5 Fun Foods You Can Cook By Sitting Them Outside in Our Heat-Wave Hellscape
The constant, climbing heat waves that our planet is going through are stress-inducing, to say the least. Which means it’s time to rely on one of humanity’s classic stress-management behaviors: eating. Even better, why not combine the two, and use that same terrifying environmental energy to make yourself a little snack?
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Here are five foods you can easily make with the ever-increasing power of our sun…
(NOTE: Of course none of this should be taken as legitimate food safety advice. C’mon now.)
Eggs
Perhaps the most classic of outdoor, unassisted cooking is the humble egg. So much so that frying an egg on concrete has become somewhat of an idiom. But is the idea of an egg sandwich done with no more than the sidewalk heat actually viable? The answer is, yes, but you will need some limited accoutrements.
The concrete itself can’t quite hit frying temp, because it's a poor conductor of heat. Add some metal to the equation though, and you just might be in business. In fact, it’s been successfully done with the help of a cast-iron pan in Australia. Even if you want to stick with non-kitchen surfaces, given that dark car dashboards can hit almost 200 degrees even on a 90-degree day, there’s a chance you could fry one up after your workday.
Grilled Cheese
Now that breakfast is taken care of, let’s move on to lunch. And what could be a more reliable lunch than the stalwart grilled cheese? Minimal on ingredients and fuss, and very possibly something you could cook up with nothing more than a furious universe’s rage.
Now, you might not be able to get that ideal, crispy toasted bread, but you can get almost all the ingredients up to temp. Butter, as the forgetful among us already know, melts at fairly low temperatures — between 82 and 97 degrees, to be exact. Then, find yourself a high-moisture cheese, they that melt at around 86 degrees.
With low temperatures like that, you’d probably be able to make something that could be described as a grilled cheese without even any crazy surfaces involved.
S’ mores
Admittedly, this does feel like a little bit of a gimme, but on the bright side, it probably has the least food safety risk out of any of these. Not to mention, s’mores already fit the season perfectly.
Either way, melting chocolate is easy as pie. I mean, you can do it without even meaning to in your jeans pocket. The key here is the marshmallows, and it is possible to hit melting temps without human-made assistance (i.e., the standard bonfire). Marshmallows start to goo at a mere 98.6 degrees, meaning that a heat wave might give you all you need while just sitting on the porch. If it’s a little cooler, you might still be able to s’more it up by moving into a parked car — more on that next.
Pork
Okay, I must reiterate — this one in particular is purely a thought experiment. Don’t come crying to us with trichonosis because you bet your well-being on a freelance web article.
With that out of the way, here’s where we truly can marvel at a parked car’s internal temperatures. The same reason that you absolutely can’t leave your baby in there while you buy milk means that it might be able to serve as a makeshift oven. The inside of a car can be over 40 degrees hotter than the outside temperature, meaning in 110-degree heat-wave temperatures, you could be looking at roughly 160 degrees of interior heat.
Which, given enough time, could enable pork to hit the recommended internal temperature of 145 degrees.
Cookies
Imagine a tray of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies waiting for you at the end of your workday. Thanks to our long-term ignorance of chlorofluorocarbons, it’s possible! This isn’t in the world of theory either, as it’s been successfully executed and replicated multiple times. You can find recipes for it, too, without even having to go to weird doomsday prepper websites that are planning for a future Mad Max world.
