Thermal Improvisation

One of the problems when on the road is how to keep stuff warm or cold.  It's really not much different than keeping ourselves warm, that is by wrapping ourselves in insulating materials.

Keeping water hot by wrapping a water bottle in a towel.  

The before photo.

We just got done bringing our dinner to a boil, some mix of rice and lentils.  It is morning. We will be moving around all day but at night when we get back, we would like to spend a minimum amount of time cooking.

So we wrap our hot kettle with dinner inside in a towel.  By evening the contents will be close to done.  Maybe another few minutes of cooking at night will finish it off.

 What gave me the idea of wrapping pots of hot food in a towel is that my grandmother used to make sweet rice that way.  She would bring rice and milk and raisins to a boil in a pot, wrap the pot in a towel, then put the pot in a corner of the couch and pile pillows on top of it. An hour or so later, the rice would be done, all fluffed up and soft.
The key to how cooking works is maintaining temperature.  When we cook food on a stove top, most of the heat goes into the surroundings and little of it into the food.  What cooks food is exposure of food to high temperature for a given period of time.  Once food is up to temperature of boiling, it can be kept at that temperature or near it for some time just by surrounding it with insulation.

And coffee kept warm by wrapping glasses in socks.