If you are driving the whole day and there is not time to stop or to prepare food, you can use the engine heat to prepare a meal. Even sausages and chicken can be prepared on it.

• Use thick tinfoil, about an arm’s arm length, fold it double with the dull side on the outside. Wrap your food inside in a firm parcel. Tie the parcel with a piece of wire on a suitable place near the exhaust manifold of your vehicle.

• Drive then until you guess your meal is ready or when you get the smell in the cab. It is not a definite process – you will have to experiment, but when you get to know your recipes and the use of your engine oven, you will, without much trouble, prepare a delicious meal.

• Eggs can be prepared in different ways. In a spade, kettle or if need be on the bonnet or on a warm rock. You can also bury eggs in the warm sand next to the fire to be baked in the shell.

• Another way for eggs is to sharpen a stick, the point should be as thin as possible and must be longer than the length of the egg. Very carefully make a small hole on the one side of the egg, thrust the stick through and cautiously out on the other side. Hold the stick with the egg over the coals, rotating the stick until sufficiently cooked.

Then there is still that trick that always succeeds to impress the ignorant – to boil water in a paper- or plastic bag.

• Make two holes at the top of the bag and push a stick through it to serve as handle. Pour water in the bag up to the holes. The holes must be thus situated and formed that the bag cannot tear. Then hold the paper kettle over the coals until the water boils.

• A plastic shopping bag with grips works better. Just make sure, in all cases, that no flames or excessive heat can burn those parts of the bag that is above the water-surface. The principle that prevents the burning or melting of the bag, rest simply upon the fact that the water cools down as quickly in the inside of the bag as that heated up by the heat on the outside

Dr Wallace Vosloo is an Engineer and Scientist by profession. His family has lived in Africa since 1696 and he has a deep love for the continent. He is a practical outdoorsman and loves traditional hunting, axe and knife throwing, longbow shooting, black powder rifle- and cannon shooting, salt and fresh water fly fishing and tracking. The art of survival is Wallace’s main field of interest and his passion is to transfer these old forgotten skills to young hunters.

A plastic Coke bottle can also be used as a kettle. Remove the stopper to prevent pressure building up in the bottle while heating and do not fill the bottle completely seeing that the plastic shrinks a little and the water at the same time expands during the boiling process