American oil

I bet we could bake those cookies in the sun if we lived in Texas or Arizona this time of year! But not in Canada, Washington, or Wisconsin. Yesterday felt like October.

Carol

zadaconnaway wrote:

Abe, maybe if we go somewhere in the car, we could cook them under the hood? I know you can heat canned foods (like soup) on the car engine. Of course, if a big enough batch was made, you could eat cookies for quite a few meals and forgo cooking regular lunch and dinners!

You can heat things up on a car engine, because that engien is only about 25%-30% efficient. 70%-75% of the energy in the gasoline goes to heating the air around the engine, rather than driving the car (by contrast, a good electric motor can have an efficiency of 90%). That's right, you only get about one dollar worth of useful energy out of that four dollar gallon of gasoline.

Actually I was joking about the solar powered cookie thing, but the answers have been interesting and informative.
The more we talk about things like this the more inventive one may become.
I developed a solar cooker for my own use. It would be great for camping requiring no fire, however it does require sunshine and therefore it is not a reliable source. I haven't checked but there may be things like that already on the market. If not, it most likely soon will be.

Ah, when you grasp the concept of the no-cook cookie, you have seen the true meaning of life, grasshopper.

Americans would rather drill than conserve

If a no-cook cookie is still a cookie and but looks like an unbaked cookie...what is it really? This leads me to more random thoughts of needing a new name for crude oil to differentiate it from preffered, friendly fuel alternatives.

I think we ought to refer to crude oil something like this:
crude oil, the harvesting and use of which is destroying our beautiful planet
and when we refer to preferred fuel sources as something like this:
Clean energy, the equivalent of peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven on a rainy afternoon.

Thoughts?

lin wrote:

Americans would rather drill than conserve

And that's because most people don't want to change their lifestyles. People don't want to give up their big SUVs, rider lawnmowers, jet skis, RVs, ATVs, snowmobiles, speedboats, and all the other gas guzzling toys they don't really need. Mayby they should rename the Hummer, I think it should be called the Guzzler.

Pam,
I like your suggested definitions.
I'm wondering if your cookies are baked with any oil? If so, you need more definitions.

Abe,

I think the oil in the cookies is vegetable oil, not the crude oil, but correct definitions are always good. Making up definitions can always be a fun thing to do.

I bet if we gave this task of definitions to a group of grade schoolers, they could come up with some remarkable ones.

Carol

I am a butter user, through and through. Cookies require fat that is solid at room temperature to achieve the right texture, and I prefer butter because of the flavour (compared to margarine or shortening). Peanut butter cookies make use of peanut butter and butter and although both are technically oils, neither one could be considered crude.

To relate it to gasoline, butter is like premium gasoline, margarine would be mid-grade, and shortening regular or maybe even diesel.

At any rate, regular gas in the Vancouver, British Columbia region has now been hit with a carbon tax and is selling at $1.50 per litre, which is about $6.85US per US gallon; still cheap by European standards, but a huge hike over last year's prices, which continue ever upward. Gas in my area is expected to hit the same price this week, a 40% hike above what I was paying a year ago.

I'm a butter person too. I never use anything else. This is a tray of muffins made with butter. They don't taste like American muffins, mainly because UK flour is milled from a different type of wheat to that grown in North America. The butter gives the muffins an altogether different taste and they are much lighter in texture -- made by creaming the butter and sugar and adding eggs and flour, not from a batter of flour, oil and sugar.

Sugar and Butter mixed together tastes really good, but it probably makes one of the unhealthiest meals anyone has thought of (except for mayby American fast food resteraunts).

Shelagh--YUM!

I always use butter, as well. It's another renewable resource in my mind. As long as there are cows, there will be butter. Years ago I read that margarine was one molecule away from plastic and quit using it altogether. I don't know if that is true, but it gave me the excuse I needed!

I did not know our flours/wheats were different. Have you ever tried using potato or rice flour? I don't suppose they would be as good.

But you really must stop showing us all these goodies. I am gaining weight just drooling over your baked goods!

lin--funny!

Quote :

Most wheat grown in the UK is winter wheat. This is planted in the autumn, generally between September and November. Winter wheat accounts for more than 95% of the UK grain used by millers. Grain planted in January-March is generally spring wheat. This tends to yield less, but can suit some farms well. Wheat imported from North America, which accounts for 600-700 thousand tonnes each year, is spring wheat used to make breadmaking flour.

http://www.milling.org.uk/farming.asp

Peter, butter and sugar are not unhelathy -- it's the amount consumed that determines how unhealthy the food is. You can eat anything you want -- and the greater the variety the better -- in moderation. I eat chocolate, drink cofee, love scones and jam but not all three in the same day! Oh, and I love pizza once a week.

I find the wheat very interesting. And it seems that 'they' are always coming out with items that are unhealthy, and changing their minds later on. Eggs were suppposed to be killers, and now it is only the yolk that is bad for you. Good grief, I can't keep up with it all, so I just eat normally (no, not fast food!) and let it go at that. I try for moderation, but don't always succeed. Especially with 4th of July coming. And of course, there is always Christmas, Thanksgiving, Halloween, ... and so on!

Shelagh, since this thread is already highjacked as you pointed out, I might just add one more bit of highjack information.
Just today my daughter told me that they always keep a bowls of chocolate, in various forms, sitting in the office. When bits and pieces of the chocolate were missing and being bitten into, and then the tell-tale trail of small mouse droppings were evident, they realized that the mice were also chocolate lovers. For bait to trap the critters, they used chocolate and it worked. Now they put the chocolate away at night. So you can now add mice to the list of chocolate lovers.

I always suspected that mice were smarter than we gave them credit for.

Lin I love the static electricity idea. Despite living in a maritime climate, last year there was plenty of static going around. I went to pick up the chihuahua one day and managed to zap her right off of her pillow! Poor little chi...

Regarding Hummers...have the lost the war?

http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=8473

I thought this was an interesting comment:

Quote :

Fact:

A vegan driving a Hummer, leaves a smaller carbon footprint than a meat eater driving a bicycle.

I repeat, thats a fact!
Agrofarm complexes, and their biotech bully buddys and chemical petisides, are far more responisible for green house gas emmisions than any Hummer ever will be.

Though its still fun to bust on them!
_____________________________________
Posted by billy vanzandt on 6.26.08 at 9.01

Do you suggest that we get rid of the meat eaters, or the meat they eat?

I have seen the vegan/meat/carbon footprint before and I actually don't buy it, not just because I am a meat eater but because there is so much more than that to the argument.

Love it!

Well, mayby the vegan with the Hummer has a smaller carbon footprint because they only drive their hummer a few miles a year as opposed to the 15,000 miles driven annually by the average American driver. That's how they skew statistics like that. They didn't say how many miles per year the vegan drives his/her Hummer, did they? However, a vegan or vegitarian would have an advantage ofer a meat eater in that it takes much, much less land to grow their food. The earth could therefore sustain a greater number of vegans than meat eaters.