Sun Oven Chronicles- Pot Roast

I decided to try my hand at slow-cooking in the sun oven.  Most of my attempts thus far have been only shorter baking and rice.  What better test than the classic pot-roast?

The top pot:
I salt and peppered the roast, inserted some whole cloves of garlic, and browned each side for 10 seconds in olive oil before putting it in the pan.  It's zucchini season around here (i.e. people feel free to leave zucchini on your doorstep, whether you like it or not...) and so I thought I'd throw in some zucchini, and I was a bit too ambitious at Costco last week, and bought a thing of mushrooms, which ended up being twice as many as I really needed, so I threw some of those in too.  Hopefully those won't be confounding variables to my trial.  I added no liquid to the roast.  (The SunOven site says things are more moist in the sun oven and often times you should add less liquid.  I thought the zucchini would probably produce quite a bit)

In the bottom pot, I put some potatoes and carrots.  I salted and peppered them and as an afterthought, misted them with olive oil. I figure it can't hurt...

I used the black lid (not the clear one).

Here's the before pic:

Preheated the oven facing the sun.
put them in a 250 oven at 9:30am.
Turned the oven more south and less angled, but so there was still a bit of sun shining in.

When I checked on it a couple of hours later, it was still at 250.

I pulled it out about 4:30pm.  The sun was no longer shining in, but the oven was at 150 and when I tested the temp of the roast, it was about 170 (well done...)

Here's what they looked like!

the carrots and potatoes looked exactly the same and the pic is slightly blurry,
 so I decided not to show them

I took the roast, zucchini and mushrooms out and made a gravy.  I couldn't believe how much liquid was in there, especially since it started out completely dry!

We were all starving and I forgot to take a picture of the final plate.  Everything was good though- I would say as good as normal, though the potatoes and carrots didn't have that nice roast flavor since they had to be cooked in a separate pot.  If you don't like zucchini, you probably won't like this- it was very soft (as zucchini gets...) but I liked the flavor of it.  My husband wouldn't try it because he said it looked like a pickle and he doesn't like pickles.  (He doesn't really like zucchini either though...)