Day 5 Challenge- Extreme Weather Conditions

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Day 5- SATURDAY- NATURAL DISASTER- EXTREME WEATHER CONDITIONS

This was the challenge for Saturday. Depending on where you live, pick an extreme weather emergency common to your area and live it. (I chose conditions after a hurricane and during an ice storm. You will notice that I changed quite a few of the rules to make them fit the conditions for these two weather situations.) They said "you have water, but you don't have electricity or natural gas." I chose to say we have water, we don't have electricity, but WE DO have natural gas.

They said my fridge food is ruined, but I say my fridge food is fine, because right after a hurricane eating up your fridge food is the first thing you need to do. So today we are eating out of our fridge, and cooking in the solar oven and on the camp stove.

Note: We have not been able to buy anything from the store since Monday, Sept. 13. We ran out of real milk on Wednesday. So we have been living on powdered milk, powdered eggs, and all the food storage we have in our house.

My own personal goals for the day:

Cook more food in the solar oven.

About 11:00 am I mixed some banana bread batter, and put it into a bundt pan (the bundt pan was shiny aluminum and it should have been dark, but I don't own a dark one yet.) I put the pan into the preheated solar oven at 11:35. It baked for 1 hr and 25 min. and the temperature reached 325 degrees. I got it out at 1:00.

While it was in the solar oven, I put water and raw vegetables in a black pot, inside a clear oven-roasting bag, sitting on an aluminum pie pan to reflect the heat, and set it out in the sun to pre warm.

After I took the banana bread out of the solar oven, I immediately put the black pot into the solar oven at 1:00. When I opened the oven to switch the food, the temperature dropped from 325 to 250 degrees. Within 25 minutes it was back up to 320.

I cooked the vegetables for 40 minutes, the water wasn't boiling yet even though the thermometer said 320. But the carrots were a little softer than raw (I like them crunchy) so they were almost done.

Learn to use our camping stove.
I am afraid of fire so I don't like to use camp stoves or grills or matches. But our stove was surprisingly easy to light. I boiled some water in a coffeepot placed on the top.


Figure out how to hang blankets around our stairwell to trap the heat in the downstairs if we have to use our gas log to heat our living room.
We could put a board across and nail it into the wall, and fasten or nail a blanket to that. It will make holes in the wall, but they will be relatively easy to patch and paint later. It will be easier to stay warm in the one room with the gas log if we have the stairwell blocked off. Otherwise, all the heat will rise into the upstairs.

Things I learned:

After so many days without real milk, I finally drank some cold powdered milk (because I wanted milk with my banana bread.) I found that if I added a little vanilla to my glass of milk, it tasted a tiny bit like melted vanilla ice cream instead of that stale powdered milk flavor. It was actually good that way. I will never drink powdered milk plain again, I will always add vanilla from now on. (Note to self: Buy more vanilla for my food storage.)

Using my food storage in the past couple of years, I have learned that stocking up on Wheat Thins or mayonnaise or olives, etc. when they are on a really good sale is a great way to save money. I went to the grand opening of a grocery store near my home this week (yes, I was cheating on the Challenge because I wanted to see their Grand Opening prices, but I ended up not buying anything so technically I didn't actually cheat) and I couldn't find a single thing to buy for food storage. All of their loss leaders were things I had already stocked up on, and I didn't need any more. That tells me that most of my food has been purchased at the lowest prices I could find them during the year.