ACtually the idea occurred to me not for cooking but for fuel conservation. I haven't bought a prepared instant meal since 1964, and I never cook, either, except for angel hair and the odd trout. Everything else is either grocery store instant or I dry myself. Costs me a fraction of Mountain House prices, tastes even better, and I can control ingredients (We go lacto-ovarian Zone veggie in the back country) A lot of that does much better with a little extra burner time. All of it reconstitutes significantly faster at sea level boiling than at 10,000 ft boiling, but more importantly, it takes a lot less fuel to reach any temp if nothing is being vaporized along the way (yes, even a covered pot loses a lot of energy, if not volume, to vaporization). No intention of baked beans from scratch, but I'll be feeding 6 for 10 days or so and thought it would be worth at least doing the weight/fuel calculation for a pressure cooker (as it happens, exactly the model wagga posted), which btw IS 3-4 lbs, but definitely not pack-mule material.
