Biff and Rosie Sitting in a Tree.....

Shantell's cousin Biff and his wife Rosie came over for dinner and a visit tonight. It turns out that they live about 5 minutes away. They are a cute couple. They have been married for about 3 months.

I gave Biff a hard time about not trying out for American Idol. This boy can sing!!!!! I tried to enroll the help of his family in my cause, but it mostly fell on deaf ears. Either I am tone deaf, or they didn't think it would be a good idea. He has been taking singing, dancing(ballroom), music lessons for practically his whole life. His three brothers and sister have been as well, but I think Biff has the best vocals of them. In fact, they were all in a band together called "4 Hits and a Miss".

After they left I decided to fiddle around with some alcohol stoves that I had made. I have been scrounging through the trash cans at work and found some big Arizona Iced Tea cans, so I made a stove with these cans. I figured the can could hold enough fuel to bake muffins.

I decided to bake some muffins because I wanted to try out my $.50 purchase from DI. I had previous used my brothers BakePacker to bake. I came across a homemade version of the oven while I was researching how the BakePacker worked. This site suggested making the oven out of an aluminum baking try. I immediately thought that a disposable aluminum pie tin would work better. We didn't have one, so I went in search of one at the local thrift stores. I couldn't find one, but I did find this:

I have no idea what it was or what it was used for, but it met all the requirements that would go into creating the DIY version. The "broven" has a lip, but I didn't think that it would be tall enough to add enough water under it to bake. So I thought about adding some legs to it until I put in into the pot. The broven fit nicely in the larger of my Sigg Tourist pans. The pan has a lip in it so it gave me enough of a gap for the water.

I started the water a boiling and the muffin a cooking. It appeared that I didn't add enough alcohol to the Arizona can, so I had to resort to using another stove to finish the cooking. I have about 8 of these stoves, so I picked the one that has turned out the best of the bunch. Shantell thinks I am to obsessive over the stoves. :) This one fired up like a champ. It finished up the cooking. The muffin took about 18 minutes to cook.

The Three Berry muffin was completely cook and tasked great. Since the oven uses water to bake, so there is no crispy muffin top. I even got Shantell to try a bite. I think that I am slowing turning her into a camper, or at least getting her excitement level of camping up to 0.00000000000001%.