar Oven

The technique of cooking with a solar oven is a fairly recent invention. This light-powered method is slow and steamy. It’s also perfect for producing tender meats and very moist baked goods. How does all this work? Just place your food in the oven, close the door, line it up with the sun, and let the light do the rest. While this is almost a care-free cooking method, you will need to twist the oven a little bit, every 30 minutes. This keeps the oven in the right position as the sun tracks across the sky. You may also have to raise or lower the zenith-adjusting leg, but only a few times in an entire day. You can bake beautiful bread in four hours, cut-with-a-fork roasts and baked apples in about five hours, savory soups and stews in about six hours and heated up leftovers in about one hour. The generous size of the unit pictured allows you to cook two things at once, like soup and bread, allowing you to cook for 4-6 people at once. And though it’s not quick like a microwave, this appliance doesn’t need any fuel or electricity to work perfectly. Grid down? Bugged out? No problem. Also, there’s no smoke to give away your position. Homesteaders, preppers, and energy conscious average folks can use this oven to cook their meals, probably with several decades of dependable service.

Cooking with Foil

A simple sheet of foil can become an oven, broiler, frying pan and many other vehicles for cooking—all you need is some food and a cooking fire. This is a big step up from baking your food directly in the ashes or coals of a fire, and foil pouches can make some great tasting meals over a bed of coals. Here are some tips:

Use heavy duty foil, if it’s available.

Fold packets up tightly if you’d like to keep the steam in.

Leave a gap in the package if you need some steam to escape.

Place the packet on a dying coal bed, not one that is too hot or filled with flames.

Turn a Can into a Camp Stove

A store-bough camping stove is a wonderful thing. Most are easy to use and efficient. But if you don’t have access to one, or you run out of fuel, you need to know how to build a cook stove and find alternative fuels for it. Food and beverage cans are the raw material for a variety of stoves that burn liquid fuels and dry fuels like wood. All you have to do is make the right cuts in the metal, add your fuel and light it up. Home-made “rocket stoves” can burn sticks and other plant fuels. They can also burn fuels like alcohol and wax-soaked cardboard. Just don’t pour gasoline or other explosive fuels in a stove like this, the results can be tragic.

Cook in a Can

If you have a spare metal can, you can attach a wire bail or set it on a grill to make an improvised cook pot. Most food cans come with some kind of plastic or epoxy inner coating, so burn the empty can in a fire for a few minutes and scrub it out aggressively to clean out the residue. Then fire up a serving of hobo stew, or whatever else you like. This is also an easy and quick way to disinfect drinking water by boiling it.

Make Ash Cakes

Out of bread? No oven to cook in? The coals of a campfire can bake up some tasty bread—if you have the secret ingredient to make your dough. When I started experimenting with camp breads years ago, I naturally turned to classic outdoor texts to find the recipes for bannock, damper, hard tack and every other kind of camp bread and trail biscuits you’ve heard about. The recipes themselves were simple enough. But these simple ingredients didn’t leave much room for error, and usually yielded something closer to ceramics than a biscuit. After a few more fiascos, I finally stumbled upon pancake mix. The “just add water” complete pancake mix was the bread recipe that I had been hoping to find. It both tastes good, and it cooks quickly. Just add enough water to make a dry dough, pat out little “cookie” shaped patties, and toss them in the coals. Watch it closely as it starts to fluff up. You’ll cook it about one or two minutes on one side, depending on the heat of the coals. When it becomes rigid (like a little flat biscuit), and the very bottom edge begins to brown – use a stick to flip the cake over and cook it for another 30 to 60 seconds. Dust off the ashes and enjoy.

Most survivalists will find these tips and tricks valuable, and may be tempted to try them out on their next camping trip! They should too since it's only by practicing survival skills that'll we will truly be prepared for when SHTF!

What cooking hack do you want to try first?

Source: Outdoor Life