Filling Holes in My Prepper Pantry and Beyond - What I Learned from the Texas Storms

today i want to share with you how i'm filling the holes in my prepper pantry and beyond given what i learned living through the texas storms [Music] hi sweet friends i'm mary and welcome to mary's nest where i teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments sourdough and more so if you enjoy learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time i upload a new video now i know to many of you that live in different parts of the united states maybe even different parts of the world where it gets very cold that it almost seems strange maybe even a little borderline silly when you see the people in texas reacting to the cold weather that we experienced but nothing like say what people are experiencing in wyoming for example but the big difference is that we don't expect to have such cold temperatures such severe weather and for such a long period of time generally in february here in central texas where i live it's usually about 60 degrees and sunny so this past february when we got hit with such severe weather first an ice storm and then snow topped that ice and then more ice topped that snow many people were really caught off guard in the past even if we did have a little minor ice storm it was over the next day and everything was melted and the sun was shining the same thing if we got a little snow and when i say little i really mean little like maybe a half an inch but now we had a severe amount of ice with that snow on top which initially was just nice you know soft snow but unfortunately that ice was underneath so there wasn't really a lot of driving going on people don't hear you know people here don't normally have chains for their tires and so on and so forth and then you had more ice topping that snow as well as topping all of our trees causing many limbs to break and crash down onto roofs and many just to break and fall into roads i mean it was a mess and this went on for over a week so people are not used to that as i said people are more used to the weather clearing up the next day and we're not used to it getting so cold for so long we just we dropped down here in central texas into single digits and then we had a lot of wind and so you've got the ice storm and the wind and now you're dropping down into sub-zero temperatures and our houses are generally not built to withstand sub-zero temperatures for extended periods of time and all of this was compounded by the fact that many of us were out of power for extended period of periods of time and then many of us were out of water for extended periods of time in our particular situation which i shared in the video that i did previously on the our texas weather update which i'll be sure to link in the description below if you've not had a chance to see that but we found ourselves without power for about two days and then the rest of the week we had little bits of power here and there but for the most part we're without power now we were very lucky that we were never without water and we and we never had to worry about a boiling water notice as many of our friends did so i learned a lot from this experience because i always have plenty of food and water on hand as i've shared with you all in the past in my prepper pantry videos i'm very well prepared and a lot of that comes from my uh growing up back east where i am used to being in very severe snowstorms and i was reminiscing with my husband about how uh i remember living through a nor'easter that lasted almost three weeks we were snowed in for three weeks and so i'm very used to the concept of making sure we have plenty of water and plenty of food but something that i never really thought about was having some our house gets so cold and have no electricity and not be able to cook because if we lose power it's often in the summer when people are running their air conditioners because it's maybe 100 or 110 degrees fahrenheit here so if we lose power and it's generally maybe for an hour or two if you really need to cook you can just kick up the grill and i don't even have to worry about relying on propane for that you know i have an old-fashioned weber grill you know just some briquettes or some wood and i can cook a chicken but when it's below zero and very windy and you're being pelted with sleet the last thing you want to do is kick up the grill and something you have to keep in mind is that the concept of having a wood stove to heat your home or to use for cooking which many people in very cold parts of the country do have that concept is very unusual here in central texas because a wood stove would be very underutilized so we were very happy to have peanut butter and bread and crackers and jam and those little non-perishable uh laughing cow cheese wedges and different foods like that so we had plenty of food to eat but we really couldn't warm up anything to any significance little devices like this that are like little trivets that have the uh tea lights underneath let you warm a food a little bit you know you're not going to be making a major meal you can maybe warm a can of soup or a can of beans which can be very comforting uh when it's very cold in the house because that was something that we ran into and i'll talk about in a minute i'm very grateful uh that we had plenty of blankets and plenty of down quilts from my days living back east but uh with it being so cold outside and having no electricity and no a way to heat our home the temperature was dropping and it was dropping pretty quickly and it was getting down into the low 40s in our house and we were that's when you start to get nervous because you start to worry well how long is the power going to be off and how much colder is it going to get and then you start to worry about the potential for pipes cracking and so on and so forth so a a warm meal could be very comforting uh so you can you know have little things like this uh you're not gonna be doing any major cooking but you can warm them up and i thought a wonderful tip that i heard from somebody who read somebody from someone during all of this was just warm your food don't try to get it hot and then let it cool off so that you can eat it warm is good enough and i think that's a very good rule and these little trivets you know with these uh tea lights i i like this trivet concept i just feel it's a little on the safer side uh then using something less sturdy these are quite heavy they they seem like wrought iron and you can put the little tea light in it and put your little piece on top and then you know use whatever you want i'm laughing because i'm showing you my espresso maker but i did not have any type of stovetop coffee pot and so we i i laugh like i this this is not so a setup that i had at the time and i've learned and since have filled my holes so to speak in my preps but and i'm not even sure if the tea light would be warm enough to uh uh heat the espresso pot but it really it made me chuckle that when i realized you know what it's kind of the luxury the thought of having an espresso but i've had that for years and i thought well that might be good to be able to make some coffee uh but again you know you're working with these tea lights so you're very limited and this also these little uh devices are terrific uh you go maybe they're pronounced um they just they have candles right inside and this does get quite warm and uh you can use this as like kind of a little hot plate but again we're talking warm not we're not gonna and we're not gonna be roasting a chicken or anything like that and speaking of that that's another thing that i've never worried about you know when it comes to cooking even if we had an extended blackout in the summer i have a sun oven and i can just put the sun oven outside my kitchen door and i can roast a chicken in there if for some reason you know we were without power for a day so you know although it'd be hot that sometimes is a lot easier to deal with than it being very cold so in that regard i'm all set if things go awry in the summer but you know these little things can help you get by maybe for a day or two in the winter but at some point you're going to want to cook something a little more substantial and things like you know you've got i've got one of these deets lanterns these i think are good you know to give off light in a room and whatnot i've used things like this you know going back to when i lived back east but i'm not a fan of lamp oil and uh i know if those of you who know homestead tessie she uses something some type of i think it's called clean heat i've never tried that but that seems like something that would be interesting again this can give light and then they give you these little they give you a little you take the the lid off and they give you a little rack and you can put a little pot on here that they give you and you can put a little something in there you could maybe warm some water to make a little tea or an instant coffee it's going to take a little while to get it hot if you're making a beverage but you know so these are all options you know as i said i'm not a huge fan of the lamp oil i'm not a huge fan of this one i like the idea more of using trivets with uh tea lights i like this yuco it's got candles in it uh it gives both light and a little warm hot plate up here you just need to be careful and remember that this is going to be hot so these are some options but again as the temperature stayed cold and we were without power and time was going on and you're really starting to think well what can i cook you know what can we eat to be maybe even kept a little warmer and that's really where a generator can come in handy but this generator is a small one this is a solar powered you can you know plug it in and charge it when you have electricity but primarily you use just the foldable solar panels and then you can charge this but this is just a small one because we never thought that we would be needing to power you know an electric cooktop or a coffee pot you know this is great for powering a little cooler if you're in a situation where you need to keep medicine cold in a little electric cooler you can you know power your cell phones and things like that but in terms of plugging your coffee pot in or as i said electric cooktop this is just not going to be able to do that job so now we've learned that for backup power we really do want to have a larger solar generator and yes there definitely are generators that you can you know run on uh gasoline and we're definitely going to consider those as well and something that we really found to be a lifesaver it really came in handy was this little device whoops i just pressed something uh but this little device uh you actually it's magnetic and it sticks to the front of your refrigerator and then it comes with two little sensors one goes in your fridge one goes in your freezer and it tells you what the temperature is in your refrigerator and in your freezer so we were able to monitor how cold it was in our fridge and in our in our fridge and in our freezer and when our refrigerator started going above 40 degrees fahrenheit we knew at that point we did need to open it and we needed to get the food out and we packed it in coolers and we put it outside this is very cold outside but we also had food in there that we didn't necessarily want to freeze so we put one of these in uh with with the cooler and we just monitored it to make sure that it wasn't getting too cold even in the cooler that we had outside but it worked like a charm and we were able to preserve all of our food keep it at the right temperature and keep it from going bad and what we did was we just started eating that food we started eating the food that would otherwise go perishable and something i have to say that i really love are these thermos because these came in so handy because you're going to laugh you know i i enjoy my morning coffee and for those really cold mornings when we didn't have any power and we didn't have any way to really make a cup of coffee uh because as i said these are you know new additions we were really just kind of relying on something like this and you're really not going to be making coffee with that other than maybe an instant you know warm some water and have an instant cup of coffee but to have perked coffee is really a treat and wonderful at lifting your spirits so the minute we had power and we had no idea how long it would stay on and it never stayed on very long uh you know it would be on for a little bit and then it would go off and we'd be saying why do you think the power is coming back on 10 hours later when do you think the power is going back on but i would quickly rush to make a cup of coffee not a cup but a pot and as you see we have two coffee butts one decaf and one uh calf and then i would make the pots of coffee and i would fill up these thermos and that was so wonderful because these thermos you know today the thermos are great and i really like this one you can see it's very well loved i've used this a lot you put the coffee in here this is a glass has a glass interior which i especially like and this keeps the coffee so hot so i would put the coffee in here and then we'd put the lids on i'd fill this thermos and put the lid on that and then just leave that on our counter and then in the morning when we still had no power and it was so cold at this point you know we're in our clothes we're in our coats you know we got the hoods up it's really starting to get chilly in here and what a delight it was to have thermoses so i can't say enough make sure you have plenty of thermoses and if you think there's going to be a power outage if you think a storm or you know a storm is coming and you want to just have either hot water or coffee tea whatever the case may be that is the time to prepare and make sure you have some good well-insulated thermoses that will keep your hots hot for as long as possible and a new addition to the family here so to speak is this coffee pot and the reason that i bought this was because i have a little small electric cooktop which i'll show you many of you have been with me for a while and you've seen my cooking videos i often have it here on my kitchen island it's just one of those little portable electric cooktops but and that's got a wonderful it's got like a cast iron burner it's wonderful and it gets very hot and when we upgrade to a larger solar generator we're going to make sure that we get one to which we can plug that cooktop in and if we wanted we could use that cooktop to uh power it to make some coffee in this coffee pot now hopefully we'll get one that we can also plug in our regular coffee pots too it's interesting i've really learned a lot about solar generators through all of this that what exactly what level of power you need to uh power certain appliances and how much power they take and how long it lasts and so on and so forth and so i just want to be prepared all across the board i've got my electric coffee pots and then i've got this stovetop version and the reason i liked this one this is made by faberware and if you've ever looked around for these coffee pots and basically what this is is just like the old-fashioned ones it's just you put your coffee oops you put your coffee grinds grounds your ground coffee in here and you put your water in there and then it's basically just going to perk and you put this lid on and the water is going to come up through this pipe in the middle and come over the coffee grounds and it makes a great cup of coffee this is basically what i grew up with but the but this is a fabric wear and the reason that i really liked this one and it was very affordable it wasn't expensive at all the little top here is glass and that's why i really liked it because a lot of them are plastic and that i'm just wondering you know will it impart a certain flavor in the coffee but you know if you're going through bad weather and it's been days maybe without a cup of coffee and you like coffee uh it may not really matter but also just for long-term wear and tear i thought it was good to to have this little glass percolator on top so that was faberware so i was very happy with that another thing i want to mention that we were so happy to have are these little radios now this is actually one that i recently purchased and the reason is the emergency radio we had it works like a charm and it was so wonderful to be able to listen to the radio and hear what was going on and conserve power on our cell phones but speaking of cell phones this generator this little solar generator will charge cell phones but our radio wouldn't and so that was a very interesting thing to realize and the reason is we've had that a long time and all the various uh connectors they had no longer fit modern cell phones so that's something to keep in mind if you have one of those emergency radios which i highly recommend they really can be a lifesaver and the one we have is a hand crank this one is also a hand crank it also has the ability to charge you know from from the sun and it has all the bells and whistles just like this one is a little smaller it's got the flashlight but it's got the radio it's got the solar panel here it's got the hand crank on the back so this is just terrific and our other one had all the same bells and whistles as well just an older one but make sure that the one you have if you have it so as you can charge your cell phone that it does have the right connector ours we've had it for so long and i completely forgot about it i never thought to check did it have a usb port and no in fact it did not now something i want to say about having the prepper pantry i have that whole series of videos on how to stock your prepper pantry how to do it on five dollars a week uh the different things that you may want to think about adding to your prepper pantry well i have a whole series of videos on it and i'll be sure to link to that playlist in the description below and up here in the icards if you're just getting started with a prepper pantry it can be very helpful to you to kind of walk you through all the steps of what you need to do without panicking with staying calm with giving yourself plenty of time to stock little by little uh so you know it's it's a very easy plan and it's based on what you like to eat and what you want to have on hand so that's something to definitely uh consider watching especially now as for many of us going into the warmer weather although we often have to deal with the possibility of floods and tornadoes but generally for most people warmer weather is an easier time to start stocking their pantry in preparation for bad weather in the winter when they really can't get out of the house so definitely look into that but speaking of the prepper pantry i was so happy to have that well stocked and i really learned about things that we like and enjoy and that basically are comfort foods when you're kind of stuck at home and going through you know a difficult situation where it is very cold and you know god bless my husband he had to be outside often cutting down limbs to keep them from uh breaking through our roof some were already leaning on our roof we had a very kind neighbor a young man who came over and helped my husband as well and so there was uh that was a very nice thing is our neighbor we have a lovely neighborhood and everybody really came together and there was a lot of camaraderie and so these are you know all things when it's cold and you come inside from working outside and you're working in conditions that you know maybe it's snowing maybe it's sleeting or hailing or whatever the case may be and to come inside and to be able to enjoy foods that are really comfort foods is very nice and so something i found was that you know as i said i have a very extensive prepper pantry always make sure we have plenty of food not only for ourselves but to help out you know our family extended family friends neighbors whatever the case may be i gave away a lot of peanut butter and we had one jar left in our pantry and maybe it was a small jar and maybe about half of it had been eaten and so we were really porcelain it out because we enjoyed it so much it was a sweet treat but that's a good thing to keep in mind to make sure you have plenty of food that you really like and that you have plenty to share as well as you know backups for yourself as well also having enough water is very important because you don't know might a pipe break might the city's situation be that wherever you live that they can't get water to you that happened to our friends they were without water for four days and thank god we had plenty of water not only did we have water you know coming from our tap although cold water but we had water uh they didn't have any water for four days and so we were able to share a lot of our bottled water with them and what we also did was and something that you often hear of people doing when they know there is a storm and the potential that there may not be water you can start filling your bathtubs with water and so i had bought this thing that i saw recommended i think in another person's youtube video called a water bob and this was a very clever thing to have now if you don't have this you know you could maybe line your tub with a clean tarp i highly recommend making sure that you have a couple of tarps they're very reasonable you can buy them at hardware stores you can buy them at the big box stores like costco and sam's and just tuck them away you know because if in a bad storm you know if you did get a hole in your roof or you did get a broken window or something like that tarps work really great for giving you protection from those things until you can get them fixed and they can also work well at lining your tub now this water bob is something that you fill your tub with you you put it in your tub and then you fill this with water one thing i will recommend you know it is a sort of a universal attachment to fill it with water they don't show it here on the box but it's a universal attachment and so oh i think here they're showing it in the smaller picture but there's uh this piece that can fit over basically any faucet but i would highly recommend from personal experience if you do this don't leave it unsupervised make sure that you have some way maybe with a rubber band or something to hold that in place and then don't try to fill it real fast because the water could back up just take your time supervise it and fill it it took me a couple of hours to fill this but now we had water although with this you you it's supposed to be clean and bpa free you know another chemical freeze in terms of the plastic that it's made out of so you can drink this water if you need to but we really use this to fill the tub because we wanted to make sure that we had water for personal hygiene we wanted if we did find ourselves without water we had bottled water to drink but we wanted to make sure that we didn't need to use that to wash ourselves flush the toilet so on and so forth so it was funny in a way using this this winter because i really bought these thinking that we might need them in the summer when as i said you know we can get floods here in central texas some are very dangerous and deadly and they've sometimes washed out whole towns and so that's something that i always have in the back of my mind and we have tornadoes so making sure that i have some type of water source in the event that if we were without water or once our water came back then we had a boil water notice and what if we didn't have power you know how could we boil the water you know we'd be kind of working with these things and you know would we have had you know a solar generator that could power a cooktop to boil water you know these are all things now i'm thinking of but really didn't in the past so but i thought that this would be very handy to have because i could fill my tub with water and then i would have this to drink also another thing that you can think of if you know a storm is coming these type of containers are very handy this holds five gallons of water it's made for water it's made to hold water so it's it is food grade and i think that's important whenever you're thinking of storing water but these are also very handy if you need to give someone water because you can put five gallons of water in here if you are not keeping bottled water on hand but you have water and maybe a friend or family member doesn't you can fill these and give them to them and they've got they've got five gallons of water so i highly recommend keeping some of these on hand and not just to share with other people but also for yourself if you've not had if you've not kept any bottled water on hand and you know a storm is coming and there is the potential that you may lose electricity you may lose water filling these up is going to be a lifesaver now in addition to little things like this that are basically candles that provide some sort of light as well as heat as and and things like the lantern that's about that provide light as well as a heat source for a little bit of small cooking we love having little lanterns like this they they're battery operated and we always make sure we have enough batteries as well as really good high-powered flashlights but these are nice just for lighting a room or if you have to walk from room to room and it's night and it's very dark and you know as i said you have no power these come in handy and what's nice is they are very easy to store they're very tiny and they really don't take up a lot of space we have larger electric lanterns you know that we can carry around and that illuminate a room but these are also uh just a wonderful thing to have because you can even adjust it if you want if you just if you want a little light maybe you have to get up at night and use the restroom or something but you don't want to disturb other people you can even just put a little you can only open it up a little bit and get a little bit of light or you can pull it up all the way and light your whole room now when it got so cold in our house we were very lucky to have two fireplaces but fireplaces don't give off the type of heat the way a wood stove would be but at least it was nice to sit by it and warm up a bit and something that i've thought about is i have the cast iron type dutch oven with the little feet that you use when you're out camping and that can go on to you know a fire but i was thinking it would be very interesting especially since i have a fireplace right here in my kitchen if once the logs kind of burned down and i just had a lot of hot embers if there was some type of grate i could put on top and then i could use my cast iron my not the ones with the feet for camping but sort of do the same concept have the grate and then put a little cast iron frying pan or a little cast iron dutch oven of which you know i've got plenty of those and that might be an interesting way to be able to cook and really cook something nice and warm like a stew something you could really enjoy and one thing that i want to say that i cannot recommend enough and this really goes no matter where you live because as we saw here even in central texas you know we were below zero you know and it was very cold and no heat and the thing that i can't recommend enough is having wool blankets and i am so grateful this blanket belonged to my mother and she passed this on to me with a few others and i had down comforters uh that i had brought with me from living back east and it's funny because at one point i thought oh gosh what am i going to use all these down comforters for i should just get rid of them but i said oh i'll save them you know they're nice and i folded them up and you know put them in the closet and i'm so glad we had them we have a down comforter on our bed and uh we had these blankets on our bed as well and definitely keep your eyes open for wool my mother is in her mid-90s and this blanket and as you'll see there's even you can see over here there's monogram on this and it's not my mother's monogram but my grandfather was a personal assistant to a successful businessman and this businessman would give my grandfather hand-me-downs my grandfather had five children and was very happy to get hand-me-downs and one of the hand-me-downs that this gentleman this businessman gave my grandfather was this blanket and who cared that it had uh someone else's monogram it was warm you know for their five children and so my mother had this on her bed as a little girl and then when she married my father she and i was born she put this on my bed and then when i got married she passed on some wool blankets to me but this wool blanket is in wonderful condition overall there's just like a little fraying here on the edges but this wool blanket is probably about a hundred years old now and look at that how well that's why boy if you can find quality to buy a wool blanket today may be very expensive but i highly recommend that if you're at thrift shops keep your eyes open you never know when you may come across something like this that somebody donated and to have a real good heavy wool blanket this kept us so warm and my husband who really hadn't really ever had the need to have a wool blanket on his bed said that what a difference this made because he was so cold the first night and i you know because we were asleep you know when the power went out and we noticed it was very quiet and very dark and we we usually can see our little clock and we both looked at each other in the dark and we said i think the power's out and it just started getting real cold and we were hearing like all the sleet you know pelting on the windows and stuff and i got this out and put this on uh his side of the bed and he said what a difference it made so you can never be i'm at the school of thought now my mother always said make sure you have five to six wool blankets per person and extra in in your family in your household an extra in case you have guests or whatnot who may have to stay with you during the hard times so i am definitely of the school of thought make sure you have five to six heavyweight wool blankets and maybe some down comforters as well now are there a lot of alternatives to having wool definitely today there are all sorts of modern zero temperature sleeping bags and things like that that can come in very handy you can have even tents and set up a tent in one room in your house as a lot of people did and had their nice sleeping bags and all of that definitely if you have those things that's great but if you're not a camper or you don't want to invest in in these excellent quality sleeping bags keep your eyes open for wool blankets going through any type of emergency whether it's like what we just went through in texas or other emergencies that people around the country or around the world go through are times that allow us to evaluate our preparedness plan and things become very clear very quickly where we have holes in our preparedness where we have holes in our prepper pantry did we have enough food did we have enough water these are the things that are very important for us to make sure that we have sufficient supplies of in our prepper pantry and then taking it one step further did we have the equipment that we needed to support our prepper pantry now if you're at the very beginning of building a prepper pantry and building a preparedness plan i have a playlist of videos where i walk you through step by step how to start a pepper prepper pantry how to start a prepper pantry on five dollars a week how best to store the food what are the most ten important forever foods how to have a survival pantry all of these things are very important when it comes to being prepared for any type of emergency and these videos walk you through step by step by step no panicking no rushing you do the little violet you do this little by little over the course of many many weeks so that in a year or maybe six months or a year whatever you're comfortable with in terms of how many supplies you want to build up you can have completed your prepper plan and then once you've got your prepper pantry stocked and an emergency does present itself you'll have what you need so be sure to click on this video over here where i have that playlist for you to go through step by step no panicking no nervousness just one day at a time little by little with as little as five dollars a week and you'll be building your prepper pantry in no time at all and i'll see you over there in my texas hill country kitchen love and god bless

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 48,247

Rating: 4.9409838 out of 5

Keywords: Filling Holes in My Prepper Pantry and Beyond - What I Learned from the Texas Storms, Filling Holes in My Prepper Pantry and Beyond, Filling Holes in My Prepper Pantry, What I Learned from the Texas Storms, Texas Storms, Prepper Pantry, preparedness food storage, preparedness plan, prepping, food storage, long term food storage, emergency food storage, prepping on a budget, prepping for beginners, preparedness, prepping basics, prepper, emergency preparedness, marysnest, marys nest

Id: jtaN90bJgbQ

Length: 36min 51sec (2211 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021