Category Archives: French Toast Emergency

French Toast Emergency, Local

Can you bake cookies in your car on a 111-degree day in Kirkland? Yes

[KIRKLAND] – (MTN) Twitter, YouTube, and Tik Tok were full of videos of people cooking eggs, bacon, pancakes, and cookies on decks, pavement, and in cars. Yesterday we put this to test using our company truck, which had been sitting all day and facing west.

We got off to a late start, putting the cookies into the General Motors built oven at 4:01 PM. We had planned for 2 hours, but many of you suggested we should go for 4 hours. A check at 6:15 PM showed we had a hot mess, as some of you voted. We didn’t open up the door to check because we wanted to retain as much heat as possible.

By 7:30 PM, it was still 108 degrees outside, but the sun had sunk low enough to our west that it was starting to get filtered by trees. The thermometer we put on the dashboard showed the interior had dropped to 140, but the cookies looked – done.

The tops were surprisingly chewy, while the very bottom could have benefited from a bit more heat. That may be our fault because we put a silicone sheet under the baking tray, thinking it would protect the dashboard. After we set up the cookies, we learned a car’s dashboard could get to 200 degrees, so any fears that the heated metal baking tray would damage the vehicle were unfounded.

If you like your cookies soft, these were nearly perfect. If you like your cookies with a crunch, like one of our unofficial testers, these were a nope.

Can you bake cookies in your car on a hot day? Yes, if you like them soft baked. If you’re wondering what the inside of the truck smells like, it smells like a bakery.

Breaking News, French Toast Emergency, Local

BREAKING: Counterfeit N95 masks flood area hospitals

The Washington Hospital Association announced that hundreds of thousands of fake N95 masks ended up in dozens of Washington hospitals. The counterfeit masks are well constructed and appear in every way to look like 3M manufactured masks. They even include the 3M logo, display of lot numbers, certifications, and warnings like a real mask.

Area hospitals are already sending out memos to their staff on the situation and pulling the impacted masks out of circulation. Hospital workers, including at critical medical facilities treating COVID, unknowingly started using the masks in late December. There is no information on if any hospital workers were sickened by using the fake masks.

N95 masks are produced through a specialized process that creates an electrostatic charge in the filter material. Most viruses are too small to be stopped by conventional paper or cloth masks, but the amount exhaled or inhaled is reduced. The electrostatic charge in an N95 and KN95 mask attracts the particles as they attempt to pass through the weave and capture them. Without the electrostatic charge, the cover provides no more protection than other woven masks.

On the left is a real N95 mask produced by 3M and on the right is a counterfeit N95 mask produced by an unknown source

3M developed this process, and their masks were readily available before the spread of COVID for medical and industrial use. High demand by the medical community has put a lot of strain on the supply chain, increasing costs by 200%, and during most of 2020, state and hospital officials were on their own to secure their supplies.