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More Ideas For Cooking On Your Car Engine
OK, so in my last post, I mentioned how one goes about harnessing the waste heat from your car engine to cook your dinner. While just mentioning the how-tos is enough for some cooks, other folk might need more than just a bit of inspiration. Some people prefer to have it down in black in white in front of them. So, without further ado, here are a handful of recipes for cooking on your car engine. Just don’t forget the golden rules of wrapping everything very thoroughly in tinfoil and making sure that the wire you use to strap your tinfoil packets in place on your engine block doesn’t interfere with any moving parts.
I haven’t given cooking times in these recipes, as individual results will depend on (a) your car engine, (b) how fast you’re driving and (c) how hot a day it is.
Veggie roast-up
Chop pieces of suitable veggies into chunks about 4 cm x 4 cm by 10 cm (but there’s no need to be too precise. Toss in a wee bit of cooking oil then sprinkle with salt and maybe a few herbs (rosemary, oregano or thyme) before wrapping in the tinfoil. Suitable veggies include pumpkin, parsnip, beetroot, onion, potato, sweet potato, swede, zucchini and carrot. You can put them in separate packets if you have too many to fit in a pack that stays together.
Long-haul pot roast
This requires a drive of 200+ km, so try this one next time you’re driving interstate. Take a decent chunk of meat (1 kg or more): beef, pork or mutton. In an ice cream container or something else that will fit your meat, combine 1 cup red wine, 2 cloves crushed garlic, a couple of sprigs of rosemary plus salt and pepper to taste. Dunk the meat in the mixture and roll it about until the meat is coated. Cover the container and leave it in the fridge overnight. Before you set off, take the meat out of the marinade and wrap it up in the tinfoil. Discard the marinade. Halfway through your drive, stop and flip the packet of meat over so it cooks evenly.
Chicken wings a la Porsche Cayenne
Get about half a dozen chicken wings and coat them lightly in oil (not too much or you risk it dripping out of the tinfoil and starting a fire that will be really hard to explain to the insurance company). Mix up a bit of cayenne pepper (or chilli powder), dried oregano, chopped garlic and salt, plus enough paprika to get enough to coat the wings. You can also use pre-prepared seasoning mixes from your local supermarket if you want to try a different flavour. Wrap up the wings, either individually or as a packet.
Baked apples
Got to have dessert in there somewhere! Use large, firm apples (e.g. Granny Smith). Remove the core so there’s a hollow down the middle of the apple. Combine sultanas, cinnamon and sugar. Stuff the hollow with the cinnamon, sugar and sultana mix. Wrap up really well individually in the foil. This also works with other firm pipfruit such as pears and quinces.
Chocolate bananas
This BBQ favourite works best for short journeys. Leave the bananas in the skin and cut a slit in them lengthwise. Insert chocolate chips or chunks of chocolate. Possibly slip in a few marshmallows. Wrap firmly.
Dashboard Pain au Chocolat
This doesn’t involve the engine but is too good to leave out. We all know that chocolate melts if left on the dashboard in the hot sun, so make the most of it. Get some plain croissants from the bakery and heaps of dark chocolate. Chop up or grate the chocolate and add it liberally to the croissants. Wrap in clingfilm, baking paper or foil. Place on dashboard of the car and wait until the chocolate melts.
Happy driving (and cooking!)
Megan
How To Turn Your Car Into An Oven
Car engines produce a lot of waste heat. It’s one of the basic laws of thermodynamics that energy will change from one form to another, and as not all the chemical potential energy in the petrol or diesel that you put into your tank gets turned into kinetic (motion) energy. Some becomes sound energy and some becomes heat energy. In the normal course of things, a lot of this heat energy gets wasted.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can do something useful with that heat. The most common thing that people do with this head is using it to heat the inside of the car. But you can also use that heat produced by your engine to cook a meal. They say that this is as old as the internal combustion engine, and it’s probably older than that, as I guess the drivers of steam trains probably boiled a kettle or baked spuds on the fire that boiled the water to power the train. Heck, the hordes of Genghis Khan used to shove a steak under the saddle while galloping across the steppes, meaning that it was nice and tender and ready to eat come the end of the day (but they ate raw meat).
I will have to say at the outset that I haven’t actually tried this – yet. There have certainly been moments, though, when it’s been tempting, especially on those hectic days when there’s a billion things to do and pick up, lots of driving to do and a potluck dinner to get to.
You have to pick the right sort of thing to cook. It has to be something that isn’t too big and that can be cooked adequately while wrapped up in tinfoil. Good old sausages work well. So do whole fish and corn on the cob. You could possibly give chicken drums a go, but you’d have to have a long drive to make sure that they’re cooked adequately.
You have to wrap what you’re cooking up thoroughly in tinfoil to stop any fumes getting into your food and tainting it. While some smoky flavours are delicious and desirable, petrol and diesel smoke isn’t quite so tasty. The other thing is that you don’t want the juices from your food getting into your engine and stuffing it up. So use several layers of tinfoil.
You will need to secure your tightly wrapped package to the engine block so you don’t lose your dinner when you hit a bump. Use metal wire. Don’t let your packet interfere with any moving parts.
Here’s a sample fish recipe to get you started.
- 1 medium sized fish, cleaned and scaled
- oil or butter
- salt and pepper to taste
- 3 cloves garlic
- 1 or 2 carrots, cut into rounds or julienne strips
- mushrooms (as many as you like), washed
- tabasco sauce, lemon wedges and chopped parsley to serve
Place the fish on several layers of tinfoil. Lightly coat the fish inside and out with oil or butter, then season with salt and pepper. Arrange the sliced carrots and mushrooms around and on top of the fish. Wrap very securely in the tinfoil and secure the package to the engine block.
Drive home for half an hour or so. Every time you get stuck at a busy intersection, console yourself with how the extra cooking time will make the fish beautifully tender. When you get home, remove the packet from the engine block. For goodness sake, protect your hands. Peek inside the packet and check that the flesh of the fish is white and flaky. If it is, your fish is cooked! Enjoy your dinner with all the garnishes and sauces.
There are tons of websites and books on this topic if you have a look around. Engine block cooking is bound to appeal to those pushed for time, those with a taste for survival techniques and those who have a bit of a thrifty streak to them.
Black And White Issues (And A Few Shades Of Grey)
If you take a look through the paint section of any home renovation store, you’re bound to come across those paint charts that leave you bewildered as to how many shades of white (and blue and grey and…) are possible. So in some ways, it’s a bit puzzling as to why cars tend to come in fewer colours. Look at the range of car colours available in any new model. Usually, there’ll be offerings in white, at least one grey and a red of some sort. If you’re lucky, there’ll be a few other shades: blue, green, yellow or even orange.
We tend to be more conservative with car colours when we buy, apparently. According to one source, this is because cars in a more conservative colour can be re-sold more easily. White tradie vans will be snapped up quickly, but the same sort of van – say, a Toyota Hiace – that’s in some odd colour such as metallic purple won’t go as quickly, even though might be mechanically perfect and brilliantly practical. (However, as I’ve said in other posts, this can work the other way if you’re a buyer: you might be able to pick up said purple Hiace for a song because the seller is struggling to get rid of it.)
Other colours also seem to hold their value pretty well. Dark colours like black, deep charcoal grey and very dark blue tend to be popular with luxury vehicles – and don’t forget classic British racing green in Jaguars! Think business suits and little black dresses and you’ll get the idea.
Safety plays a role in car colour choice, too. Lighter colours tend to be easier to spot on the road. This means white, yellow and possibly the lighter shades of silver are pretty good, but the luxury colours (black, dark blue and deep green) tend to be harder to pick. From experience, cars in that medium shade of grey – about the colour of the average HB pencil line or the colour of clouds threatening rain – tend to be very hard to pick during when the light is fading.
It’s possible that technology also plays a role in what looks hot for cars. Some analysts noticed that when silver computer bits and bobs were all the rage, silver cars were also sizzling, as the paint colour made the car look up to the minute. When Apple brought out their tablets and other devices in white, silver took a back seat again and white surged even further ahead. Some have also noted the increase in popularity of peacock blue and lime green, as these colours tend to be used a fair bit for lighting features and accent trims in high-tech gear.
According to Forbes magazine, the most popular colours for cars are:
- White (why are we not surprised?)
- Black
- Silver (that’s a lighter shade of metallic grey rather than completely reflective like real silver – only Justin Bieber is crass enough to have a mirror-finish car)
- Grey – everything from charcoal and pewter through to smoke and cloud
- Red. As every pre-teen boy knows, red cars go faster.
- Blue – peacock and cobalt for fun little hatchbacks, butcher’s blue for trade vans and indigo for luxury numbers.
- Brown and beige. This entry by Forbes magazine surprises me, as I haven’t seen a heap of brown cars about.
- Yellow (which also includes gold)
- Green
There is no #10, as every other colour is so rare it hardly rates, apparently.
This Is Your Brain Behind The Wheel
Have you ever wondered why sometimes, when you’re just driving for a long time, some of your best daydreams seem to just bubble up out of nowhere? Or have you ever wondered why it is that talking on a hand-held phone is so distracting to a driver, even though you’ve got your eyes and the road and can steer perfectly well with one hand.
It’s all down to your brain and the fact that you are, quite literally, in two minds about everything.
OK, here’s a quick guide to the architecture of your brain without getting too technical and requiring you to understand words like “hippocampus” and “hypothalamus”. Your brain looks rather like a walnut, what with the curly knobbly bits and the two halves. It’s the two halves that are important here, as they have different jobs to do.
The left side of your brain is the Mr Spock side of your brain. It handles logic, maths and decision-making, and also contains your language centres and the music centres. The right-hand side is the Michaelangelo side of your brain: artistic, emotional and creative, but also in charge of visual perception and space (hand–eye coordination stuff). You could call them the yin and yang sides if you like. (See the illustration – taken from an ad put out by Mercedes-Benz .)
Usually, when you’re driving, the two halves of the brain can get on pretty well. The left-hand side makes the decision about where you’re going to go and why you need to go there, and keeps track of the road rules. The right-hand side monitors what’s going on around you and tells you to make all those minor adjustments on the brake, accelerator and steering wheel. If you’ve been driving a manual for a long time, the right-hand brain will also handle gear changes; if you’re new to manual gears, the left-hand brain will manage a lot of this until the movements become automatic and the right brain can do them. We call this “doing it without thinking”, which is a bit of an insult to the right brain, which thinks in a different way.
If you are driving along without much outside input – down a familiar road in moderate traffic, for example – the left side of your brain doesn’t have a lot to do and it allows your right brain to dominate. Your right brain is busy with the driving and the left brain will happily let it dominate. While it’s dominating, your right brain can also get creative and all those interesting, quirky daydreams can come bubbling up, with the left brain playing a supporting role.
However, if you’re talking on the phone, the left brain is dominating, what with having to process the words coming in and possibly making decisions at the same time. Unlike the right brain, the left brain is a bit of a bully and a drama queen, and it won’t let the right brain have much of a say if it’s busy.
So there you are, talking on the car phone and your left brain is in full command. Right brain can perceive an upcoming hazard – that slow driver who hits the brakes heaps ahead of you, for example, or a busy intersection. But the left brain, busily engaged in processing words and making decisions, tells the right brain to shut up. It’s not until the right brain starts screaming at the right brain that the left brain drops command and lets the right brain do what it needs to by managing what it can see and the spatial relationships (i.e. what’s around you and how close you are to it or if you’re on a collision course). It all happens within seconds, but that switch from left-dominated to right-dominated does slow your reaction time.
So why doesn’t somebody talking in the car to you distract you like a phone does? Simply because the other person has two sides to their brain and their own right brains telling them about how fast you’re both approaching the intersection or that slow driver ahead of you, and the emotional/relationship nous to back off from the conversation. Someone on a phone doesn’t have that right-brain input at that time, so he/she will keep yakking regardless.
A lot of modern active safety systems attempt to replicate what your right brain does: detecting upcoming problems and taking action.
This is a very simple overview of your amazing brain and the highly complex processes that go on when you’re behind the wheel. Some people are more right-brain than others; some people can switch from left to right quickly. But even this little glimpse should give you an idea of why cell phones, car phones and too many road signs are so distracting.
Level 2, 9 Help Street