Preppy Prepping

Because we live in the South, where we are happy if we have 1 day of Winter, we do not have a fireplace. We know lots of people who do, but many more that don’t. If you’re one of the lucky families that has a fireplace, you probably have firewood stored up somehow or have a reliable source. If you have a fireplace, but it has fallen into disrepair or you just don’t use it, now is the time to call a chimney sweep. Get that thing up and running; at the very least, get it to where it CAN be used. You have a cooking source and a heating source already in your home. You’re lucky. When my mother was growing up in the frozen north of Alberta, Canada, they used coal oil lamps for light and a single wood-burning stove for heat. They had a huge old farmhouse kitchen that housed their big cast-iron cook stove. This was the only heat source in the house. After chores were finished for the day and dinner had been consumed (in the kitchen), evening life for the family all took place in the one heate...

Our Grandmothers used them and some of our mothers, as well. However, many people today only own electric kitchen utensils. Gone are the hand-cranked mixers and hand mills for grinding grain into flour. Some families may not even own a hand crank can opener. If the power grid goes down, hand-operated utensils will be essential, so it’s time to take stock of the non-electric kitchen utensils you may need. Let’s start with the 3 mentioned above. I have 3 or 4 manual can openers. I have so many because only one really works. I need to throw out the others and make more space in my drawer. If you have a trusted manual can opener, buy one more. Can openers are difficult to sharpen and really do dull over time. How fast they become useless depends on how much they are used. In any case, have a spare! You don’t want to end up having to use a knife to cut into cans. I recently purchased a “retro” hand mixer. It has a wheel with a handle attached and two beaters that turn when the wheel is rota...

Well, I tried my hand at homemade pasta, and learned 2 very important things. First off, you don’t HAVE to use Semolina, despite what I’ve always been told and the many articles I’ve read on this subject. When it came to actually printing out recipes, almost all of the recipes called for plain all purpose flour. The recipe I decided to use called for 2 1/2 cups of semolina. I used 1 cup of all purpose flour and 1 1/2 cups of semolina. The resulting pasta was dense and not light, like I wanted. The second issue was hand-rolling out the dough. It was way more than my poor arthritic hands could take. I rolled out a quarter of the dough and my daughter had to do the remainder for me. Without the use of a pasta roller, we just weren’t able to get the dough thin enough for a product with a medium or light bite. Although smooth, it was quite heavy and thick. I think, in the future, I’ll use less semolina to my all purpose flour, probably much less, maybe just 1/2 cup per recipe. I still have ...

As I’ve previously mentioned, my husband and I moved our family to England several years ago for a short stay. His job assigned him to a project in northern England and provided a furnished home for us for about 3 months. While it was very short, it afforded my children an opportunity to live in a different country and culture without having the handicap of a foreign language (or so we thought. Turns out, English is NOT what we speak. We speak American, which is absolutely not what “they” speak.) We learned many, many things while there, but a couple of the things that changed my life forever are detailed below. First off, they don’t perk or drip their coffee. They refer to both coffee and tea as “a brew”, and both are prepared in relatively the same way - good old boiling water. Every kitchen, and even every hotel room, is equipped with an electric kettle, but not the kind I grew up around. These are cordless kettles. You plug a base into an outlet, remove the insulated kettle, fill i...

 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...