I cook my stock pots in thermos cookware and save money on gas. 

I own both the Dream Pot (see first pictures) and the Shuttle Chef (last picture) Each has it’s advantages, the Shuttle Chef would no doubt insulate the contents more than the Dream Pot, and I love the curved easy clean shape and polish on the stainless steel internal cooking pots but I also love the design of the Dream pot where there is one large pot that allows me to cook enough food for a few meals for two adults and freeze the leftover food for future servings.  The clever design allows a smaller pot to fit inside the larger pot, giving you the same two small pots that you get with the shuttle chief.    

I am thawing out a two serve meal I cooked up in a stock pot a week ago and divided into multiple meal servings.  The recipe was a chicken, a bunch of celery, red and green capsicums and a small chilli pepper, 5 onions a few cloves of garlic, carrots chopped up, herbs, bay leaves, pepper corns, four different varieties of legumes and some barley, covered with water, and a teaspoon full of vinegar which I have read helps draw the minerals out of the bones into the liquid, simmered until just before the chicken meat was ready to disintegrate. 

I removed the chicken allowed both broth and chicken to cook, removed all the fat from the broth and skin and bone from the chicken, returning the chicken chunks to the mixture, it to cool then returned chunks of skin free chicken meat to the mixture. 

I serve about 2 soup ladles full of this mixture for myself and three for my man, with or without dry toast and additional vegetables.   

I have reheated this with snow peas and tonight I will probably serve it with mushrooms on toast.    

I usually use brown rice rather than barley but the brown rice is still packed into he caravan outside and I've been in the house for a week but haven't completed emptying the caravan pantry yet so I changed.    

A money saving tip is to make a broth like this up when you buy your vegetables because there is a lot of nutritious parts of vegetables that are usually thrown out but would be ideal added to a rich broth.  For instance I trim up my cauliflower and broccoli into flowerets and pack them in the crisper ready to use then chop the stalks up and add them to the broth.  All the leafy parts of my celery go in my broths as do the washed outer leaves of lettuce and cabbage.  I also add outer skins if I think they are suitable and clean, pumpkin, potato, mushroom skins are edible and mushroom stalks also go it my stock pot.   

All left over bones are added to the stock pot, I might as well get the benefit of the minerals in my food and the extra flavour it's more nutritious and cheaper to freeze all left over bones so they are ready to throw into the stock pot when your having a cook up (I do one once a fortnight), than to buy commercial stock. I don't add any salt, there is enough salt in the bones and meat already IMO. 

A further economy measure is to cook this in a thermos stock pot.  You heat the pot on the stove for 10 minutes then place in the thermos cooker where it cooks on in its own generated heat, (no additional power required), for up to 6 hours.  This is cheaper than a slow cooker and more portable, can be cooking dinner in the car while you are driving to your night’s camp site.

The only disadvantage I can see for a traveller is that these thermos cookers take up a far bit of space and this year I travelled for four months and cooked everything in one wide deep lidded non stick saucepan and that and one kettle and leaving all additional cooking paraphernalia behind, allowed me room to shop at the SPC cannery before leaving home and store packaged sugar free fruits, legumes, tinned fish and many other non perishable products at huge savings.  We went through three 250 gram containers of fruit a week at $1.each a total of $3, a week for fruit while we travelled and these would have cost us from $3.50 or $10.50 a week to buy as we went.  Similar huge savings were made on trays of salmon at $1. A tin versus an average $3.50 tin if purchased in rural town supermarkets.  By leaving excess cooking pots behind, I was able to save at least $30. a week on my food shopping bill.    

So strange as it seems these thermos cookers I bought for camp trips will get more use saving me cooking fuel costs, when I am in my summer home, rather than seeing very much service when we go on tour. 

  Images of Australia in the Paintings and Writing of Artist Author

 Kathy Shell  Artist – Kathryn Shell  Author
Kathryn Shell is a published non-fiction and fiction author currently working on an Australian Novel.
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