There was a guy on the news the other day who baked a batch of cookies on the dashboard of his car to show how hot it is. I'm thinking that could really come in handy if you are doing a lot of cooking and your oven is full.
My dad was a very innovative kind of guy and he figured out---I'm not making this up--- how to cook a TV dinner on the manifold of his car. I don't know what a manifold is, but it is something under the hood that gets real hot when you're driving. He wrapped the TV dinner in foil, experimented to find out how far he had to drive to cook it just right, and then he and my mom would go camping there. He had also figured out how to make the seats in the car into a bed. This was probably in the '70s before RVs had been invented. I'm not sure how thrilled my mom was with this arrangement, but at least she didn't have to cook.
I'm not that ingenious. The closest I have come is that I cook a roast in the crock pot in the garage. If you come in from work and smell something cooking in the crock pot it smells great but when it is for Sunday lunch and you put it on just before bed and you wake up at 3 a.m. and realize you've been smelling it all night, not so much. The boys used to call it Garage Meat.
Otherwise I stay in the kitchen for cooking. Well, there was that time I was trying to make yeast rolls and there didn't seem to be a good place in the house to let them rise so I shaped them into balls, put them in muffin tins and set them out on top of the refrigerator in the garage. It wasn't quite as hot as this summer has been but hotter than I thought, I guess, because next time I went out there they had risen like Mt. St. Helens, climbed over the top of the muffin tins and were creeping down the sides of the refrigerator like lava into the hinges and door handle. The stuff going down the sides was thinner, I guess, so the heat had baked it and made it kind of crusty. I usually like the crust on homemade bread but after the third day of trying to get that stuff out of the hinges I kind of changed my mind. I think we had crescent rolls from a can that night.
I'm usually not that messy when I cook. Well, okay, there was that time I spilled a whole pan of uncooked pecan pie down between the oven and the refrigerator. And there were a couple of oven fires before self-cleaning ovens were invented---once with my in-laws walking up the sidewalk for Thanksgiving dinner. (Everybody was cooking their turkeys in brown paper grocery bags that year to make them extra juicy. I don't think that trend lasted very long) And nobody ever told me that you are supposed to prick holes in potatoes before you bake them or they will explode!
Now that I have a self-cleaning oven it is much better. Just the occasional smoke, not even enough to set off the smoke alarm. I don't know why it is so hard to remember to just turn it to "Clean". Maybe I'm a little cautious because of an experience my sister had when she first got her self-cleaning oven. She had invited friends to come to dinner after church and thought she was setting the oven to automatically come on for the roast inside but she accidentally set it to clean. She said when they got home the 5 pound roast had turned into a long cigar ash and the carrots and potatoes didn't even show up. I guess they sent out for pizza.
I think she should have used a crock pot. She could have put it in the garage.
No comments:
Post a Comment