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This Man Cooks His Lunch on a Satellite Dish

On a sunny day in Amsterdam, I met solar-cooking enthusiast Rik, who cooked hamburgers, popcorn, and coffee with the sun as his only power source.

You see this stuff in movies all the time: someone finds himself in a desolate place and has to survive. After catching a fish, a chicken, or whatever hops by, the person puts together a heap of dry grass or hay and waits until the sun is at its highest point. In his hands he has a piece of glass—eyeglasses or a magnifying glass—and manages to start a fire using the sun's rays. The sun is his only hope of survival.

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Frying an egg on the hood of a car. Grilling gyros on a slide. How cool is that?

Rik, 49, lives in Amsterdam. He writes about cooking with the sun on his blog. On a sunny day this summer, he crammed a small portion of his solar cooking studio into four bags, just for me. When you're in the Westerpark around 7:00 PM, you can hardly see because of all the blue barbecue smoke. But I'm about to cook with the sun—not with a piece of glass, or on a hood or a slide, but with solar cookers.

"There are three different devices," explains Rik as he starts unpacking his bags. "Parabolic cookers, panel cookers, and solar ovens. They come in many variations."

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