Leaving your dog in the car on a summer day can cook them just like a steak. So, unless you are into authentic Vietnamese dining, DON’T COOK YOUR DOG!

Let me prove my point …

The other day I posted a short PSA about leaving your pets in the car. I had a few comments and some professional advice. In one of my replies I compared the interior temperature of my light colored vehicle quickly became dangerous in just 10 minutes. I likened it to the recommended internal temperature of a steak. At 140 degrees we’re talking MEDIUM WELL DONE!

That got me thinking … you can imagine where this is headed.

I took a completely frozen steak from the chest freezer, opened the bag, sprinkled a little salt and pepper and closed the bag again.I placed it up on a cooking cooling rack and set it on the center armrest of my vehicle. At the time, the outside temperature was 84. The sun was now shining. At no time did the sun shine directly on the armrest.

Within an hour, the steak went from frozen solid to 87 degrees. Then my experiment went a bit wonky because it became very overcast for the rest of the day. Even still, after 3 hours of mostly overcast, I removed the steak from the bag and it had a very respectable internal temperature of 126 degrees !

The steak has no grill marks so it looks a little less "restaurant worthy" than my usual cooking but I can tell you it is delicious. I will run this test again on a sunny day and start with a thawed steak. My expectation is it will cook completely within 60-90 minutes.

Don’t let this happen to you family pets !

This cup was in my truck. My truck is not black. It’s silver with light grey interior. The cup was in the cup holder. Not in the sun; in the middle of the car with no direct exposure. The truck was in my driveway and the shade much of the time.

The heat in the truck was hot enough to deform both the cup *and* the straw. The top shrank. The sides wilted. The bottom dimpled.

Obviously, Zen was not in the truck. During the summer, unless Zen and I are going somewhere for her enjoyment, Zen stays home. No reason to take chances with our pets!

PS: I didn’t say "dumb pet owners" because there are no dumb pets; only dumb owners. Any trainer will tell you, it’s the owner that needs the training more than the pet. Trust me, I’ve had a lot of training !

I started by dumping just about any grain I could find into the mixing bowl. That turned out to include about 2 cups of spent grain from the Saint George’s brewery, a half cup each of wheat germ and oat bran and a quarter cup of milled flax seed. Considering the bread recipe only called for a bit more than 3 cups of bread flour, I needed to make some adjustments. Here is where the combination of the strait dough method, past baking, and a heavy duty mixer with a bread hook all converge. I had approximately 20 oz of water with 4 tsp of yeast in it. That was enough for two loaves. So added about half the liquid and and most of 6 cups of flour. I then dribbled in the remaining liquid about a tablespoon at a time. My target is a dough ball that pulls away from the mixing bowl and leaves the sides clean while at the same time, not being very sticky to my hands. If I over shoot with the liquid, I just add a sprinkling of flour.

This bread is heavy! Tasty. But heavy. The bread has so much extra stuff in it that when I chilled a baked loaf in the refrigerator, it allowed me to cut the slides less than 1/4" thick (nice for those starch fiends on a diet).

I ended up with three loaves. Here i have cut half the loaf as thin as I like and am trying our a strawberry rhubarb all frit preserve. It’s also great as an appetizer when lightly toasted and spread with tomato pesto (which I also ended up making more of last last week and canned).

Just because … a common turn of phrase for me. When I am curious about something, I figure "why not" and try it. In this case it was creating a time lapse video.

Most IP surveillance cams and software for webcam can grab a single picture either triggered by motion or some repeating interval. I used a TRENDnet SecurView Wireless Internet Camera (but I think the the image quality is much better from the Cisco/Linksys Wireless Internet Video Camera).

I set it up to FTP to my computer and then set the interval to be every 10 seconds. Once it had captured frames for about 5 hours (remember it takes 30 frames for one second of video so at one frame every 10 seconds, it takes 5 minutes to capture 1 second of video).

I used ffmpeg to combine the images. The only trick is the image names must be sequentially numbered. Then its the same command I used for my tomato pesto video.

The problem with this method is that the video quality is less than the image quality – which to me, makes no sense. I’ll keep noodling that problem.