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This is the time of the year when all sorts of wonderful things pop up: plants in the garden, farmers markets, bugs. This is also the time of the year when some not so wonderful things pop up: thunderstorms, major weather systems with wind, hail, tornadoes and hurricanes. And when your area gets hit with one of these (and we can almost always bet money on that one, no matter where you live), there is a chance, even if remote, that your living unit is going to either suffer damage or lose power or both.
Aunt Toby, the DH and all the little Chez Siberians(who are not longer so little, nor are they in residence), have experienced this. Thunderstorms that knocked power out for hours. Ice storms in the winter that have snapped trees in half on top of power lines and left us without power to run the blower on the furnace for days at a time. Gentlemen at the control of backhoes who..well, we won’t talk about the whole ‘call before you dig’ from people who won’t.
The results are the same. No power. It doesn’t matter if you live in New York City, Bugtussle, Idaho, Chez Siberia, or any place else. If you don’t have power, there are certain basic things that do not function. If you live in a rural area, there are an additional group of things that cease to function as well and we will discuss those at a later date.
One of the things that just stops (though for a while it can provide a certain amount of function) is a refrigerator. Freezers are in the same category. 
Now, if you lose your power for only a couple of hours – even a day – if you have a freezer full of frozen food and no one does the obvious thing and opens it up (why do that? Really? You’ve looked in there a zillion times; the freezer does not contain anything new or wondrous in it just because the substation down the road got zapped because a squirrel decided that the coating on a cable looked appetizing. Trust me on that one), then you are pretty safe. Once the power goes on, you are good to go. If you lose the power and it’s longer than a day, then we’re talking real damage to food. Another thing that stops is all other electric appliances such as washers, dryers and cooking devices and a stove.
Ah – frozen food and no stove to cook it with.
Even if this occurs during the summer (and if you live in a city, you have additional troubles if the power cuts out for more than a day in a place like New York City in August – we’re talking dangerous) so you don’t have issues with heating (just keeping cool), you still have issues with keeping fed and not losing the food you have to spoilage.
So, Aunt Toby is going to suggest something radical, cutting edge, green…even.
It’s time to think about preserving food in ways that do not require the constant application of electric energy. Those ways are canning and drying (there are certain things that really only work well with freezing, but we will discuss that at another time as well since the case being made here is to use preservation techniques that if the electricity goes out, it won’t make any difference at all). And also time to think about cooking food in ways that do not use electric power and possibly do not even use things like propane tanks, charcoal or other fuels. It’s one thing to do a little bit of a grill out on the deck; it’s quite another thing if it’s the middle of the winter and you are faced with nothing but a fireplace or a woodstove in your house and firing up the hibachi just might be the most dangerous thing you can do.
So, in her new resolution to actually perform what she says she’s going to perform, Aunt Toby is planning this: A multipart series on Canning, Drying, and cooking when you don’t have your usual venues at your disposal, plus an extra added series on freezing. How does that sound to you? Everyone like that? Good.
And in the meantime, to whet people’s appetites, here is an article from a recent copy of the New York Times about gourmet canning. Time in a Bottle
And commit the song at the top to memory.
(This post can also be found at Aunt Toby’s blog)
18 Comments
Always good advice from Toby…
Start with sweet cherries. At least in California this is a bumper year.
As well as canning you can also dry them.
Yep – dried sweet cherries are YUUUUUMMMMMM. They never last long; I’ll be doing a post on drying as well.
I’m so glad you mentioned that. I went without power for a couple days one winter. I knew charcoal puts out carbon monoxide. But I thought, just a couple of pieces won’t put out that much, surely.
Not sure how long it took, but all too soon I was down on the floor, the room reeling. One more small piece of charcoal and I might not have made it to the door (and this was in a four bedroom house…an apartment would be far worse).
If you’ve never tried burning charcoal indoors, a word….don’t.
Gadzooks, Fenestrate! truly an insight into increased quantities of CO2 in the air!
A tip i read about determining if freezer has cut out for any length of time; make ice cubes in an ice cube tray, then turn the tray upside down in the freezer. If the freezer warms up, the ice cubes will drop out of the tray.
Clever!
This is a great topic–thank you. I learned how to dry and freeze foods, but I want to learn how to can safely–I have a water-bath canner and I can handle that, but I’m a little scared to try a pressure cooker. I hope you might cover pressure cooker tips for the timid!
Votus – heh..timing is everything. Just follow the link at the end of the post to my blog; I just put up an introduction to canning there. I am a firm follower of pressure canning – I am not a fan of water bath canning, so you will see the bias there. there are four little videos – the last two are on pressure canners.
your timing is cannily uncanny
ooooooooo – Well, when the director of the Fresh documentary said on Movie Night that she was interested in starting canning (she lives in NYC) but felt intimidated, I figured I’d better get on the stick. She can’t be the only person out there that has this impression that they will either poison their families or blow up the house with a pressure canner.
Cool–I will check it out!
Hey – anyone in the mood to make their own home canned peanut (or other nut) butter? Here’s a great site which talks about preserving pecans(I’m going to assume that other nuts work the same way) and they advocate canning them and processing them. Now they are also toasting them and packing them hot, so I’m not sure what effect that would have on making nut butter, but they also give directions for using a pressure canner, which I would think would be the safer way to goo — toast the nuts, run them through the processor with whatever else you’d want to put in it (a little salt perhaps?), put in the jars and process – they say “Half-pints or Pints for 10 min. at 5 lb (10 lbs for altitudes over 1000 feet). http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/
thank you toby! this is gonna be an excellent series!
and OT, thanks to your previous posts on women’s health, i managed to nag my 80-yr old mom to the doctor. I thought she might have “walking” pneumonia, and the dr’s verdict was close to that. At least it wasn’t her heart. She wouldn’t listen to me or the sibs about taking it easy, but once the dr confirmed illness, she finally had “permission” to not overdo.
Well, there you go. I don’t know what it is about Moms — they do seem to require a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging out of the pocket to take the information seriously. It really escapes me but that is the thing..I’m glad you got Mom to go.
Dear Aunt Toby,
This will sound truly nuts. (Thank for the nut butter reference, by the way). But it may have its uses for short-term power outages as well as getting stuck in your car or truck in the winter for a while.
It’s a beeswax Survival Candle in a tin can with 4 wicks, and 2 (for smaller candles) or 3 (for larger ones) metal strips that hook onto the open can to form a grill. So they’re good for light, heat, & a bit of cooking. You can use them in confined spaces. They supposedly emit negative ions. Anyway, they won’t kill you. They supposedly work down to 60 below. And they smell great.
I got a large one last winter after a bad storm, and the topic of conversation at a dinner with friends all of whom had been sans power was how they’d handled it. Anything requiring propane or other fuel is just too scary for me. So the survival candle was a great find.
I also found a small, light-gauge stainless steel teakettle that heated 3 cups of water to boiling in about 20 minutes. (The guy in the camping store insisted that the candle would never do that!) Couldn’t find a small, light-gauge steel frying pan so inverted the lid of the candle & poached eggs in it. Took 17 – 18 minutes. (Guy insisted that it wouldn’t cook eggs, either.)
The candle is imported from Canada. It supposedly burns for 300 hours (intermittently). You have to put it out from time to time, work the soft wax down and around the wicks, let it harden again, and relight. Or rotate the wicks.
Yes, it’s low-tech and won’t heat a big space. I have not yet experimented with making an indoor tent of a survival blanket & using the candle to stay warm. But at least I’ll have coffee; eggs; some heat; and light. The only brand name I know for these is Pheylonian. And yes, I called back the guy back and said that I’d had hot coffee and cooked eggs!
Thanks for this series!
One of the things that I found so fascinating about my grandmother was that she could do anything with nothing.
Make a meal from practically nothing in the pantry. Skin a rabbit (when I saw her do this it took me a long time to look at her the same way again; I was 10 and traumatized but I learned to admire the survival skill aspect), pluck a chicken, plant a garden from old seeds, help midwife a cat which sought refuge in her greenhouse, can anything and everything until the day she died at 90 (abuela, do you really think you need 30 quarts of pimiento? :)
I miss her so much…..
She was from Spain, came to America the long way around the cape, lived in Hawaii before it was a state with 4 kids, moved to California and had 4 more, taught herself English, amongst so many other impressive things. Truly an inspiration. And she thought she was just living a simple life.
Back to canning: can things you would like to eat and trade with other canners so you don’t end up with 30 quarts of pimiento :)
Here’s a website where you can find U-Pick farms in your area…
http://www.pickyourown.org/
Valletta – trading is a great idea – another great idea that exists in some communities is a ‘community kitchen’, where commercial sized kitchen equipment and canning equipment exists and groups of people can rent the kitchen and use it to preserve food. In some communities, it’s even set up as a commercial kitchen in the sense that people can use it to produce small runs of commercial food products in a kitchen that has been inspected and licensed. So, in that sense, they are really for small businesses. But it’s worth looking in your community to see if an organization has such a thing; you can get together with friends and family and can up all sorts of things and at the end of the day, swap, trade and everyone goes home with a bunch of different things instead of …30 quarts of pimentos.
Long ago and far away…….well, the 1950’s and 60 miles up the road…….immediately behind the house in which I lived was a building called the “cannery” that amounted to something like your “community kitchen”. This, in a small rural Southern town, was what I assume came about as a result of the Victory Gardens of WWII. There were huge pressure canning vats and, best I remember, only metal cans were used vs. glass jars. I’ve no idea how the cannery came into being, how it was financed, or exactly when the building ceased being used for that purpose but it was a wonderful idea.
Waccamaw – I have a could of really old canning books that have directions and diagrams on how to use canning equipment that actually uses cans, with specific instructions on the whole issue of what sort of solder has to be used on the cans (for obvious reasons). I often wonder where all that stuff went to – some small manufacturer probably..or the junk yard.