This is a drill

So after last week's power outage I've been taking stock of areas where we succeeded in staying comfortable and areas where we failed. In a way, a 12-hour power outage is a blessing, because it's a sort of practice drill for something that could take much longer to resolve. As you know, I'm not a tin-foil hat kind of lady, but having lived through a couple of major earthquakes I do know what it's like to not have electricity and gas for several days. If you've lived through a hurricane, tornado or blizzard, you probably know it too.

Right now our neighbors have three or four eucalyptus trees that are leaning significantly towards the power lines that keep our house and about 20 other properties in the area lit up. It's kind of a foregone assumption that they'll come down sometime in the next few weeks or months, but at least we now have a mindset of preparing for that eventuality. It's gonna happen ... it's just a question of when.

So doing a quick inventory of what worked and what did not last weekend, here's where we failed:

1.  We were woefully short on batteries. 

2. We had not stored extra lamp oil for our kerosene lamps. 

3. Most of our candles are either battery operated votives or highly-scented decorative candles, both inappropriate for long term use in a power outage. No one wants to live in a house that smells like a combination of Christmas Pine, Pumpkin Spice, something called "Sea Breeze," and the odd floral-scented aromatherapy candle. If Martha Stewart ever opens a funeral home, it will probably smell like our house did that day.

4. We needed a generator, as we have no woodstove or wood-burning fireplace to heat the house with when the grid is down. We do have a pellet stove, which can operate off-grid if necessary though, and that proved to be a huge plus once the generator was up and running and the stove was plugged into it. 

Having a generator will also allow us to do a dirty re-wiring of our well pump so we can get water if we need it. (We have a 4,000 gallon storage tank, but if it were damaged we could effectively be out of water in a disaster).

5. The main emergency wind-up weather radio I had in the house was broken.

6. None of our devices -- phones, Kindles, etc. were charged.

On the positive side, we had enough food and propane. Plus plenty of wine -- essential during times of natural disaster (in my universe). And both vehicles had full tanks of gas, something we always try to have going for us in case we're forced to pack up and leave quickly. 

And we had lots of pet food on hand, just like the disaster prep sites advise, so our cat and dog were going to be fine.

So what's next? Stock-up trips, both online and in person. I already bought lamp oil and batteries, plus our new generator will allow us to charge our devices, run our heat, and keep the food in our fridge and freezer from spoiling. We'll overnight-charge our devices a little more religiously from now on, too.

But another important thing is knowing what you already have on hand. We have both a percolator and a café press, but the day of the power outage we forgot we had them and so went without our caffeine fix for the day. Not a major disaster by any means, but if it's important to stock up on emergency supplies, surely it's even more important to remember what you've put by so you can use it when the time comes. I had several friends who forgot they had things they looked back on and wished they'd used. First World Problem.

So this has been an important wake-up call as to how quickly disasters occur and how quickly you may have to rely on what you have on hand, right her and right now.

This time it was more like a drill, but next time it may be more serious. So like having flood/earthquake/hazard insurance, having a generator and emergency supplies on hand are something you hopefully will only rarely need. But the day you need them, you'll be thankful to yourself for purchasing them.

Things Could Always Be Worse -- a Foodie Prepping Primer?

It seems like every time I start canning season, I also begin thinking of emergency preparedness. I'm not a Collapse of Western Civilization kind of gal, but I am most certainly a 7.0 Earthquake kind of gal, having lived through two of those suckers in my lifetime.

And so I reasonably ask myself at times like these if I'd be happy eating the stores I've canned and/or put up on my shelves. If the power was off for, say, two weeks or so due to a large quake, assuming we are well enough to have an appetite, the question then becomes 1) do we have enough food to survive, and 2) exactly how much fun would it be to eat what we've put up? 

Relishing (left) the apocalypse.

These are the only two questions that matter if you and your loved ones are in a disaster and are already safe, with a good source of water and shelter from the weather. It will come down to food. Doesn't it always? Whether it's a housewarming party or the End of The World As We Know It, that's what you will remember about the party when it's all said and done. So even at the conclusion of the future Earthquake Party, the question will be: What did we have to eat?

If you remember Jim Bakker, the preacher involved in some juicy evangelical sex scandal in the 1980s (with a wife who could not keep her mascara from fleeing the scene of her badly made-up eyes), he basically disappeared. Or so I thought. The other day I was channel surfing and found him, now hawking survival food supply kits on QVC. "It's our $99.99 Special 20-year Survivalist Package featuring MEXICAN food!" he extols. 

While I find him strangely amusing, there's one thing he and I agree on....just because the world ends, it doesn't mean Taco Tuesdays have to.

Anyway, I don't count what's in my chest freezer at all in my accounting of foodstuffs, since chances are it would be warm enough that within a few days anything we cannot consume immediately will spoil. This means for the first three days we'll be eating nothing but steak, ham and chicken. (Note to self: stock up on emergency, End Of The World-strength laxatives.) But ultimately, the safest and longest-lasting emergency source of food lies not in the freezer, but rather in the canning cupboard and the pantry selves.

I can make this delicious.

Rice, beans, quinoa,  various pastas and grains would probably become our staples, along with flour for making bread.  Beans would be especially important since lacking refrigeration, we'd also probably be lacking in animal protein after our chest freezer binge-feast (belch), except for fresh eggs. Since I'm mostly vegetarian, I would be OK here, and everyone else would have to be too. 

But the issue then becomes how to dress up all those beans and grains so that they are tasty, or at least interesting, since they'll probably be eaten two or even three times daily (perhaps with some canned salmon or tuna, which I've also put by). People in this situation always say something like well, things could always be worse, but really, I can't think of anything much worse than having to eat rice, beans and quinoa for two weeks straight. 

Of course having a good stock of wine, beer and other alcohol could help immensely, so that should also be at the top of any emergency preparedness food list in my opinion. Everything tastes better with expensive alcohol to wash it down.

But I think having a good stock of spices, jams/chutneys, relishes, and little gourmet items will ultimately make your family's life livable during times of crisis, as much as warm blankets and shelter do. You need to be able to dress up your staple ingredients with flavors, textures and surprises to keep those Lord of The Flies instincts at bay and keep civilization afloat. Sauces, sprinkles, marinades, aoli and other spreads (we have chickens and oil and therefore eggs and therefore aoli -- yum!). 

For me, I would plan on cooking everything in the solar oven (which even works on cloudy days, things just take longer to cook) or on the grill, and so that gives me lots of options for different tastes and textures as well.

Everyone should have one.

I do not plan on eating squirrel or gopher in stews, or insects, or nearby neighbors. That is not my kind of disaster. But vegetarian paella with canned mushrooms, peas and asparagus with some hard-boiled deviled eggs on the side, a fruit galette for dessert and some '10 Cabernet to accompany it all? I could live with that. 

I am sure there is a survivalist cookbook out there, but I like to see myself as a kind of a "San Andreas meets Ina Garten"-type heroine, creating lovely meals for my family spontaneously and cheerily, while the tremors rumble through, the stucco falls off in sheets and the National Guard personnel carriers pass by the road.

It's Bon Appetite at the end of the world, baby. And I feel fine.

Why buildings matter

Undeniably lovely, but would you want to be here in an earthquake?

One of my favorite type of article in Mother Earth News is when they feature someone who has, by the sweat of his or her own brow, built the house they live in.  Some houses are made with old-style adobe bricks, some are made with straw bales, others are built into hillsides like hobbit homes. Most are adorned with lovely stonework, nice floors and natural wood beams, and look quite idyllic, at least to me.

Someday I'd love to build something like that -- lay out a mere 20 grand or so for materials, and with the help of friends and neighbors, build a home of our own design, using some very cool old-style method to do it. And then live in it forever.

And then I see something on the news like what happened yesterday in Nepal. A magnitude 7.8 earthquake, which would be pretty bad in a first-world city, but is totally catastrophic in a third-world one. I see the collapsed buildings, the bricks scattered in the streets, and see the news footage of rescue workers trying to dig out those who have been buried alive.

And suddenly I am very thankful for the 2 x 6 wood frame of our house and the steel straps that bolt it to the concrete foundation, because of course we live in earthquake country and know exactly what the shaking of a major earthquake feels like.  Because the one thing you realize once you've lived here is that it matters -- very much -- what kind of house you live in and what kind of building you work in. 

We talk a lot in the homesteading world about preparedness -- we have our emergency kits, our canned goods, our solar ovens and our generators -- but we often don't think about the structural risks occurring within the buildings where we live and work.  When I traveled to Mexico on a business trip many years ago with a boyfriend who was doing a laser light installation in a large discotheque,  he called me up a ladder to look at the crawlspace above the ceiling while doing the installation.  Between the walls and in the crawlspace, everything was piled high with dry straw, used for insulation and soundproofing.  "If there's ever a fire," he said, "this place will go up like a haystack."

It was a sobering shock to realize that other countries do not have the same building codes as we do, but in disaster after disaster you can see it -- in everything from cyclones to earthquakes to fires...what would cause moderate damage and no loss of life in the States causes nothing but those things less-economically blessed countries abroad. All because of the building codes.

And so, while we pray and hope for recovery for all those caught in this terrible disaster, it should also be a reminder to keep building safety in mind both at home and while traveling.  Choosing a boring 2 x 6 wood frame house is uninventive, but I like to think it will keep us alive in a disaster.  Choosing a modern hotel when traveling, built to first-world standards, might be more boring than staying in a 16th century monastery, but if I had to take bets on which would be standing after a quake I know where I'd put my money.

Being prepared means not only preparing with goods, water, flashlights, etc, but also in choosing structurally sound homes -- and the same goes when we are traveling and staying in hotels, pensions, B & Bs or hostels. No one can predict the odds of your just being in a bad place at the wrong time, but anything you can do to improve those odds is a good thing, right?

In the name of safety I'm willing to be a little boring in where I lay my head and eat my meals. 

How long could you survive on your stored food?

A very (unintentionally) funny blogger whose name I will not mention apparently caused quite a kerfuffle last week when she stated she was going to spend a week eating from her food storage and larder on a week-long "staycation," and the following day declared herself short on supplies, hit the road and went into town for some good old-fashioned grocery shopping and a store-bought ham sandwich for lunch.  

I only heard about this second hand, so I'm not sure how true it is. But I did like the idea of exploring just how prepared we are here at the homestead to live off our stored food as well as what's in our garden in the case of emergency.

Could we do it?  Would it be painful?  If I'm brutally honest the answer to those questions is 1) yes, and 2) quite possibly. 

We absolutely have enough food to last us at least a couple of months, assuming the grid was still up, our freezer was working and our garden had something in it.  Without refrigeration, I would guess we'd be OK for a month or six weeks. But it would be painful, mainly for the same reason the aforementioned blogger ended up fleeing her home in search of a professionally made ham sandwich: We "first world" types like things the way we like them, and that's nowhere more apparent than when it comes to the food we consume.

The basics of any long-term non-refrigerated food storage plan should ideally have an abundance of two items which will sit in the back of the pantry almost indefinitely, and feed an army when needed.  Those two things are rice and beans (with an emphasis on beans, which in addition to providing necessary carbs, are also high in protein). Some flour couldn't hurt either, but unfortunately flour does not have the same shelf-life as the other two dry goods and turns rancid within a few months unless stored frozen.

Of course, in a normal week we don't eat rice or beans more than once or twice -- at most -- as a side dish, and in some kind of emergency those might be staples, seen on the menu daily (or worse, several times daily).

The drudgery of this might be mitigated slightly based on what else we have put up in our pantry, which at this time of year is quite a lot -- things like tomatoes, canned tuna, preserved pie-fillings, jams, pickles and other goodies could definitely increase the variety in our meals.  Spices can also make a huge difference in making a boring menu seem fresh and different, and those can be kept in abundance, year-round.

But there's no question, even with all those other ingredients, it would probably not be all deliciousness and fun after the novelty of the first few days wore off, and the very modern urge to skip into town for some sushi took over -- even if an earthquake had already  taken out out most of the town and the sushi place along with it. The heart wants what the heart wants, you know? Beans and rice are no substitute for fresh sashimi and California Roll. We westerners are pretty much accustomed to getting our cravings met, but a natural or un-natural disaster could change all that in the blink of an eye.

One thing I do know is that sometimes, it's a good idea to challenge yourself to make dinner based only on what's available in your pantry -- sometimes for several days in a row. It's not only a way to rotate your stores by eating older food, but it also forces you to try out new recipes and new food combinations.

Since moving to the country, I have done this fairly regularly, since I don't like to make an hour's round-trip drive to the grocery store in search of just one or two missing ingredients for something I am jonesing for.  Instead, I make something I'm not craving, and live with it. We should all do that more, if just for the practice of doing it as well as a nod to the realization that much of the world lives like that all the time.

I also like to think it's good preparation for a time, perhaps post-natural disaster, when we'll be on our own for several days to weeks and will have to make do with what we have.  Because when that happens, there will be no getting fed up and heading into town in search of someone to make you a sammie or some ahi.  It's going to be up to you to provide for yourself, based on what you've put by. 

It will be you and your pantry against the fates, and if there's a ham sandwich you've got your heart set on, you'd better already have all the ingredients on hand, including the recently butchered hog. 

Because things like your town and your local store may not be available, at least for awhile. How about some canned tomatoes with rice and beans? Anyone? Anyone?