Trans Mountain had a groundbreaking ceremony for construction of the Expansion Project July 27, 2018.
I learned of their pumping mud into Hopedale Slough January 21, 2023. That during active salmon spawning, and in a waterway federally listed as critical habitat for threatened Salish sucker. Also far from the first time this sort of thing has happened on the project.
Their construction progress report filed February 7 includes re the Hopedale Slough incident: “Plan is being developed to ensure monitoring at pump-off locations is completed as per the Trans Mountain Environmental Field Guide (EFG) for Pump-Off.”
4-1/2 years after starting construction, only now they’re making a plan to ensure monitoring?
More fun facts:
– in the construction progress report Trans Mountain list the incident as happening January 22 but photos were posted to Facebook by a Chilliwack resident at 10:38 am January 21. That resident said they had reported it to the RAPP line. My photo seen in this post was taken at 4:02 pm on the 21st. You can normally see the bottom of the stream there.
– Trans Mountain claim that “Elevated levels [of turbidity] were observed however returned to within guidelines within 24hrs.” I suppose that statement might be true if you count the 24 hours from the afternoon of the 22nd when someone finally emerged from Trans Mountain’s fences to take some pictures.
Yet another incident that clearly demonstrates that protection of public interest as it relates to a healthy environment, and even protection of species of economic importance or species at risk, is failed by the ‘authorities’ we have in place.
First tray: sweet potato and a little onion with spices. Heavy on the turmeric.
Second tray: onion, carrot, celery, zucchini, orange pepper.
We only have one GoSun, so the first tray cools while the second is cooking. But the second finishes piping hot, so mix the two and it’s fine. Then on a whim I stirred in cottage cheese. Incredible!
Most delicious lunch ever. Cooked by the sun, and I’m chowing down thinking this is probably just like a favourite recipe from some exotic place. 🙂
“How do I adjust the recipe so it will fit in the GoSun cups?”
* Makes spreadsheet that takes recipe volumes in cups & desired total volume, and gives ingredient volumes in cups, tablespoons and teaspoons to arrive at that total volume.
* Looks at finished spreadsheet.
“Or I could just make the recipe and not use it all at once.”
In my defence, I hadn’t had coffee yet. Turned out yummy! And the third batch should be ready in a few minutes. Masa (pan)cakes and blueberry sauce. Cook time for the nicely browned batch here was an hour and a quarter in full sun. No doubt was ready sooner, but I was busy so didn’t go check on it.
A problem with our cooking has always been things being put on the stove or in the oven and forgotten. There’s a household joke that our family’s favourite flavour is burnt.
We’d heard that the GoSun ovens don’t do that favourite flavour. Today we put it to the test.
My instructions were to peel the two sweet potatoes, dice them up, coat them with the stuff in the little container in the spice cupboard, and put them in the GoSun. I hoped this was the right container.
Here it is ready to go. (A bit more than one good sized sweet potato in the tray. The rest had to wait.)
Popped it into the GoSun, and we went to the Village Classic Car Show and Chilliwack Farmers Market!
I was tickled to see an AMC Pacer at the car show! My parents had a red one when I was a teen with a drivers licence and no sense of mortality. It was a hideous car. Heavy, under powered, brakes that would fade, suspension that wallowed in the corners. Mind you, it was probably fine when mom drove it, because she would drive like a mom. A responsible mom. I thought it was just the worst. But still have kind of a fondness for them. If I had money to waste I’d like to get one and paint it to look like a frog.
The car show was great and so was the Farmers Market. Special treat today was the Mainland Whisky booth giving out samples. So good! And just the thing on an empty stomach. 😀
Tried the Time Machine and the Coffee Whisky. It was a tough choice. Time Machine was super interesting and really good, but I bought a bottle of the sweeter Coffee Whisky before wobbling off to see the rest of the market.
Loaded up with a market bag full of fresh veggies, we headed back to the sweet potatoes in the GoSun.
We’d been out for hours, bypassed the long line ups at the food trucks, and came home hungry to enjoy a beautifully cooked treat!
No burnt! Some were just a bit crisp on the outside, but pleasantly so. You’d think it was cooked by someone who knew what they were doing, rather than being just stuck in an oven and forgotten for hours.
Googling sweet potato and yam recipes for the GoSun Sport it looks like people generally cook them 35 minutes, so we could have eaten these hours before we did, had we happened to come home earlier. But either way, it doesn’t matter! The GoSun doesn’t doesn’t burn food and doesn’t waste energy!
With just a little time left before our balcony would be in shade, we threw another tray of sweet potato into the GoSun. Regretting now that I didn’t time it, but it couldn’t have been much more than half an hour before the balcony was in full shade and I brought the GoSun in. It’ll hold heat a long time so I was going to just let it sit while the residual heat continued to cook. But waiting was overruled so we pulled the tray out right away. Once again, delicious, beautifully cooked sweet potato!
This batch didn’t have that bit of crispness the first batch had and that I quite liked. But they’re thoroughly cooked and very tasty!
The GoSun website says 2 to 3 meals per load for this unit. As we were preparing these today I joked that you can see why the guy in the GoSun commercials looks pretty lean. If you like bigger portions you might want to go with the larger GoSun Fusion. Definitely if you regularly cook for more than two. But for ease of carrying around, and the fact that the Sport cooks faster than the Fusion, I think we made the right choice for us with this one. Down the road maybe we’ll get another one? Or a Fusion, to have more solar cooking capacity if we had guests or wanted leftovers for the next day.
But for now I’d call today’s cooking adventure a success, and I’m really happy on this first day of our first heatwave of the year to be able to cook without the heat of the stove or oven indoors!
Based on size, price, and that it came with two cooking trays and a “kettle” for boiling water, we picked the GoSun Sport Pro. It also came with a really deluxe case and ten little silicone baking cups.
First attempt to cook with it was a quick egg dish just to try it out. We lined the cooking tray with parchment paper to keep the cooking tray clean. Probably fussed too much setting the oven up on our balcony and worrying about whether we had the angle right. The first attempt turned out like this.
Not exactly appetizing to look at, but cooked.
Unfortunately we hadn’t quite got the end of the parchment paper right and egg leaked underneath. There are instructions for using GoSun’s parchment liners. The same instructions work with your own parchment paper of course, but we’d cut ours a bit short so were actually expecting some leakage. Cleaning the cooking tray was a bit of a chore.
Try Two!
The sun is inviting me to try again. I’m not getting creative because our kitchen is fairly depleted today, so it’s eggs for try two. This time with diced red onion, grated asiago cheese, and fresh ground black pepper. Stirred it up in a bowl with just a splash of milk. Going to try the little silicone baking cups this time.
Scooped a couple of large spoonfuls into one of the silicone cups, and promptly spilled about half when I picked the cup up. These things are pretty floppy!
Just a bit more care though, and in a moment there were five little cups lined up in the cooking tray. I left some space between them thinking the air space might help speed cooking.
One thing I forgot to pay attention to was the location of the little vent near the handle of the cooking tray. The end piece on the cooking tray rotates until held in place by the wooden handle being screwed in tight. The vent should be aimed up for better venting while cooking and because the other side of that piece has a flat spot so keeps the tray sitting stable and upright on your work surface. I realized it was off this time as soon as I’d put the first silicone cup in, so removed the cup and adjusted.
The GoSun Pro comes with an alignment tool attached from the factory. I looked at the instructions for that tool on GoSun’s website and this time it clicked how you’re supposed to use it. I felt a bit silly for how much I’d fussed over aligning the oven to the sun on our first attempt. The alignment tool makes it a snap! (Might have also helped that we had full sun this time. It was mixed sun/cloud the day we did our first try.)
I set a timer for half an hour based on thinking I remembered reading somewhere that half an hour was suitable for eggs. Looking a few minutes after the timer timed out, there was steam coming out the oven’s vent and condensation visible.
Pulled the cooking tube out, the eggs looked ready and so was I. Lunch time!
The cups seemed to cook a little more the further they were away from the vent, just as GoSun’s instructions said would be the case. But it was all cooked and hot.
The eggs came out of the silicone cups easily, though not entirely cleanly. Even though I’d fiddled around taking pictures (most of which were discarded), the cups were still hot to touch as I used a finger to wipe out the bit of egg that stuck. Do supervise young children when using a GoSun oven.
How was it? Well, about as good as the ingredients that went in. On the first one I though maybe I detected just a bit of flavour from the silicone cup. On the second one I thought maybe I’d only imagined that. They were bland, so after the second one I added a drop or two of sriracha to each. Just what was needed!
The silicone cups are in the dishwasher now, and the cooking tray didn’t need cleaning at all, though I suppose it’s good practice to give it a wipe anyway. I’m quite pleased with try two with the GoSun Sport. Seems like the main thing that’s needed going forward is for me to learn to be a better cook, whether using the GoSun or not.
I find myself thinking about sun and water lately. About the duality of these things in a time of rapid climate change.
The sun is the source of heat that’s baking the planet as a result of our fossil fuel emissions tipping atmospheric chemistry out of the safe zone. The sun is also a source of clean energy to replace fossil fuels, limited mainly by our choices on the pace we develop and deploy the technology to use it.
Water, either in deficit or in excess, may be linked to most human suffering from climate change. Water is also, as is often said, ‘life’. With clean flowing water comes health and abundance, and another source of energy to replace fossil fuels if used right. (imo Site C is not right)
The technology to use the sun is not only solar photovoltaics to produce electricity. It’s also design of communities, buildings, agricultural spaces and greenspace to make use of the sun when and where it’s wanted and shade from it when and where it’s not. Not that we design or build that way, usually. But we know how. We could.
Many years ago on TV I saw two men in a high mountain place that if I was to guess I’d say might have been in Mongolia, making tea with a kettle suspended over a metal reflector. I don’t remember anything else about the show, but that scene stuck with me. Why isn’t that sort of use of the sun ubiquitous around the world? Especially with high tech products like those from GoSun available.
Does the thought of going out on your deck or into your yard to boil water for coffee or cook a meal in a solar cooker seem odd? Yet for many the thought of going outside to use a barbeque carries feelings of joy. (Thinking in a mainstream Canadian context.)
Sure, a passive solar appliance won’t work all the time. But having one doesn’t mean you can’t also have an electric appliance, just as people probably still have some kind of cooking range in the house even if they love to barbeque outside. And speaking of barbeques, the apartment building where I live doesn’t allow them. Due to fire hazard, maybe? I could have a solar oven though. And after occasional mentions over the years being met with a bit of resistance from my partner (priorities, not opposition), there’s a hint a solar oven may be coming to our home soon. If so, I’ll write about my experiences with it.
Meanwhile I’ll be here wishing we could put shades on the outside of our windows to reduce the energy we waste air conditioning this place. Alas, it’s a rental and we’re not allowed to attach anything to it or renovate things. The quality of insulation, windows, and building envelope sealing — to code, so poor — are energy decisions we’re stuck with for now.
Move Forward. Please Bring Cookies. 