A traditional African recipe - beer can chicken

Here's a foolproof recipe for roast chicken if you don't have electricity or an oven..

You'll need:

1 chicken
1 can of beer
1 cardboard box
some tinfoil
a wood or coal-fired barbeque (braai to you southern Africans)

Take a good-sized gulp from your beer can so that about 75 per cent of the contents remain. Insert the can into the chicken's, errr, orifica (as per the picture) and carefully stand it up on your hot barbeque grill.

You want your coals to be about 10cm below the foul's feet. Next, cover the chook with a cardboard box lined with aluminium foil, shiny side facing in towards the chicken. The foil should overlap the edges of the box, which should be big enough to leave a gap of 10-15cm around the cooking chicken. Punch four hols in the top of the box, through both the cardboard and the foil, to allow the hot air to rise around the chicken (just like a convection oven).

Do nothing for an hour (except to check periodically that the chicken hasn't tumbled over, and that the coals are still hot). You'll know it's cooking OK by the sound and smell of fat dripping onto the hot coals and sizzling.

A regular size chicken takes between an hour and an hour-and-a-half to cook.

Warning: the only downside with this recipe is that the contents of the beer can are, sadly, undrinkable.