Winter Power Outage Scenario

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Survival Cooking Skills

Our survival cooking skills were a bit rusty coming into this disaster scenario.  Our primary cooking gear for this exercise is a single burner propane stove and a 3 quart pot with a bail handle.

The main thing we learned was that cooking with one pot over a camp stove takes a bit more practice than you might initially think. 

We also found a couple of recipes that needed some adjusting to the cooking method we were using.  (But, the rice with canned chicken and dried vegetables from a vegetable dip mix was amazing. Score on that one!)

We decided we needed to set up a few more practice sessions just to learn how to cook over camp stoves and eventually open fires.
 
I took some additional notes along the way:

Note: Stove cooks hot. 

When the steam coming off the pot starts to multiply rapidly it’s because it is not steam anymore – it’s smoke.  At the precise point all the water boils off is when it start to burn and produce the white smoke that looks surprisingly like steam, just more of it.  A tell-tale sign that it is starting to burn is that the “steam” does not quickly clear from the pot when you lift the lid.  If you catch it just as it starts to smoke your food will only be a little bit stuck to the bottom of the pot and not actually charred.

If the stove had a lower setting this would not be a problem, but even on the lowest setting it had and even though it was 20°F (-7°C) outside, it cooked way too hot!

I ran the stove out in the detached garage.  I opened the side door and cracked the garage door so we had some great cross ventilation, but still has significant protection from wind and snow.

Note: Get a two burner camp stove.

A single burner stove is great, but a dual burner model would have made meal preparation a lot easier.  Most dual burner stoves also have a wind screen, which is critical for operating in windy environments.

Note: Get sippy cups for the kids.

Spilling precious and limited drinking water is not a good thing during a disaster.  Also, soaking your insulation layers can be dangerous in extremely cold temperatures.

Note: Paper towels

“Wait, we don’t have paper towels in the kit?  How did we miss that?  Where they even on the list?”  Fortunately we were home and had paper towels sitting on the counter.   But if we had evacuated, it would have been a different story.

Note: Need more bowls.

We had just enough bowls for each person in the family to eat out of.  However we found ourselves using them for food preparation and serving as well.  We need to add a couple more bowls to the kit.

Overall, we were well fed, but we realized we need to practice our survival cooking skills a bit more before we really need them.

Surviving disasters with children is harder than it looks. Read about our experience...

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