It’s hot here, and we are staying in the trailer.

Here in Madison, Wisconsin, it is 101deg’s, and Anne-Marie and I just don’t feel like going anywhere today.  The community of Deforest is having a lot of activities in the city park, the parade was this morning, a car show till 4:00, beer garden, and food venders, all this and more, just three miles from the RV Park, and we don’t have the energy in the heat today.  We have been on the run every day for a while, so I guess it’s OK to have a day off.

I made lunch today.
Way back when we were still in Tucson, Arizona, I felt that we needed a electric skillet of some type, or something a little larger than what we could use on the gas cook top in the trailer.  When cooking on the gas cook top in the trailer, an awful lot of heat is put into the trailer, and when it is too warm, this isn’t helpful.  We had purchased a Cuisinart Panini Grill, the year before, and it became the favorite appliance for me, but it was a bit messy, being open on the sides, and allowed splatters to jump out.  The panini grill, in addition to being a bother to clean, it would get hot all around, top, bottom and sides, and put a lot of heat into the trailer.  I’m not saying that it is a bad appliance, because it makes great sandwiches, it makes a lot of heat and releases it in the trailer.  Nearly all appliance manufactures make some type of electric grill or skillet, but our needs were for a somewhat small one, perhaps 10 inches across, and this small size really narrowed the field to just a few.  We already owned two Zojirushi rice cookers, and they are about the best engineered small appliances to be found, so I read all that I could find on the skillets they manufacture.  The neatest feature of the skillet is that the base contains the heat, and is cool on the bottom and sides, and the skillet base heats the most even I’ve ever seen, Anne-Marie noticed that when simmering, the heat is uniform across the bottom of the pan, center to the outside edges.  It still gets hot on the top, and heat is heat, but the release of heat into the trailer seems to be a lot less than the panini grill we used before.
It’s now 102deg, hot outside.