Free treats. Cooking tips. Culinary road trips.

Listen up folks. We have a very awesome announcement to make. The Night Move is pairing up with a company called Taste-full Tours to lead what they term, “Culinary Road Trips.” If you haven’t heard about these, prepare yourself to get excited. They’re bus tours (on the world’s greatest biodiesel-run shuttle bus, of course) run by culinary professionals. Sign up on the Upcoming Tours page of their website to check out some chefs’ little secrets -- off-the-beaten-path bakeries, homemade chocolate shops, local brewpubs and authentic international markets. You’ll get to rub elbows with shop owners, taste their specialties, and best of all, learn something. (And since the more you know, the more you grow, this is pretty much the greatest opportunity ever.)

I get by with a little help from cow guts

So I'm not sure if this is how Clean Emission Fluids (our biodiesel supplier, located on the grounds of NextEnergy in Detroit) does it, but apparently turning corn into biofuel has gotten easier in the past year.

"An enzyme from a microbe that lives inside a cow’s stomach is the key to turning corn plants into fuel, according to Michigan State University scientists," and according to this article, on the Environmental News Network: "Cow stomach holds key to turning corn into biofuel". Um, gross?

Basically, they pull a specific gene from a cow's stomach. This gene produces the enzyme that converts grass and other food into the sugar that fuels the cow. And they've figured out how to grow corn that has that enzyme. Magicians, I tell you.

If they put it in the right place, the enzyme makes the whole corn plant is now usable for biofuel. According to the article, "If the cell produced the enzyme in the wrong place, then the plant cell would not be able to function, and, instead, it would digest itself."

Read the article for more info. It's really super cool, but for some reason talking about cows' stomachs and enzymes and things digesting themselves grosses me out.