Preppy Prepping

 Today, let’s talk about cooking with no power, thus no microwave, no oven, no stove.  If you have a gas stove, like me, you only need electricity to ignite your oven or range. As long as gas is still coming through my line, I just need to manually light my burners with a lighter to be able to cook. But, in a catastrophic emergency, I won’t have gas for very long. So, just how DO you cook long-term? About 10 years ago, several people in my neighborhood decided to try out functioning with no water and no power for a weekend.  It was a great dry run for us.  I went into the weekend sure it was going to be simple. I put a bucket of water from our rain barrels in each bathroom to pour into the commode to flush it.  We bungy-corded the fridge and freezer to help remind each of us that refrigerated food was off limits. I put plastic wrap over top of the sink to help me remember not to run water in the sink. We were confidently prepared! My solution for years to the qu...

 We’ve talked about water, rice, beans, a little about bread, seasonings, veggies, and fruit. Now, I’d like to tackle meat. With the protein you’ll be getting from the combination of rice and beans, meat is not essential. But it sure is nice to have. As I previously mentioned, our meals from Stores (I’ll try from now on to use a capital “s” when talking about the food I’ve put aside, and a lower case “s” when referring to grocery stores) will look fairly different from our typical meals now. For one thing, we probably won’t eat 3 meals a day. My family consists of all adults and a couple of my children don’t eat breakfast. However, the bigger issue is preparing food without the use of a microwave, stove, or oven. I’ll talk more about cooking in a later post, but I bring this up here just to point out that cooking will be a lengthy process and I just don’t see how I’ll be able to cook more than twice daily. I will need to cook outside and will need light, which means having dinner e...

When I first began preparing for a potential emergency, everything I read stressed the importance of ROTATING my stock. Eventually, this task became overwhelming, partly because we don’t typically eat a lot of beans and rice. The things I was stashing away could not easily be transferred to our daily food supplies. But keeping up with dates on all my cans also put me way out of control. So how do I ensure my food doesn’t spoil before my family needs it? My solution went two different directions. First off, I found articles (case studies, really) about canned goods that had been discovered more than 100 years after purchase. One occurred in Texas when a company bulldozing an area to build a parking lot for a new shopping complex discovered a root cellar that contained hundreds of canning jars full of food. The food was taken to an independent lab and tested for bacteria and nutrition. Every jar, still carefully sealed, was free of bacterial infiltrate and still held it’s original nutrit...

Today, I want to begin talking about storing food. Probably the least expensive and easiest item to store is rice. There are many different types of rice. Brown rice is a great antioxidant. Basmati rice is low in arsenic, a common by-product of rice. But plain white long-grain rice is inexpensive, easy to cook and store, and provides over 200 calories per cup. It’s a very good way to start storing up. One pound of rice equals 7 1/2 cups of cooked rice, so a 50-lb. bag, costing $25 or less, will give you a whopping 375 one-cup servings.  Rice alone, however, is an incomplete meal. But combine rice with beans, and you have a meal consisting of all 9 amino acids which, together, form a complete protein. Again, beans are very inexpensive and easy to cook and there are many different varieties. So, add multiple pounds of various beans to your stores along with your rice, and you’re well on your way to being able to provide healthy and filling food for your family in an emergency. This i...

 I consider myself to be a planner, not a Prepper. I don’t have a secret, hidden hide-out, my family doesn’t do drills, and no t.v. show is going to be interested in me. I’m just a regular person trying to make sure my family’s needs will be covered if something very serious happens. I have many friends who don’t think it’s even remotely possible that our infrastructure could fail. But I have another friend who lived through Katrina in New Orleans - he believes strongly in preparing for potential emergencies. I’m sure the people in Texas never expected to be without power for weeks.  Years ago, we suffered from an ice storm in the Deep South that knocked out power in our whole city for several days. We were lucky in comparison to flooding, fire, tornado, and hurricane damage that occurs frequently around the world.  Truthfully, though, I started learning how to prepare for an emergency about 15 years ago, when the Lord told me I should. I discussed it with my husband who ...