I was curious to know what methods you plan to use for cooking that does not involve electricity. Let's say your power is out for more than a few days; how would you cook your food? What type of food would you cook?
For me ---BBQ
I BBQ all the time anyway. I have 2 propane tanks full at all times..LOL...in winter when ice storms kill power --we BBQ and I have the side burner for bakes beans or whatever--it handles a nice sized pot.
So I am good there.
When I tent camped....I would Dutch Oven meals. Very simple. So if I ever have no BBQ---I know I can build a fire and make a Dutch Oven meal right over the flames....very simple....stews and such are so easy as long as you have heat.
Wood stove and the one dish wonder! The one dish wonder recipes are most of what I use anyway! Working, single mom, you know...
One can throw on a pan of soup, fry some potatoes and add some ground deer meat, make some dirty rice (using deer meat again), even make some pan bread, if ya have to. If you have some cast iron skillets you can make pert near anything on the top of a wood stove. Now standing close enough to tend it is always tricky...seems if the fire is hot enough to fry something, its also hot enough to fry you!
We have propane so I can still use my stove top. Two years ago we had a blizzard and lost power, we lit our oil lamps and candles and DH and I had a very cozy fireside supper! I actually look forward to a good storm
We are all electric at home and waiting to see what H. Gustav is going to do, so this is weighing heavily on my mind at the moment. We can grill, of course. But I haven't ruled out the possibility of cooking over an open fire.
We'd use the propane bbq if I wanted to cook (e.g. stuff from a thawed freezer) or boil water.
But frankly, thus far the times that power has been off for just a day or so we've simply eaten no-cook meals. I always keep a couple tins of tunafish and a *small* unopened jar of storeboughten mayonnaise in the back of the cabinet against precisely that sort of need.
I would like to have a small propane camp stove for emergencies in the warmer months. I don't want to fire up my stove in August! We grew up without electricity, so its not as big an issue for us, I guess.
Last hurricane we had (Katrina) the power was out for 9 days. Best thing was those military MREs. It was crazy, tho. We couldn't keep perishable stuff because there was no frige. We couldn't use anything that had to be cooked. So we ended up spending most of a weeks wages on pre-prepared and fast food.
All the good stuff like tuna & crackers, bread, peanut butter, anything that didn't need to be refrigerated OR cooked was hard to find. Not only were all our own people looking for food, but we had thousands of evacuees looking for food, too.
I was living in town then, tho. Now I'm out in the country where I can actually shoot stuff and set it on fire.