Our kitchen
Travelling for one year and trying to live in accordance with Aryuveda requires a lot of cooking (preferrably 3 warm freshly cooked meals per day and warm beverages... usually we manage 2 warm meals per day). The easiest and most convenient is obviously a good gas burner. We invested 100€ in one of those: Optimus Vega, quite light; very effective, comes with wind shield, works even in hotel rooms without setting off the fire alarm; since the gas bottle is separate you can turn it upside down which allows to cook even below 10 degrees C. But gas cartridges are expensive and not available everywhere. Our first estimate is that cooking with gas costs about 60 cent per meal.
We therefore also carry a "hobo-style" wood stove (Lixida inox); it is very cheap (20€), foldable; fits very nicely into our inox pots (Relags); quite effective, as we can cook an entire meal with two or three small branches, we just need to break or saw branches of 1-2 cm diameter into ~9 cm long pieces, stack them standing into the cylinder, add a bit of alcohol and light. The main inconvenience: it behaves very differently depending on the wood available; we are still learning... Sometimes we get a strong flame inmediately, on other occassions it takes 15 minutes of heavy smoking until finally the fire starts blaring, sometimes it starts great but adding more wood does not allow to continue with sufficient temperature. If the wood is too wet, it does not work at all, and it leaves the pots quite black with tar and soot.
In the morning to heat my porridge, cook tea and my aryuvedic medicine (Mucuna and Ashwaganda) the wood stove is too much of a hazzle, so we have two more options: an electric resistance ("Tauchsieder" in German), 160g, 300 Watt, 16€. Hung directly into the thermos bottle it takes about 8 minutes to boil three quarters of a litre of water, not fast but it works all by itself if you have electricity (obviously).
Our final option is cooking directly with alcohol: tiny metall cup (Ibasingo Titan), similar to a fondue cooker, which when placed into the cylinder of the wood cooker takes ~ 40-50 ml of alcohol to prepare breakfast, ideal when camping outside a campsite. Alcohol is much more available and much cheaper (3€/liter) so a meal on wood stove or small meal directly prepared with alcohol costs about 10 cents....