Meals to go

There is nothing better than the smell of cookies baking in the oven.

On Friday, I turned my car into an oven!

I knew it was going to be a scorcher and had always wanted to see if a car was really hot enough to bake something.

Friday morning I prepared dough and put them in cookie form on a cookie sheet. I also wanted to see if an egg would fry so prepared a pan and cracked open an egg.

I put both pans on the dash of my car and hoped no one would walk by and see them in there because that was just a really weird site!

I had to drive somewhere during the afternoon so took the pans off the dash. And wow! They were as hot as if they were in the oven. The cookies were not completely cooked at that time and the egg had not started cooking.

By the time I left the office at 5:30 p.m., the cookies were baked, even brown on the bottom, and the egg white had nearly disintegrated and the yolk was as hard as if it had been hard boiled.

It was a goofy experiment, I guess, but it showed me what the Iowa summer heat is capable of.

I was thinking how convenient it would be to make complete meals in my car using that summer heat and what a time saver this would be to me. I could fill my whole back seat with pans of "things" and carry them in from the car and onto the kitchen table. There would be no more me standing on my feet for an hour and aa half after I get home from work preparing a meal and there would no longer be those voices, "I'm hungry. When is supper going to be done" because it would already be done.

It sounds like a really good idea but probably not a healthy one, huh?

Darn.

I also discovered last week when it was so hot a couple of items I use daily that should not be left in that heat.

I realized that bringing deodorant to reapply in the afternoon after a morning of sweating is not a good idea. I did just that not realizing the deodorant had melted and was very warm. The worst part was it was a brand new container of deodorant and after using it, there was white particles in 3,000 places in my car plus I had third degree burns under my arms!

And lipstick. That is not a good product to leave in a hot car, either. Dang. Ruined that, too.

Oh, and about those cookies. I took them home and set them on the table to show my family and Jordan picked one up and took a bite before I could tell him how I had baked them. That one bite was enough. and he didn't want to touch that egg.

* Lorri Glawe is a member of the Pilot news staff. Reach the columnist at lglawe@stormlakepilottribune.com