"foil" news and stories

Some of you are no doubt familiar with the technique of cooking food on your car's engine while you drive. Perhaps you've even read Manifold Destiny. A great site called Instructables has a step-by-step guide with plenty of annotated photos showing how to make things like marinated chicken breasts, roasted potatoes, ramen noodles and apples with brown sugar. Mileage ranges and speeds are suggested, as is placement on different parts of the engine. The tutorial was posted by a mechanical engineering student who goes by Trebuchet03. He also adds that the striker plate inside your car door can double as a bottle opener in a pinch.

Heart-shaped cake pans are great for Valentine's Day. After all, anything shaped as a heart - cakes, cookies, mashed potatoes - is automatically perceived as romantic being romantic. The problem with heart-shaped bakeware is that it isn't terribly practical. You have to store it and probably will not be using it nearly as much as more traditional square and round pans. But Reynold's has come out with a line of shaped aluminum mini cake pans. Usethe Fun Shapes pans to bake heart-shaped mini cakes and then simply throw out the tin as you would with an ordinary cupcake wrapper. The company recently started marketing these, but plans to put them out for most holidays. I paid $1.49 for this pack of 24 at my local grocery store.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]