This weekend Mick and I made a road trip to Chattanooga for a swing dancing festival. The festival was great fun - they had live bands playing in the park by the river, and we boogied on the very crowded dance floor.
On the way we decided to try out a legendary form of food preparation - engine manifold cooking. The idea is, you wrap up food in many layers of tinfoil, then place it strategically on the hottest parts of your engine (avoiding the moving parts), close the hood, drive for at least 2 hours, and then you have a delicious hot lunch. I was in charge of the menu, so I did an internet search and discovered that there was a book on this published in 1989 entitled Manifold Destiny. It is long out of print, and extremely difficult to come by, but I managed to get a copy through interlibrary loan - an elaborate process that involved my consulting with several Georgia Tech research librarians.
When the book was finally delivered, I pored over it and devised my menu, which included marinated tofu, sliced potatoes and carrots with fresh rosemary, corn on the cob, and baked apples with sugar and cinnamon. I used a whole roll of tinfoil to wrap everything up, studied the layout of the car's engine to figure out the best spots, wedged everything in, and off we went.
Two hours later we pulled over at a Civil War battlefield, sat down under a monument, and unwrapped everything. The food was perfectly cooked, and we are now planning more trips just so we can have an excuse to try new recipes.
1 comment:
This sounds very cool. Feel free to plan a trip to Nashville to try out a new recipe.
Post a Comment