You don’t have to stand over a stove stirring food all day.
Cooking food in a thermos beats standing over a stove or worrying about timers or pulling something out of an oven. Even the worst cook should be able to cook food in a thermos – it’s pretty foolproof.
I like making steel cut oatmeal using Alton Brown’s (of Good Eats fame) excellent recipe, but it requires me to get out my cast iron pan, toast the oats, add water, cook for 20 minutes on the stove, add milk & salt, and then cook and stir for another 10 minutes. It’s a pain and I usually cook a triple batch and put the leftovers in the fridge because it’s more involved than I’d like.
Cooking the same oatmeal in a thermos is much easier and faster. No stovetop stirring or timing and it’s there waiting for me whenever I’m ready to eat.
Using a thermos is the most fuel efficient way to cook. Period.
A quality thermos is a marvel of heat retention. The better thermoses retain 75% of the heat even after 24 hours. So, cooking using a thermos is very efficient since the water is heated up once and kept at a high temperature within the confines of this metal vacuum.
Why should I care? It’s not like a gas stove uses more than a few pennies of electricity or gas to fix food.
That’s true, but what if your gas or electric stove isn’t working because of an outage of some kind? Or maybe you like to backpack and have limited gas to burn? Learning how to cook using a thermos is a great preparedness skill and could come in handy sometime when you most need it.
Cook with healthy whole grains without the time and trouble.
Most of the recipes we have on the site include whole food ingredients like whole wheat, quinoa, oats, millet, etc. These whole grains are in their perfect form but often aren’t eaten because of the time it takes to cook them using normal methods. A thermos, however, uses it’s heat retention properties to cook these whole grains overnight while you sleep so you get the nutrition of the whole grain with little time and effort.