Recipes After a Disaster - Eating without Electricity (Day 2)

This is the second in a series of blogs on recipes that you can easily prepare in a disaster or emergency without power.  In this blog, you'll learn how to cook a cheese sandwich with a tealight-candle emergency stove. 
Day 2 - Food Use and Storage
By Day 2 of a power outage, we hope you’ve used up your highly perishable refrigerated items (see Day 1 Blog). If not, and if night-time lows are dropping into the 30s, you may be able improvise a way (think coolers and ice packs) to harvest that cold in the early morning and keep some food in the safe zone for another day (under 40 F). 
​   If it’s not cold enough outside, maybe your freezer goods are still cold enough, and you can move refrigerated perishables in there. This may involve trade-offs: are you saving refrigerated perishables at the expense of what is in the freezer? Also, each time you open the freezer door lowers the temperature inside, so it's best to avoid opening the door. Whether these trade-offs are worth it is entirely your call.
   If you have a generator or solar battery, then you may consider using some of your power to run your fridge, preserving your perishables.

Check out this video on how to use Tealight candles to cook in an emergency from The Provident Prepper

Tealight candles can burn for as long as 3-6 hours releasing approximately 100 BTUs; click to learn more.

A cooler can extend the life of your perishable foods in a power outage.

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Day 2: Recipe Prep-cipe: [Grilled] cheese sandwich

For today’s recipe, we’ll assume that we’ve used up what would go bad without refrigeration. This leaves us with: breads, nut butters & jellies, hard and processed cheeses, butter, various fruits & veg, sugar-free pickles, vinegar-based dressings and condiments…and whatever you have in your freezer. 
What is kept in a freezer seems to vary widely between households, so I won’t rely on frozen food for our recipes. Perhaps you’ll use up your freezer stuff for the other 2 meals of the day 🙂. Or as we mentioned in Day 1, consider teaming up with your neighbors to balance out and use up your communal frozen fortune.

​If you’ve devised a way to heat a pan, you can grill a cheese sandwich. If your cooking method involves more than a small flame (as does propane, wood, white gas, etc.) then cooking should be done outside or with adequate ventilation so that carbon monoxide doesn’t accumulate. You could also use tealight candles to heat a pan - this is safe to do inside, because the small flame creates less carbon monoxide. Lit candles should not be left unattended, and you should keep an extinguisher or fire blanket handy. But heated cooking is optional here - the sandwich can be served cold.

1. Light one or more candles to heat your pan.
2. Butter two slices of bread on both sides.
3. Put a slice of cheese between the slices, and place your sandwich on the heated pan.
4. Optional: You can add things to your sandwich (deli meat, hummus, other veggies, if they’ve stayed at a safe temperature).
5. Use a heat-safe lid to trap heat around the sandwich.  Check the bottom side of the sandwich every five minutes until it’s crisped to your liking.
6. Flip the sandwich and repeat the previous step.​

"You could also use tealight candles to heat a pan - this is safe to do inside, because the small flame creates less carbon monoxide. Lit candles should not be left unattended, and you should keep an extinguisher or fire blanket handy."

Serve with pickles & fresh fruit - maybe avocado if you have it.
Note: This took me ~20 minutes to crisp (but not brown) my sandwich, and melt the cheese.

Blog Series Links

Check out all of the blogs in the Recipes after a Disaster series: 

• Day 1 - Menu strategy: Eat Fresh Foods First
• Day 2 - Food Use & Storage Strategies
• Day 3 - Meals from Canned Foods
• Day 4 - Foraging Basics
• Day 5 - Pantry Soup Warmed by Tea Candles

Author

Lincoln Thomas, Newsletter Editor, Neighbors Ready!