SOS - Cooking it ALL!

When the hurricane media experts were predicting landfall in Houston, I started cooking because I have lived through Gilbert, and Alicia, in Houston, and I remember power outages. I knew that if it hit here, I would lose everything in my freezer, and thank heavens, it was far enough from payday, that I didn’t have a big stash in the freezer.(Most of my food storage is canned, or dry, a prompting I felt a need to follow about 7 years ago).

So, I cooked 5 days worth of meals that could be reheated in the crock pot! I know, the crock pot takes electricity, but I have this power converter for the laptop working in the car—using the cigarette lighter. I figured I could cook those meals in my car, using the same gadget I would recharge or power up the laptop. It worked! We had Alcatraz Stew, Chicken Gumbo, White Chili, Black Bean soup, and spaghetti.

We also had grilled pork chops, burgers, and all the other meat that I threw on the grill after I had no power to keep that freezer cold. But ice! I did run down to the Red Cross/Fema station at the sheriff’s office, and I picked up ice on the 4th day, and packed my freezer full to keep the milk, and other stuff cold enough to keep and use.

But the really fun thing about collecting the ice—was the FEMA/Sheriff deputies insisted that I take the pack for a family of four, including the MRE meals. The MRE’s provided the boys, and myself with at least three hours of jubilant entertainment, as we read the directions, and put the water in the hydrogen pack and chemically heated the meal. I think we even chanted, toil, toil, bubble, and boil, and giggled greatly over constructing the meal as directed! I am looking into adding these into our kits, and making a 144 hour survival kit—for a serious hurricane really laps into at least one full week of no power. (And boys that are entering or have entered the years of young adulthood, SNACK A LOT!) Enduring that line to collect the FEMA ice is incredible, and I felt guilty over the gas I used to collect the ice. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to need to get ice everyday.

I got to know neighbors, that I had never met before, yet they live within a stone’s throw all around me. Whenever a grill was going, we all knocked on each other’s doors, and offered to share our food, the hot coals, whatever was needed. Even the Elkin’s Lake Putter Parlor threw open their doors to the residents, and started grilling all the food in the open air, allowing all of us to eat it up, or they would have to throw it out! Teenage boys in the neighborhood spread the word, riding their bikes house to house.

Debi Greene