Cool again today, and hopefully dry.\u00a0\u00a0 It stayed cool yesterday and was sunny and bright.\u00a0\u00a0 A beautiful day.\u00a0 A day for . . . yardwork!<\/p>\n
Well, my wife did some planting, and I did some cleaning.\u00a0\u00a0 She got some new plants into the herb garden and replaced some of the decorative stuff that froze.\u00a0\u00a0 She cut back the stuff we’re hoping recovers.<\/p>\n
I raked some more leaves, especially by the citrus trees.\u00a0\u00a0 I shook and knocked most of the dead leaves off the trees and then I cleaned up around them.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t quite get everything bagged, I’ll have to finish later.\u00a0 In the back yard my wife planted some tomatoes (and the herbs) while I picked up debris and ran the lawnmower.\u00a0\u00a0 Put the fire pit cooker back in the middle of the yard.\u00a0\u00a0 Pressure washed some spots on the patio and a few things I’d missed, basically just to run\u00a0 the gas tank dry.\u00a0 And then, because the firepit was just sitting right there, we decided to have a little fire.\u00a0\u00a0 And if we’re going to have a fire, might as well use it to cook dinner, says the 9 year old… wisdom from the mouths of babes.<\/p>\n
So that’s what we did.\u00a0\u00a0 The firepit<\/a> is enclosed with mesh all the way around and has a cast iron grill that you can cook on.\u00a0\u00a0 We re-heated beef stew, put some mushrooms in butter in foil, and grilled some kielbasa sausages.\u00a0 I put a can of red beans and rice on too and that made a real nice meal with the sliced sausage.\u00a0\u00a0 During the blackouts we ate a couple of cans of the stuff<\/a>, and gave some to the neighbors too.\u00a0\u00a0 Recommended.\u00a0\u00a0 Tasty, hearty, and easy to make.<\/p>\n (And of course dessert was s’mores.\u00a0\u00a0 We had the fire going anyway…)<\/p>\n Canned and ‘instant’ versions of food and ingredients should be high on your stored food list.\u00a0\u00a0 They take less time and less heat energy to prepare and you might be short on both of those things during your emergency.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve got lots of regular rice, but during short term events, I reach for the Minute Rice.\u00a0 Everything we had for dinner had already been cooked, and really just needed to be heated.<\/p>\n Speaking of shortcuts, for breakfast I made eggs, and biscuits with sausage gravy.\u00a0\u00a0 First time for me and the gravy.\u00a0\u00a0 It was from a can too.\u00a0 Biscuits from a tube, gravy from a can<\/a>, and eggs (ultimately from a chicken, but yesterday just from the store.)\u00a0\u00a0 The gravy was pretty good, the family all ate it and my wife got seconds.\u00a0\u00a0 It was FAR better than the white goo I got from a gravy packet last time I tried biscuits and gravy.\u00a0 Younger daughter also got fried sliced spam.\u00a0 She loves it.<\/p>\n So breakfast was from medium and long term storage, and dinner was from the pantry but cooked over a wood fire.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Eat what you store…\u00a0\u00a0 and store some stuff you don’t normally eat so that you have some novel foods if you get bored.<\/p>\n Cooking over a wood fire is fun when you don’t have<\/strong> <\/em>to do it.\u00a0 Practice using some of the different ways you have stacked to cook, clean, heat water, etc.\u00a0 MUCH easier to do so in the daylight on a nice day, when the indoor stove is there for backup…<\/p>\n And of course, keep stacking the stuff you need.<\/p>\n nick <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cool again today, and hopefully dry.\u00a0\u00a0 It stayed cool yesterday and was sunny and bright.\u00a0\u00a0 A beautiful day.\u00a0 A day for . . . yardwork!<\/p>\n Well, my wife did some planting, and I did some cleaning.\u00a0\u00a0 She got some new plants into the herb garden and replaced some of the decorative stuff that froze.\u00a0\u00a0 She cut back the stuff we’re hoping recovers.<\/p>\n I raked some more leaves, especially by the citrus trees.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n