It’s great. Bring the stew, or chili, to boil, preheat the thermos with boiling water, and drop the pot in. Twelve hours later it is still hot! Typically I’ll just do this for the meat and roots, let it sit overnight, then add the softer veggies the next day.

Sure, absolutely, share some recipes. Eri used to do it all the time, that’s why we created a board for just that.

If you want, I’ve got a crazy huge list of recipes I can either post here or email – they’re full of good stuff like this.

I like to brown the beef, chunks of beef, not ground, in cast iron, in bacon fat. Once it is mostly brown, add onions and garlic. When the the water is gone, and it starts to dry up, add hot water to the pan, let it simmer, then scrape the leavings off the bottom when you start the stew pot. After that it is carrots, peas, etc. Potatoes go in last. Once the taters are soft, mash some up to thicken the broth.

I’m an adherent of slow cooking. Take the mixture and put it into a cooler with a bunch of towels. Let it sit for hours. The meat will become so tender…

Lengthwise however – excellent breakfast material. Did mine a little past the reddish into the brown, but they taste great.

I’m gonna try the gooey mess, next – I suspect it’ll taste like a fruity version of Shepard’s Pie…

The Cubans prepare them two ways, tostones (platanos verdes) and maduros.

Verde,(Green): Peel, cut them into medallions, quick deep-fat fry them and pound them flat in paper to squeeze out the excess grease. Serve salty, yellow, hard and crunchy, like fried potatoes.

But I prefer…

Maduros, (Ripe): Peel, slice them on the bias, pan fry to a deep, soft, sweet reddish brown. Delicious.

Puerto Ricans pound them into a gooey mess they mix up with ground meat and vegetables, called mofongo. It looks as dreadful as it sounds. The stuff is disgusting, but they swear by it. I never did understand those people.

I decided to do two baked apples the way he describe; one was wrapped in tinfoil, and one wasn’t. The tinfoil one was a lot juicier, but the open one really had the flavour brought out.

The strawberries were also done – I’m pretty sure this is how strawberry syrup was made. The strawberries shrank to the size and consistencies of prunes, but were super delicious, and the syrup at the bottom of hte pan was used to flavour other items.

I also tried plantains; they essentially taste like potatos. A fun experiment, but I think I’ll stick with spuds.

Last was a group of Kiwis. Not sure what possessed me to do this, but baking them really brought out the sour flavor. Might possibly try to make some Kiwi-ade, or belnd and mix with tonic water. The skins for some reason taste like yam skins.