Is there anything better than coming home to a fully cooked meal just waiting for you to serve? With loadshedding keeping us guessing, we think it’s time to re-introduce our secret weapon to you, the Wonderbag.

It’s a heavily insulated bag that keeps food cooking at a low, but safe temperature over several hours to continue cooking your dish while you are busy doing other things. And while we have always been a *big* fan, unpredictable power has meant it is even more useful than ever before!

Made by a group of underprivileged ladies, the story behind the concept is really rather amazing. The colourful bags are designed to keep a hot pot at a whisper below simmering for many hours, allowing you to cook everything from rice dishes (in just a few minutes) to oxtail (in a few hours). Made with colourful shwe-shwe fabric and lined with a more resistant fabric, they have a nifty toggle for convenient closing and have a fire-retardant solid foam base for an ultra-insulated, super-safe cooking experience!

1. First, prep your dish. Do everything you would do before you would usually leave the dish to simmer (in this case we fried onions, added spices and all the other ingredients). Then pop a tight fitting lid on top.

2. Then carefully place the pot inside the Wonderbag. Placing a folded dishtowel in the base and around the sides of the pot can help keep your Wonderbag clean and adds a little extra insulation.

3. Place the smaller cushion insert in on top of the lid. Then pull in the draw string, enclosing the outer bag around it. Leave the bag somewhere safe where it won’t be knocked or disturbed for the full cooking time. We know it’s hard but try to resist the urge to check on it during cooking time, as this will let out all the built up heat requiring you to put the dish back into the stove and bring it to the boil again before closing it up.

4. When everything is cooked, remove the pot from the Wonderbag and serve. The cushion insert can be flipped over and used as a trivet to serve food from the hot pot. You’d be surprised how hot the pot is even after several hours inside the Wonderbag.

Wonderbag has many benefits:

• It can help to ease the burden of loadshedding
• It reduces electricity or gas useage (instead of slow-cooking something over a long period)
• It reduces time spent cooking, giving your more time for other activities
• When the pot is insulated in a Wonderbag at a fairly constant temperature, less evaporation occurs, so less water is needed!