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I'll never forget the night we went to the store to buy our first microwave oven. In my innocence, I wondered why we would ever need two ovens. Then my dad explained to me the wonders of the microwave, how we could just put food in it and -- presto! -- it would come out piping hot. It wasn't until I went to college that I truly appreciated this amazing invention, although at the time it was lost on a mind that pondered why we didn't just start cooking earlier if it took so long.

Now my mind is making the adjustment again, moving from a faster mentality to a slower one with the solar oven. In Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew's book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living, you learn how to not only bake with a solar oven but also how to build one. Now, no one has ever accused me of being a handyman (and probably never will, except for my two-year-old who thinks I can fix anything), but the oven seems simple enough to make. Yes, I believe even I could do it.

Here's what they say about solar ovens:

"Solar ovens cook food over the course of a day. Although it may take several hours to bake a potato, slow cooking's conversion of starches to sugars makes up for the wait. Food cooked in this way is especially tasty. Solar ovens produce deliciously cooked food with no energy inputs other than the sun and are great for tasks from cooking vegetables and tofus to toasting nuts. In their most basic form, solar ovens are boxes covered by glazing that heat up when set in the sun. Their designs can be highly elaborate or plain and simple. Solar ovens can be constructed out of wood or even layers of cardboard.

"The sheet of glazing that covers a solar oven allows sun rays in, but doesn't let heat back out. This trapped high heat sometimes nears 200 degrees and will crack regular glass. Tempered glass must be used for glazing. Store-bought tempered glass is the heat-resistant glass dors found on some ovens. Another cheap option is to use baking bags--plastic bags designed to roast turkey. These can be cut open and stretched across a solar oven. For the same reason that regular glass can't be used for glazing, only oven-safe cookware can be used inside of a solar oven."