Subject: To cook versus soak & eat

Can pigeon food, beans, rice be eaten after a long soaking (week to months) in colloidal silver water?  The colloidal silver water would hopefully kill off and keep from growing any bacteria. One could then wash the result before eating it raw.

Can pressure be applied to the soaking process to speed it up?  One would soak it in water or silver water and pump it up to say 50 to 100 lb/in^2.  The question is will this speed up the process?

Can one put a little bit of a common enzyme in the water to make it soften faster?  Say Amylase, or another common digestive enzymes.  One that we could grow or stock pile. 

Which food products would be able to be eaten without needing to be cooked?  Is it tender enough to eat and digested?  Are there other foods that could-should be tested in this way?  Any volunteers?

If we could master this we can save a lot of cooking energy. 

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Subject: Efficient cooking with electricity

Whether your boiling pigeon food, beans, rice, bugs, worms or some other cheep stored foods one needs a good energy efficient way of cooking.  Once one has run out of wood, and other things to burn then efficient cooking with electricity becomes the key knowledge to have.  We need to know how many kilowatt-Hr it takes to cook each item we plan to eat. In some cases it just might be better to use the electricity to grow algae, which needs no cooking to consume.

I propose the following tests could be done by a volunteer: Pre-soaking pigeon food, beans, and/or rice for 1-2 days. Measure overall power requirements (Kilowatt-Hr) for each of the following ways of cooking.

1) Pot "heat insulated" and placed in a micro-wave oven.  To heat insulate the pot one could wrap the closed pot in a towel or paper bag or some other reusable non-heat conducting maternal.  Would need to be micro-wave safe.  The way to check if something is micro-wave safe is to test a sample for short to then a long time to see if it gets warm. 

2) Use a hot plate and a pressure cooker.  The over all combination to be heat insulate with reflective thermal insulation like several layers of tin-foil or glass-tin-foil or whatever else you can think of.  Needs to be setup to be reusable. 

3) Other efficient ways? 

Each would be brought to a boil and kept there until somewhat cooked.  Shut off power and let it continue to cook while it slowly cools.  One would need to determine the optimum power by minimizing the power on times.  Right now I am not sure which way is more efficient.  I suspect the second way to be better because of the faster cooking due to the pressure cooker.  But, this could be offset by the extra mass being heated.  Thus the request for a volunteer to test and recommend.  

Once we know the measured overall power we can then compare this with how much power it takes to grow an equivalent meal of algae.  The results will give us data on efficient electrical-power management for cooking.