Fireless Cooker: Success!

One of the things that Bettina goes on and on about is her fireless cooker. It's labor saving, it's money saving, it's gas saving. She waxed eloquent about it so much that I looked it up.

Turns out that a fireless cooker is a variation on an old fashioned passive cooker, specifically the haybale variety. You heat food to boiling, cover it tightly, and insulate the whole thing. This is best for foods which would normally be several hours at a low temperature to cook, e.g., beans, roasts, oatmeal.

So last night I made one. Although Bettina's was bought, and might have also had additional heating stones in a handsome piece of furniture, I made mine out of fabric scraps and my canning kettle.


I sewed two denim pant legs together and evened out the width to be roughly ten inches when stuffed (that being the height of my kettle). Using scrap fabric, I filled the pant legs, attempting to quilt panels as I went, with mixed results.



Turns out, my machine really hated this project and now needs as tuneup. (This is piggybacking my last project of a heavy wool coat, so it's had hard usage.) I then made a little pillow out of pockets to put in the center , directly underneath the pot, along with a few pieces of scrap cardboard to act as a heat shield. I then set up my cooker!


I curled the pant legs around the inside of the kettle, put the pocket pillow in the middle and the cardboard on top.


I then started oatmeal boiling in the asparagus kettle. When it was good and boiling, I put it in the fireless, put a pillow on top, and tied the lid on tightly. And so, more than 12 hours later, we had warm and cooked oatmeal for breakfast! I consider this project a success and am looking forward to repeating it.

Notes about the oatmeal: it clumped together outrageously, make sure to have a little extra water, or boiling water ready in the morning.