Gelatinizing Starch in an Emergency

I've been thinking more about disaster preparedness recently, and an important piece of that is food. And for many foods, before you can eat them you need to cook them. For example, a large fraction of the calories in our house are dry rice and pasta. These have ungelatinized starch, where the nutrition is bound up very tightly in starch granules. We mostly can't digest these as-is, but heat and water gelatinize the starch and make it bioavailable. [1] This means you need some way to heat things up. If the power grid is working then you have lots of options, including immersion heaters and boiling water with a kettle, but in many disasters this is not an option. What else can you do? Various options with fuel and batteries are possible, but a solar oven is hard to beat. Most would have what they'd need to put one together from tinfoil, cling wrap, tape, and cardboard. It would be worth putting some effort into identifying the best DIY-from-on-hand designs and distributing them. A…