Some humor Y2K shopping

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A local sporting goods store is closing, and having a pretty good "going out of business sale", so I went to check it out. They had some good prices, so I bought a few "essentials". Went to the checkout line, and the guy in front of me was buying two of the folding Coleman camping toilets and a book on "simple eating/cooking". I started to plop my 250 rounds of 12 gauge, 1000 rounds of .22 and 200 rounds of .38 on the counter. He takes a good look at my stuff and says "I guess no one will be trying to take YOUR food away"! I leaned over and said in a low voice "I didn't buy any food. I figure I'll just sneak up on people when they're sitting on their portable toilet, shoot them, and take THEIR food". He looked at me for a second, then we both busted out laughing (including the clerk).

Well, guess you had to be there, but it really was funny.

One thing I bought for $30.00 was a Coleman collapsable camp oven designed to be used over the burner of a camp stove. Anyone have any experience with one of them?

-- Online2Much (it_was_funny@the.time), February 13, 1999

Answers

Get it good and hot first time you use it or you will eat food tasting like tin foil.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), February 13, 1999.

ROTFLMAO

-- Tman (Tman@IBAgeek.com), February 13, 1999.

ROFL :D

That's pretty sweet... did he go back and buy some shells himself??

That Coleman folding stove is a nice setup. It has no, repeat no insulation, so it will eat up fuel. What I found to be the best way to keep from having to go full-blast on the burner was to wrap the stove in aluminum foil. I used the super-heavy-duty kind, crumpled it up a bit (traps heat better), and wrapped it around the stove. One long piece tucked into the top of the front opening (with the door open), over the top, down the back and tucked into the recess underneath. Next, a very long piece from underneath one side, over the top, down and back underneath. Do the same thing in an X pattern looking at the top, to seal the corner joints (BTW, I checked out the heat loss from this stove with a thermocouple, and found most of the heat escaping from these corner joints). Now, do this *all over again* so that there are two layers of foil over the stove. It'll look like something from the space program, but NOW you're ready to bake, Y2K style.

How does it work? Glad you asked... It required MUCH less gas to get it hot than before. This set me to thinking, so I fastened a three-legged steel plant stand onto a piece of 3/4" plywood, and placed an Aladdin kerosene lamp in the center of it. I blocked up the stand so that the Aladdin's chimney came within an inch of the top of the stand. Placed my oven on top of the stand, then fired up the lamp. Within 15 minutes, the thermometer read 325 degrees, hot enough to bake bread, roast meat, etc. Now an Aladdin is only about 3,000 btu's, compared to around 10,000 for the average propane burner, so you should be able to bake decently at around 1/3 the propane usage as compared to a box-stock oven. Incidentally, an Aladdin uses a gallon of kerosene per 50 hours of operation, so this could be a real cheap way to solve the cooking/heating/lighting dilemma in one fell swoop. Incidentally, one Aladdin lamp will heat a small, well-insulated room in the dead of winter - I've tried it, and it works.

I had thought about super-insulating the oven by putting layers of fiberglass insulation on the top, sides and back of the already-foiled oven,then covering with moe foil, but before I do I want to be sure that it won't get loose and get in the oven and food. When I get it figured out I'll post the results.

-- Why2K? (who@knows.com), February 13, 1999.


Last Summer as I was garage sale shopping a woman about to close down her sale begged me to take her convection oven FREE! I did and when I got it home an began wondering what in the world I would do with it, I found upon examination that it would work like a coleman camp stove oven if you merely set it on a burner. All that was necessary was to cut off the cord connected to the top! Since all but the top is just sheet steel It will be A LUXURY VERSION OF THE COLMAN CAMP OVEN with two chrome racks. All I had to do was buy an oven thermometer to hang on the rack. Check it out! It is a GREAT SOLUTION TO THE BAKING PROBLEM!

-- Ann Fisher (zyax55b@prodigy.com), February 13, 1999.

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