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I really like food. Seriously. Sometimes I think about what I am going to have for dinner while I am eating breakfast. So, when I was recently thinking about emergency preparedness my mind automatically went to food, and my favourite question popped into my head: “What am I going to eat?!”
So, I decided to enlist some friends, who love food as much as I do, to do an experiment to see what sort of dishes we could create in a disaster-type situation. We got together for a dinner party and each made one dish with the following guidelines:
- No electricity could be used in the cooking process
- No tap water
- Only non-perishable food
Despite these rules we ate a lot and also very well.
Appetizers of crackers, hummus and smoked mussels, a salad of a variety of beans and tuna, and the best homemade vegetarian chili I have ever had made solely from canned items and cooked in a pot on the barbeque. Canned corned beef, refried beans, salsa and cheese whiz in a taco shell is surprisingly very delicious. Honey, cocoa powder, peanut butter and shredded coconut can be mixed together and rolled into small tasty morsels that are an excellent dessert.
What we learned is that you can eat very well during a disaster, if you think ahead of time about what sorts of things you want to eat, how to cook them, and to have the ingredients you need on hand in your preparedness kit. If you don’t, then you might be forced to eat that can of mystery food that has been sitting in the back of your cupboard for awhile – a potentially scary alternative.
So, what are you going to eat?
(No spam was consumed during our experiment.)
P.S Thanks to my friends Andrew, Mary Anne, Megan P., Anna, Katy, Mark, Megan B., James and Owen for taking part!
Filed under: Preparedness Tagged: | emergency preparedness week, food, recipes
RedCrossTalks
Karen Snider, Blog Master/ Media Manager
Jen Mayville, Red Cross Roving Reporter/Communications Co-ordinator
Janice Babineau, Bilingual blogger from the East Coast
Katie Robinson, HQ blogger in Ottawa / Public Affairs Advisor
I absolutely love this!
Here in Oregon, we’ve been talking for a while about having some sort of event where we invite chefs to create tasty food out of disaster kit supplies. It’s fantastic that you went ahead and did it on your own!
Our other somewhat-related idea is the Recipe of Disaster party in which the “potluck” items are disaster supplies rather than food. (Read here: http://redcrosspdx.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-host-preparedness-party.html )
The chef idea is a good one!
I’m not too sure about Jen’s “tacos” but the peanut butter balls look pretty good;)
The tacos were not my creation. However I will take total credit for coming up with the peanut butter chocolate balls.
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