Off Grid Cooking in Your Kitchen

welcome to rose-red homestead last Thanksgiving which was just three months ago I had dinner all planned we were having family over for dinner and I fixed everything ahead of time except on Thanksgiving morning I was going to wake up early and fix two pies and then get the turkey in the oven well when we woke up we had a power outage on Thanksgiving Day with a turkey to cook and two pies to make and that power outage lasted for six hours and so ultimately we were able to push the time for dinner to start back a little bit and once the power came back on I was able to finish everything but it really got me to thinking about what if situations and one of the what-if situations is what if we had a long term power outage and the weather was horrible outside so I could not use some of the things that I have for off-grid cooking like the grill or my canning station what if I only had my kitchen what kind of a meal can I fix and what can I use to help with off-grid cooking that's what we're going to talk about in just a moment [Music] so I have two tools that we have two pieces of equipment that we have right now out on our emergency preparedness shelf this is a little butane stove it I'll open that up in just a minute and it takes butane gas now butane gas is safe for using with this appliance inside the house the other thing I have is this wonder bag and I'll talk about the each one of them more in detail what we're going to do today is to imagine what it would be like to be in a long-term power outage not on Thanksgiving morning but rather what am I going to feed my family throughout the day if the power stays off for one day two days a week what could we do inside the house if I can't get outside to an open fire or my propane canning Center so here we go let's open I'm going to set this pan aside we'll be using it in just a moment so this is called a portable gas stove this particular one is made by coleman you can buy these on Amazon we happen to have two of them and it's just a little simple stove it is very lightweight now some of these stoves come this is removable and it's packed upside down so you need to be sure and pull this piece out and turn it right-side up with the Coleman it is in place so we don't need to do that so I'm going to turn it around so that you can see the dials so this side opens up and this is where you put in your little butane gas cartridge now these are really fairly inexpensive you can get these for about $2 a piece I buy them in bulk and I've checked prices around our sporting goods stores in our nearest town which is about 40 miles away and it is really cheaper to get them online if you can find a place like Amazon that has no shipping so I get these in bulk so here are great controls this is the lot and look what happens when I push this lock down this little platform moves forward and I'll show you what that does in just a moment this is the gas control and if you turn it all the way around and then go one more notch it has a piece of lighter which automatically lights so you don't even need matches now I want to show you on this side if you can look right down here in this hole you can see this pin right here on this gets cartridge has to go right in that little hole and there's a notch in this rim that knotch fits right in here so let's go ahead and see if we can put this in I'm gonna see if I can do it backwards here so I'm going to fit this in where that little hole is hopefully and then this is locking in the notch okay so it is now setup so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to lock it in place now watch what happens to the can when I push the lock in so the whole can is shoved right up in there and now that little pin is engaged and it will release the gas when I turn it on so I'm going to close this up now and I'm going to try to reach around here and see if I can like this without starting my hair on fire so that you can see it so I'm going to turn the gas on and then one more notch and boom we have fire right here now I'm going to turn the controls now toward me and I'm going to turn it off while I talk for just a moment now even at $2 a pop for these cartridges in a situation where we may be long-term without electricity and we need to cook inside our kitchen I don't want to spend hours and hours simmering something to get it done we still want to be very conservative in the use of this fossil fuel in the case of a disruption of society as we know it and we may be we may have to be very cautious about using up our stores of this desk because it may not be readily available they might ration it or it may not be available we want to preserve as much of this as we possibly can so when I am cooking on days without electricity I am going to be choosing things that require only a short time over this burner and that's what I have for us to do today and by using this burner in combination with this Wonderbag we can prepare meals that are nutritious if we have been preparing in advance and we have things ready to go so here is the strategy that we're going to use now when using this little burner any pan will work but when we use the wonder bag we want to use pans that are thin sided as possible and this is the thinnest cited pan that I have we also want to make sure that we don't use a pan that is oversized for what it is we're going to be cooking and leaving a lot of airspace in the pan when we put it in the Wonder bag so here's what we're going to do I went out to the shelf and I bought one of our meals in a bag in from our shelf and I prepared these months ago so we have a lot of these that are just ready to bring this particular one is tomato beef see it is very nutritious and we could actually use this for German me for two or three meals but it would be likely in a power outage that we might have family come over as well so this would serve six to eight so let's see what I packed in this bag several months ago so here is a jar of our home canned tomato paste in a wax jar actually I'm going to move the winter bag aside for right now we'll bring it back when we're about ready to use it so it's been a paste here is my dry suit mix all ready to go here is a pint of my canned beef and this was canned in October of eighteen so that's well over a year old and it's perfectly fine here is a can of diced tomatoes and lastly a little packet of vacuum-packed pasta now because we are pretending that we are in a power outage I may have to adjust some things normally I would put this pot on the stove and I would start the soup mix I would not put the beef in nor when I put in the pasta and I would let the soup mix simmer for an hour maybe two hours to get everything nice and soft and flavorful then I would add the pasta the last 20 minutes and the beef because all I have to do is heat the beef up it's already cooked and the pasta would just have to soften but today in this emergency situation I can't do that because when I put it in the wonder bag I have to put the lid on the winter bag and it needs to retain every bit of heat and I cannot generate more heat all I can do is hold the heat that we have so here's how I'm changing my strategy I'm going to put this little pot on the stove one burner stove I'm going to turn it on and put the water in it and I'm going to add everything now the taste won't be quite the same but it will still be very good and it will hold its nutrition so here we go I'm going to start with the tomatoes and I'm just going to dump that in here's the soup mix now the soup mix is vacuum sealed and so I'll see if I can get it off with just using the lid yes and this I can't even remember what the ingredients are but I did a video on these meals and bags but here's lentils and it looks like rice split peas looks like barley and then some seasonings and a bay leaf and there's some onions so I'm just gonna dump the dried mix in right there then I'm gonna pull a little tab on this well I've got a good seal on this and this is homemade tomato paste I'm going to put it in and then here's the beef now whenever I open up a jar of beef any low acid food that I have pressure canned in order to double check the safety I want to hear that sound and then I'm going to listen carefully when I break the seal to make sure that goes poof it did so that's good and then I'm going to smell it and it smells perfectly good and then the other thing that I'm going to do just for safety is make sure that I boil it for at least 10 minutes now this whitish layer is a layer of fat and so I have a decision here I can either spoon off the fat or I can leave it in to help flavor the soup now because this is an emergency situation I want all of the flavor that I can possibly get and so I'm just going to leave it in just exactly like that so here goes the beef and this was raw PAC meat and so all the juice that you see in here is the juice is the liquid that was produced by the meat itself as it was processing okay now here's the soup mix but I need to add the water and it calls for six cups of water [Music] so here too 6.now i right away can see that i have a little bit of a problem here look how much air space I have between the top of the pan and the top of the liquid now sadly this is the only option I have for a pot that will fit inside my wonder bag that wonder bag is a little small I have discovered I bought that online and I was delighted to purchase it through whatever company that I did because half of the proceeds went back to the women in Africa who made that so I was happy to do that but you can make wonder bags that are much larger all you need to do is pour some of those little styrofoam beads you can get them in a great big bulk at fabric shops just pour some of those into a pillowcase and sew it up you have been great big pillows and then put the pillows down inside some kind of container even an ice chest and you have this same principle but we're going to go ahead and go with this and I'm sure that it will be just fine but if I had a smaller pot that's what I would be using okay now time to turn it on so I am going to flip it around watch to see if the flame comes on and the flame is on and it's on high now one of the things we want to do for the Wonder bag is to make sure that the entire pot including the lid are heated through and through so I'm going to put the lid on we're going to boil this for a good 10 minutes or bring it to a boil a simmer to where the everything about the pot is hot and when we get to that point we'll come back and then we'll put it right in the Wonder bag so I'll be back shortly oops I forgot to put the pasta in so I'm going to do that right now too and give it a quick stir all right be back soon this has been boiling now for 10 minutes so I'm going to prepare the blender bag I'm going to open it up so that I have room to put the pan in and I have a little tea towel on the bottom just to protect the bottom so that I don't have to clean up messes on the bottom and each of these little pouches are filled with these little styrofoam beads let's take a look and see what we have inside our pot boiling nicely we see that some of the lentils have risen to the top it's a little sticky on the bottom I'm going to release everything from the bottom all right now I'm going to turn the heat up on high and bring it back up to a nice rolling boil the really nice thing about this little stove is that it is one of only a very few appliances if pieces of equipment that can be used inside we have a coleman camp stove out on our shelf but you cannot use those inside a house and so these two things are two of the only ones that I can find that are safe to use inside ok let's take a peek oh yeah we've got a nice rolling boil there so I'm going to turn this off and I'm going to just put this right inside this wonder bag and pull it tight just as tight tight tight as I can want to be sure that those beads go up and over the side of the pot and then I'm going to put the top on and just for a little extra weight I'm going to put another towel on the top of it now the great thing about these winter bags is that it will hold that boiling temperature almost to a boil for at least two hours and so we're just gonna let this sit and it doesn't matter how long we let it sit it'll be done probably in about two hours maybe two and a half hours but Jim is gonna go into town and I have other things to do and what if we forget about it no problem because we know that it's not going to burn because there's no heat source inside it is just holding what heat is here so we've only used our fuel for about 15 minutes it took five minutes to get it up to a boil and then we boiled it for 10 minutes and I've conserved the rest of that canister of fuel for next time and the rest of the cooking will be done in something that requires no energy whatsoever so we will be back when this is done to show you what it looks like well time really did get away from us this afternoon this wonder bag has been in place now for four hours so we're going to open that in just a minute but first I need to mention a couple of safety features I just happened to notice that on the back of this little burner it gives a warning about carbon monoxide hazard and in reading through this it says do not use enclosed areas including home now that is different than our first one the one that I've cooked on a lot and so I just sort of assumed that this one would be the very same and I think it really is the other one says you're fine to use it in the home so long as you have a window cracked or at least a two by two ventilation heading in into the home and so we have our back screen door open and so is just fine I don't have any qualms about continuing to use this in a big area like a house I would never use it in a tent I would never use it in a small enclosed camper without a door wide open but for what we did today I feel just fine about it so that is safety precaution number one now I'm going to set this aside we're finished with that and then I'm going to bring over the Wonder bag so this winter bag has been sitting now for four hours and I know I said it doesn't matter thinking that it would be two and a half maybe three hours at most however we need to remember that there is a danger zone temperature span for when bacteria starts to grow in food that is just sitting out and that danger zone is between 40 degrees and 140 and you might want to write that down and that's Fahrenheit you do not want food to be warmer than 40 degrees or cooler than 140 because that's in the danger zone so in just a minute we're going to take the temperature of our soup to make sure that it is above 140 degrees and safe to eat so here we go I can feel the heat through here this is just great this is still too hot to touch so that's a good sign oh it's really really hot in here so take a look at what we have here's our soup it has completely thickened well look probably looks so good it's hardly soup more like sort of a stew consistency it smells wonderful there's a piece of meat I can see all of that I can see the pasta and the peas the tomatoes are throughout let's take its temperature 150 to 57 58 so here we are we are above the danger zone so this is just fine to eat and you can probably see it still steaming and that is after 4 hours so we are going to dish up some and have a late lunch and enjoy the versatility of eating when the power is out and of course all of our appliances are electric and so we would be very dependent on a setup like this to cook in the case of a power outage now other you can cook a lot of things in this very same way including a breakfast of steel-cut oats or stews or lots and lots of things even bread and we're going to be doing a video on how to cook bread have to make a loaf of bread in this wonder bag maybe next week we'll see how it goes but for now we're going to enjoy our lunch so thank you very much for being with us and we will see you next time [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 6,930

Rating: 4.9889197 out of 5

Keywords: Off-grid cooking, butane burner, wonder bag

Id: 16htxmU5yFU

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020