This step is important-your thermos should be hot before you begin cooking. Preheat your thermos by filling it with boiling water, then seal it up and set it aside. You’ll lose less heat and avoid getting bits of food in your bilge or scattered around your campsite. A funnel with a wide stem comes in handy when pouring the dry mix into the thermos. There are plenty of recipes for thermos cooking on the web. By themselves, bulk grains don’t have much flavor, so you’ll want to carry spices and other ingredients to make them more interesting. Oatmeal, steel-cut oats, couscous, and quinoa are standard fare on my boat because they’re cheap, wholesome, and keep well. Pre-packaged meals from the supermarket like pasta and rice-based dishes work well, as do bulk grains or dry soup mixes-anything prepared by boiling in water. Thermos cooking uses very little fuel-a single 8.5-oz pressurized propane/isobutene fuel canister provided 18 days of hot meals on my last solo cruise. For bigger meals, you’ll need a larger bottle, or even more than one.īoiling-hot water does the cooking a pot and a compact stove or a small campfire will do the job.

A 16-oz thermos will cook a large entrée for one person. Get one that is lined with steel rather than glass-steel retains heat better. To try it you’ll need a wide-mouth insulated food jar or vacuum bottle Thermos, Stanley, and Hydroflask offer good choices. It’s so simple that I now regularly cook hot meals when I’m cruising. When I did fire up my cruising cook set, a single-burner backpacking stove, the lack of an effective low setting made real cooking impossible anyway.

When I’m out cruising I’m generally too lazy to do anything fancy to feed myself. With a small wide-mouth thermos, water boiled in the morning will have a hot cooked meal for you for lunch or dinner.

Thermos holiday camp stove