A lot of people here had power outages of up to a week recently, so it seems like a good time to talk about that. You can't be self-sufficient if you need to run down to the local Red Cross shelter everytime Mother Nature gets a bit cranky. And who wants to, right? I'd rather stay warm and dry in my own home. During crisis, even minor ones, immunites can be affected and dropping people in large scale shelters is like a kindergarten for grown ups. If you weren't sniffling and sneezing (or worse) when you get there, you probably will be when you get back.
So..you have basic needs: Food and a way to cook it. Water that's safe to drink. Heat. Bathroom facilities. Those are the items you must have. Light follows closely and a way to keep food in your fridge at the proper temperature, and after that, believe it or not, activities: Things to do when the lights are out. People get fidgety when there's no cable or computers available. Its a good time to introduce them to traditional games and activities.
For this post, let's start with food.
You can go to the local take-out place but we've already established that that's expensive and not really good for you, and if there's some sort of mass power outage from an ice storm or hurricane, odds are, restaurants will be without power, too. So don't depend on that. It's easy enough to set aside some foods that are easy to cook, or don't need to be.
What might those be? Your call, depending on your life.
Maybe some home-canned chili that just needs to be heated. Maybe Dinty-Moore stew you get at the local grocery. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches work. If you don't home can, you can buy things on sale and put them away. I'd suggest enough easily prepared food for a week for your family, maybe more, depending on your location. Buy things you would eat anyway, so you can use them up before the expiration dates and restock your cupboard. These are items you can get on sale and are the things everyone snatches up when the power goes out. So have them ready and you'll already be ahead of the game.
A couple of boxes of breakfast cereal are good to have around. Have some powdered milk on hand. Even if you don't care for drinking it, its handy for cereal and cooking or having some hot cocoa after shoveling snow.
Woodstove or heater top stew is always good, too. If you have a wood stove, or flat topped kerosene heater (and no small children or pets that can knock it off) you can cook stew right on top, in a cast iron pot.
If you have a natural gas or propane stove that will continue to work without power, have items on hand to make cookies. Nothing will make you happier when you come in from working outside than to have some cocoa made from your dry milk and some fresh baked cookies.
All of this is assuming you don't already have a good amount of food in your refrigerator or freezer. But what if you do?
In cases where you know ahead of time there is storm coming, if you don't have a full freezer, fill milk jugs or 2 liter bottles with water and freeze those. The more full your freezer is when the power goes off, the longer it will stay cold. But don't try to put bottles in after the power is already out.
If the power goes off unexpectedly, the first thing is to do a quick inventory, and then keep the doors shut as much as possible. Refrigerators and freezers are insulated and that means they keep the cold in, as well as the heat out. Let the insulation do its job. If the power will be out for a day or so, you may be able to leave things in the freezer and be fine. If not, they'll likely be kept cold enough to be cooked when the power comes back on and then refrozen in the form of a ready-cooked meal.
If your power is out due to an ice storm and you don't expect it to come back on for a few days, you can pack the food into coolers and leave outside, making sure people and other animals can't find it. If you lve in an apartment and your car is parked outside, you could lock it in there.
What are your options for cooking your food? Barbeque grills are great, used outside. Gas stoves generally still work without electricity, although you have to manually light the burners, and I understand some newer stoves won't allow you to do that. You can cook on top of a wood stove pretty easily. You can also use a camp stove, but you should only do that outside.
Longer term, a generator is going to be your best bet, but those are expensive and have potential risks associated with them, so I'll leave it for another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment