Pigeon Cottage Kitchen

At this time of year, I usually just think that the question ‘Are you ready?’ means that people are talking about Christmas. However, the Govt wants to make sure that we’re ready for emergencies like extreme weather events such as heavy snowfalls, floods or power grid failures. As these may in turn lead to food or water shortages or power cuts you may find it helpful to prepare a home survival kit to tide you over for a few days. It’s easy to think that this is just scaremongering but we’ve had lots of power cuts where we live over the years so we’ve accumulated a gas camping stove, torches, candles, battery packs and so on out of sheer necessity. It’s worth considering anyway. This is what the Govt advise in the graphic below on their ‘Be Ready’ page. As this is a food blog, I’ll also take you through some, hopefully helpful, tips on the food and beverage side.

Pigeon Cottage Kitchen #Beready tips!

• We have a gas camping stove and a gas BBQ so we can make hot food and boil water for drinks if necessary should the power go down. If you don’t have either of those, make sure that any food you put in your emergency stores don’t need cooking or are reasonably OK to eat cold. I don’t know about you but I’m going to have to be pretty desperate to eat cold beans from a tin!!!
• You don’t need to stockpile food items that you wouldn’t normally eat or drink because who wants to waste the money or has that amount of spare storage? You’d be surprised by how much food you already have in your cupboards that can be used to make a meal of sorts. For example, breakfast cereals like Weetabix and corn flakes are fine as long as you’ve remembered to lay in some long-life cartons of milk. Ready cooked grains mixed with canned fish makes a perfectly acceptable meal. Be prepared to be creative!
• Packs of bottled water aren’t expensive, don’t go off and can be kept in a garden shed or the bottom of a wardrobe if you don’t have the spare kitchen cupboard space. If your water is off for a few days you might want to save it just for drinking or cooking. Use packs of water wipes for washing instead of wasting precious water in your bathroom sink. Dry foods like rice and pasta can use up quite a lot of water just to cook them so do think of having some pre-cooked pouches or cans in too. You could also use the pasta water to cook vegetables instead of putting them in a separate pan.
• Tinned and jarred foods including fruit, vegetables, tuna, sardines, corned beef, ham, olives, pickled vegetables and prepared meals like soups, beans and pulses, pie fillings and stews are all no-brainer items as store cupboard standbys, whatever the circumstances.
• Long life milk, UHT fruit and vegetable juices, pouches of cooked beans, rice and grains have long ‘use by’ dates and won’t need a heat source to consume them.
• If you like to drink coffee but use pods or grind your own beans, your electric machine won’t work during a power cut so have some instant or ready-ground coffee in store as a backup. I’ve always got enough teabags in to sink a battleship and, if you can heat water, hot Bovril, Oxo cubes or Marigold vegetable bouillon powder makes a good soup-style substitute hot drink.
• Your freezer contents can last up to 48 hours after a power cut provided you don’t open the door. If the outage goes beyond that and you have a heat source, you might as well cook it if you can because, if it defrosts, you won’t be able to eat it safely after that.
• Dry foods like crackers, oat cakes, breakfast cereals, biscuits, crisps, chocolate, nuts, raisins and snacks all provide useful calories if you can no longer eat fresh bread, cheese, meat, eggs, cooked potatoes or pasta. If you can boil water, there’s nothing wrong with a pot noodle if it keeps you going!

If you’ve got any other food emergency top tips, please feel free to add them in the comments section.

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