Adventures with Solar, Haybox and Rocket Stove Cooking

Adventures with Solar, Haybox and Rocket Stove Cooking is the story of a ten-year journey into the world of low-impact, fossil-fuel-free cooking. A journey that began in the 1970s with a teenage experiment in Nigeria and grew into a lifelong passion for practical, sustainable innovation.

In 2011, a visit to Rwanda reignited that early curiosity. Tasked with promoting simple, fuel-saving cooking technologies, Seggy and Jane discovered how powerful solar cookers, haybox thermal cooking, and rocket stoves could be in real communities. What began as a technical project quickly became a mission: to explore these methods, refine them, teach them, and share them as widely as possible.

This book brings together everything they learned along the way. You'll find:

Solar cooking in action: from homemade designs to integrated solar-powered cookers and international gatherings like Consolfood.

Haybox cooking made simple: the basics, five practical DIY haybox designs, and even a full three-dish meal cooked on a single fire.

Rocket stove innovation: flat-pack camping stoves, community-built designs, and the JAZ stove developed with partners in Sri Lanka.

Real-world outreach: projects with EMACE, Manitha Neyam Trust, Kaveri Kala Manram, Helpage, and Margosa Green in Sri Lanka's Vanni region.

Festivals, workshops and demos: hands-on teaching at events like the Green Gathering and sustainable cooking showcases across the UK.

Recipes that work beautifully in solar cookers, hayboxes and rocket stoves.

DIY instructions for building your own solar and haybox cookers, plus detailed reports from field projects.

Across these pages, you'll meet the people, places and ideas that shaped this adventure, from rural Rwanda to post-conflict Sri Lanka, from community workshops to kitchen experiments at home. You'll see how simple technologies can save fuel, reduce smoke, protect forests, and make every day cooking easier, safer and more enjoyable.

Above all, this book is an invitation. An invitation to try something new, to build something yourself, to cook with the sun, to harness stored heat, to light a clean-burning rocket stove and to discover the quiet satisfaction of preparing food with almost no fuel at all.

We've loved every step of this journey. We hope you catch the bug too.