This wild guy wants you to cook using your car engine

An Edinburgh student took procrastination to new realms when he wrote a guide on how to cook using your car engine.

Fourth-year Alfred Cary published the cookbook this month, described as “the complete guide to cooking on car engines”.

Seriously.

From Rachel Khoo rustling up bechamel sauces in an impossibly cramped Parisian kitchen to Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood overseeing a crowd of bakers using open flames and lots of wires in a canvas tent, it would seem we are no longer satisfied with hazardless approaches to cooking.

It is this quirky trend of culinary innovation that has given birth to Carbecue.

Very much of the wholesome, laid back, Jamie Oliver ilk, Alfred Cary has managed to create a cookbook destined to be very popular with both the culinary adventurous (if slightly unrefined) student cooks and Oliver’s well established base of “Oh isn’t he a nice boy!” middle-aged women.

The concept is fairly straightforward. Get your hands on some tasty produce, season to taste, wrap it all up in some tin foil, throw it under the bonnet and drive.

The excess heat produced by the engine will gradually cook whatever hunk of meat, fish or veg you’ve decided on to leave you with a delicious bit of grub at the end of your journey.

So if you often find yourself craving North African lamb loin while belting out the Frozen soundtrack, Cary’s got you covered.

The Carbecue concept really comes into its own if you have a tendency to bowl over countryside wildlife on your night time drives. Road-kill to Lapin a la cocotte in no time.

With longer and darker evenings drawing ever closer, and as students hunt out their winter snuggle buddy, pulling out some seabass on a bed of spinach after a long drive home (as Alfred has previously treated his girlfriend to) may just be the romantic surprise that lands you that Love Actually date.

Cary’s brainchild also sits pretty comfortably within our 21^st century environmental consciousness. Short of owning a prius or a Bradley Wiggans like endurance, harnessing some of that polar bear assassinating fossil fuel energy from your wagon goes at least some way to easing your climatic conscience.

Cary rebukes cynics of the concept’s green credentials insisting: “You should never drive to cook, but only cook when driving.”

Make no bones about it, the cookbook market is already saturated and quickly being over taken by the availability of recipes online. But Carbecue is something a little bit different, a gimmick yes, but one that could make the remainder of your end of term drives home taste a whole lot better.