Good way to immolate family members who sleep walk when hungry.
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I bet this annoys the F out of dogs.
They’ll smell it and then just sit infront of the fireplace doing that dog puzzled look. WHY? HUMAN? WHY?
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I want Patton Oswalt sitting by a fire fulled with KFC scent Logs singing The Christmas Song (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” but with the lyrics changed to “Failure pile in a Sadness Bowl” and the like.
From 2007, Patton Oswalt’s Werewolves & Lollipops
That’s what I want. I know I can’t smell the KFC through my media consumption device while he sings. But I can see it on his face. A whole hour of Patton Oswalt, talking sweetly, giving his comedy tidbits coupled with notes on D&D and sci-fi. The man was in Blade Trinity. He did that and elevated the film; if he can do that, he can do anything.
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I remember meeting someone who had read the same issue of Whole Earth Catalog as your parents. He had a tool to roll the paper really tightly, and then he would soak them in grease (from his car, IIRC, not his deep fat fryer). At this remove, 40 years later (!), I am not sure if the grease was an important part of the formula or if it was just his way of making the paper log burn brighter and hotter.
Actually it did, one layer of newsprint at a time. As someone who has inadvertently caused a chimney fire by burning wadded up sheets of newspaper, I think making a newsprint log tightly bound so it burns slowly and reluctantly is an excellent safety tip. (Shredded paper would be an excellent way to start the fire if used in small quantities and a way to burn your house down if used in large quantities).
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Now when I go camping, I can start my campfire with one of these and people will be like… who the f is cooking fried chicken at 8am in the middle of nowhere?
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Could they possibly be worse?
(I hadn’t eaten KFC for maybe two decades, after loving it as a kid, and tried some about a year and a half ago… Somewhat like watching a movie you loved when young, this experience did not live up to the memory hype. It was really salty, and ridiculously greasy… even for deep fried chicken. Those weird synthetic tasting mashed potatoes and “gravy”… as weirdly good as I remembered!)
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They’re usually just square molds/presses. You soak the paper in water fist and the wet combined with pressure binds it all together. They still make them.
Tightly rolled paper burns fine. After all actual wood is far far denser. It’s not about insulation it’s about oxygen access to the fuel. Just like a log won’t go up all at once, and won’t burn stabley until you get a good base of coals and good airflow. Neither will dense paper. The thing with paper is it doesn’t really create coals and straight piles of paper tends to smother the base of the fire, air cant get into the core. But logs/bricks of compessed paper can be stacked to maintain airflow. So it’s considerably easier to get it to burn.
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Seems like it would be far more cost effective to just buy the bucket of chicken and throw a piece into the fireplace every half hour.
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For a time, the only heat I could get in my apartment was by cooking because the heater was buggy. The apartment had no insulation… wait…I have had a few apartments with poor heating and no insulation. Any way, the first one was wired for 3 lightbulbs originally. An electric heater was not an option, as running the toaster, owning a fridge, and having a light on often tripped a breaker or blew a fuse. The wall heater needed repair and we loved our landlord, so it took time to get it fixed, and we didn’t complain. I don’t think it was really ever fixed. Anyway, being cold was a great excuse to make a few cookies from that premade frozen dough from the supermarket. It also made the apartment smell so nice for a few hours, though the heat lasted about 45 minutes. That apartment could fit exactly 1 guest, 2 if you counted the cat visited by breaking in through a loose window.
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I believe you are thinking of one of these:
They were all the rage in the '70s.
Alternatively, there is the ‘manual’ method:
It’s one of those things were the ‘recipe’ says it take ‘less than two minutes’ - apart from the day or so of soaking and day to two weeks of drying.
As bauble says in the instructable:
You really need to make a whole lot of them before winter. Otherwise it will be too cloudy and cold. At the beginning you will probably love making them, so take advantage of this and make as many as you can. After a while your enthusiasm will wear off and it will turn into a chore especially if you’re out in the cold and your hands are freezing while you play around with cold wet newspaper.
But anyway… good luck if you decide to make them.
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My best friend in grade school had a lot of siblings making newspaper firelogs every winter. It was nearly an industry for them. This was as you rightly pointed out, in the 1970s.
I always wondered what happened to the heavy metals in the colored inks (typically not black ink) as the newspaper burned and the metal molecules freed themselves as airborne particulates from their oily papery chains.
Oh noes! Bad news in some areas: it’s no longer allowed:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930124&slug=1681765
Of eight fuel types rated by the Environmental Protection Agency, newspaper logs ranked third worst for particulates (tiny particles that float around in the air and cause big problems for asthmatics and others with respiratory conditions), and worst of all for carbon monoxide (a poisonous gas that causes problems for everyone). And although black ink burns fairly completely, toxic metals such as lead, chromium and cadmium commonly found in colored ink supplements can go up your chimney to redeposit in the neighborhood.
Crikey I wonder what the constituents are in the smoke of the KFC firelog. Thanks to Cult45’s EPA puppets, we will probably never know for sure, at least until we get a more protection-y of the Environment kinda leadership.
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Yeah, it’s not exactly healthy.
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But why? *Ryan Reynolds here*
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Man, homemade fried chicken is the fucking best. No contest.
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Been there done that. Lived in a tiny apartment with bad AC & heating, and poor or no insulation. During the winter i made eggplant and squash “jerky”, keeping the oven going for the 8hrs it takes to dehydrate the veggies was a good excuse to heat up the apartment. Winters and summers in that lil apartment sucked.
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Ah, that reminds me of my smallest “apartment.” It was a studio with a mini fridge and a microwave. There was no real kitchen, and my only option for baking was a toaster oven. The worst part was that the only sink was in the bathroom, so I had to carefully plan when to wash the dishes and put them away.
Still, the toaster oven could handle pastries, with the added benefit of warming my hands for a few minutes.
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I tried to refresh my memory over 35 years ago and have not gone back.
I couldn’t eat the chicken. The sides fared a bit better.
How KFC beat bacon-scented firelogs to the market is beyond me.
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