Do Solar Cookies Have Wings?!!!

Dean  (the husband)

Shalane  (the wife  :O)

Do cookies really fly?  If Dumbo the elephant can, why not a few cookies?  The answer will come shortly. Yesterday, we decided, spur of the moment, to drive out to the most remote state park in Nevada, Beaver Dam Start Park.  On a previous blog, we mentioned the freezing cold night that we spent there last year.  I froze my patooti off!  This time we were ready for it in our Greendockin truck.  We had our warm, cozy bed with an electric blanket and the solar generator to run it!  We went to sleep at 10 pm and woke up at 7:30.  I rarely get 9 ½ hours of sleep ever!  We feel like we have conquered that state park and its bitter cold nights. 

Now for the winged cookies.  Shalane decided that it would be a good idea to bake some chocolate chip cookies in our solar oven.  Remember, she is the inventive one, I never would have thought of it. I just used Nestle Toll House squares that you get in the refrigerated section of the grocery store.  Anyhow, she put them on a black, non-stick pizza pan and placed them in the solar oven at about 8a.m.  We had the oven sitting on a small, black folding table, and it was a nice, sunny, calm morning.  I started cooking them so early because we are still new at using the solar oven, and I honestly believed it would take a couple of hours.  Oh, Shalane made some s’mores pie last night, but I’m sure she'll will write about it. I really wasn't going to mention it, but I probably should since it was AMAZING!  I just crunched up a bunch of graham crackers onto a plate, covered it with some fudge topping and broken pieces of Hershey's chocolate and blanketed all of that with perfectly toasted marshmallows.  Dean and I each got a fork and dug in.  It was as yummy as it was amazing.  :O)   Anyhow, back to the cookies, they were baking nicely and after an hour they were looking close to being done.  Actually, I didn't think they were looking done at all.  They had spread themselves out pretty quickly, so they were nice and round, but they still looked really "wet."  Then, suddenly, a wind gust from out of nowhere came through, sending the solar oven flying in the air with the cookies trapped inside.  As it turns out, the cookies were done, the wind was just natures way of letting us know that they were ready.  Yup!  It was pretty strange.  When the oven blown down, Dean and I just looked at each other, like, "Oh man, this is gonna be a mess to clean up," but when we picked it up and put it back on the table, we could see that there was no cookie dough slime, just broken cookies.  I couldn't believe it!  Not only were they done, but they were cooked PERFECTLY!

My favorite part of the trip was watching an episode of “Northern Exposure” that I had not seen before. We plugged the laptop into our solar generator and watched it while laying on our bed.  It just doesn’t get much better than this!  Northern Exposure is one of our favorite shows that we have ever watched.  I bought Dean the entire series off of Ebay for his birthday a few years ago.  We still love it.  :O)  MY favorite part of the trip was eating the chocolate chip cookies.  They were SO good!  :O)  

We're still Greendockin'.  Today we are heading out to a free, primitive campground over near Spring Valley.  We stopped in at the Pioche library as we were heading over there, so that's why we were able to blog today.  We'll for sure be off the grid for two or three days though, so we'll write again when we get back.  Until then, Happy Trails!