TEXAS ICE STORM 2023 | PANTRY RESTOCK & PREPARING FOR A WEATHER EMERGENCY

[Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] hi and welcome to Faith and Flower if you're new here I'm Robin we live just north of Austin Texas and as you may know we had a pretty significant ice storm this week I talk a lot about food storage on my channel and our family tries to maintain about a one month to three month food supply we're actually working on building that back up after moving into our new home the items in here are always moving into rotation so that we are always eating what we store and right now I am taking items out of here putting them in the smaller Pantry area near our kitchen so that they're a little bit easier accessible and I'm also taking soccer inventory to see what I need to buy at the store this was actually day one of the ice storm that we had this week in Texas and it's a great opportunity for me to talk to you about why I think it's important to have a little bit of extra food storage so when we've had ice storms like this in the past similar to hurricanes and other weather events oftentimes the stores are closed or even if they're open it may be impossible for you to get to the store in this case I knew the roads were going to be very icy but because we have this food storage there isn't going to be any need for us to get out in that and we also won't interfere with other people who aren't prepared and do need to stock up another benefit is that if there is a food shortage as a result of this weather crisis we are in a position to help our neighbors and friends who may need items as well besides that in this age of inflation and very high grocery prices it's a great way to save money whenever items that we use regularly go on sale if they are something that's shelf stable I can buy one or two for now and one or two for later and that way I can build our storage up in a way that is economical and therefore when I need those ingredients I will have them on hand at a lower price and I won't have to go to the store and pay whatever the price currently is which right now seems to be rising day by day weather emergencies are the reason why I started doing this years ago we lived in North Carolina we often had hurricanes we had ice storms there too and snow storms at different times and I learned that this was a really helpful thing to do and of course that was reinforced during the pandemic but could also be very helpful if you had some sort of financial crisis like a job loss or right now the inflation that we're experiencing at the grocery store makes this a really great way to help save some money I have a whole playlist on our prepper Pantry so if you're interested in that I will have those videos linked down in the description box today I am refilling a lot of the containers that I like to keep in the pantry here in our kitchen and one of those is bread flour so we mostly eat gluten-free because our sun needs to eat gluten free but my husband and I still enjoy bread and I make sourdough bread and so bread flour is something that I like to keep a few extras of in our prepper pantry bread flour was really hard to get during the pandemic so when I did get some I got a little extra and I vacuum sealed it so that's what I'm doing here I'm unpacking that but because I basically sucked all of the air out of it it's a little bit clumpy so I wanted to put it in this mixing bowl and break it up with a whisk sort of give it a little fluff before I store it and you can also see a little oxygen packet there that I didn't realize I had stuck in to help get some of the oxygen out and this was a great way for me to keep it a little bit longer past the expiration date because there was still a little bit of flour in my glass container I poured that into a different Bowl because what I want to do is put the newest on the bottom and use the oldest first if that makes sense there's also a little bit in the plastic container that you can see just behind the bowl that didn't fit into the Container when I opened that bag so I'm going to make sure that gets in there as well so if you're familiar with good practices for a gluten-free kitchen you'll notice that I made a pretty big mistake here it would have been better for me to deal with all of this flower that contains gluten after I had taken care of all the items that are gluten free just to make sure that I don't cross contaminate everything I did clean everything really thoroughly before opening any of the gluten-free oats or the sugar or anything that I would use for Peyton's food but I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by waiting until the end and I also wound up using more you know bowls and things like that that I had to clean afterwards as well but I'm just kind of pointing that out because I know some of you will and also just to caution you if maybe you're new to having you know to prepare gluten-free items in your kitchen that cross-contamination is something that you really need to look out for foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] while I worked on this inside today the ice storm was starting outside and it was fairly mild on the first day we got a lot of freezing rain and all of the surfaces were starting to ice up the temperature was really dropping and it wasn't predicted to go above freezing for at least two or three more days so we were trying to make any preparations in advance that we could having a prepper Pantry really does help me take care of the food issue but I also have to think about how I would cook things we only have electricity in our house we don't have any gas we have a camp stove that we can use we also have a grill and I like to use inside the fondue set to warm up things that works really well for making tea or just warming up something quickly in a pot we do have a fireplace and some firewood and we also have an RV which does have propane so if it got really bad we could go into our RV and use the propane heat I can also cook in there of course preparing to make sure you have fresh water to drink is very important and we made sure that all of our devices were fully charged so that in the case of losing electricity we would be able to use our phones and laptops at least as long as we have the battery charge freezing pipes are a real issue here in Texas because the homes were not made to withstand these really cold temperatures that we've had these past few years the butter pipes are often not insulated very well here in Texas and so when water gets in there and freezes it expands and that causes the pipes to burst some things we've done that were successful are keeping the cabinet doors open in the bathrooms in the kitchen wherever there's a sink so that the warm air from inside your home can circulate under there and keep it warm also there are many things you can do for the outside faucets to keep them from bursting because that's where they're exposed so putting some sort of pipe warmers on there or just insulating them there are some insulated covers that you can get and also letting them drip so that the water runs a little bit are great ways to sort of combat this problem and we've used all of those things and so far so good we also expected that we might have some broken limbs or downed trees so having the chainsaw ready to go with the oil and fuel that it needs is a good idea idea and of course things like generators and kerosene heaters are really helpful but you need to make sure that you have the fuel you need for those things in advance [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] as I'm restocking our kitchen pantry I take a couple of minutes to sort of take stock here and see if there's anything that I need to put on order for example the type of brown rice flour that I really like to use I order from Amazon or add to my list for my next grocery trip foreign [Music] while I was at it I wanted to go ahead and decant a few other items our dishwasher soap is something that I'd like to decant into a glass container I just find it a little bit easier to use so I need to refill that today too I've mentioned here before how much I love the truly free laundry products I've been using their dishwasher soap and it's phenomenal so if you're not really happy with yours and you'd like to give them a try I highly recommend it and I'll have a link for you down in the description box [Music] foreign [Music] I also like buying spices somewhat in bulk or at least in larger containers it's usually more economical that way and so I'll store those in the top of this cabinet and then I will decant some into smaller containers that I can keep in my spice drawer especially the ones that I use on a regular basis in my last video you guys gave me so many great suggestions down in the comment section about what to get at Costco since we're new members there and spices was on a lot of people's lists so I will be looking for all of my favorite spices on my next trip and stock up on some of those [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] as I cleaned up all of the extra containers and the bowls that I used I was looking out the window trying to assess the ice situation outside and on the first day it really wasn't too terrible yet but I knew that we had a couple days left of really cold temperatures and a lot of precipitation coming so just sort of making little checklists in my head about what I wanted to make sure that we got accomplished before we lost power or before things were too icy for us to get out in case we needed to [Music] I had one last thing I wanted to decant and that was our extra rice this is going to go back into our prepper Pantry but I really prefer keeping it in a tupperware container as opposed to the bag that it came in I feel that it's a little bit better protected from Critters coming from the outside bugs or even mice and if there were a weevil outbreak or some kind of bug outbreak from the actual rice it would be contained as well [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] by dinner time the temperatures had dropped down into the 20s and I knew we were going to be in for a very cold night so I wanted something really comforting for dinner and we love curries and I discovered a butter chicken recipe that you can make in the instant pot a while ago in fact I think I shared it on my channel but I'm gonna link it down in the description box in case you missed it this was so good this recipe was a definite keeper it's so easy as well I decided to make a double batch so you'll see me doubling the recipe here it made enough for us to have three really good sized Meals one for tonight one we were gonna have for leftovers and the third I was going to freeze for a future meal I find that when I make things in the instant pot it's really easy to double it lots of times and that way I basically give myself a night off in the future [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] I like to use my instant pot on my stovetop so that I can take advantage of the vent for things like this recipe where I'm going to be sauteing some of the ingredients it's nice to be able to use the vent and also when I need to release the steam I can use the vent as well I haven't had any issues with doing this on my induction cooktop I think it would also be fine on a glass cooktop and in our previous home where I had a gas cooktop I just put a cutting board over the grates and then set the instant pot on top [Music] thank you [Music] I love my instant pot in fact I have two I have the larger one that is an eight quart and then this smaller three quart one and I find that it works really well especially for making things like rice which I'm doing tonight and if you haven't tried rice in an instant pot you definitely should it is so easy it's just equal parts rice and water add a little bit of salt and for this I'm using jasmine rice it only takes four minutes in the instant pot and it comes out perfect every time foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you foreign foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] this is such a good butter chicken recipe and it really couldn't be easier so if you like Curry even just a little bit you should really give this one a try [Music] so day two of the ice storm we awoke to no electricity and the sound of trees cracking and large limbs falling to the ground our house was pretty chilly and we didn't know how long we might be without power so I wanted to do what I could to warm us up and so I made a pot of tea with using our fondue set and I've done this before it works surprisingly well and I can just set my teapot on there and we have hot water for tea you can even make coffee or hot cocoa and we enjoyed warming up with that on this chilly morning of day two of the Texas ice storm [Music] thank you [Music] outside things were beautiful we had gotten a lot of precipitation overnight and a lot of damage too there were branches down but there was a lot of beauty everything had a casing of ice and just sort of gleaned I think it would have been really beautiful if the sun had come out but it stayed really cold they were predicting a lot more precipitation and temperatures that were not supposed to go above freezing for a few more days foreign [Music] it was sad to see the damage that was already happening to the trees and knowing that more ice would probably just make it worse it was a little bit nerve-wracking but so far so good we were without power on the second day for about six hours in the morning it came back on for a few hours and then we lost it again for probably another three hours or so and then we had power for the rest of the day which was a huge blessing we were really impressed that our area was able to get the power up and going and maintain it with all that was happening outside foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you when the power did return our HVAC system was completely Frozen and the fan couldn't move so I brought some boiling water out to Patrick and he thawed everything out and got it moving again he was able to get the fan running again and also was really careful to get the ice off of the intake the sides of the HVAC system so that we could have heat again and so that we didn't wind up damaging our system during this and it was so nice to have heat on in the house again and you just never realize how dependent you are on electricity until you lose it Patrick also got the car running to move it out of the way because we had some large branches and by the next morning we were really happy with that decision because one of those came down right where the car used to sit you might be wondering why we left the car out it's because we wanted to be able to leave our garage door is really huge and heavy and if we lost power we wouldn't be able to open it so leaving one one car out we thought was the best decision and as you can see the destruction was pretty bad on that third day we did get quite a bit more ice overnight the temperatures stayed very cold and so many of our trees suffered it's just a very loud crack pop sound as the branch breaks and then it sounds like a bunch of glass breaking as it hits the ground we're really sad for all of the damage to the trees but really grateful that nothing hit the house and did any damage to the house or the car foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] we had a lot more tree damage in the backyard as well and one of them hit our fence and I did a little bit of damage there but this is something that will be easily repaired and we're just glad that it wasn't a lot worse also by some miracle we managed to keep power all day on the third day which was a huge blessing [Music] foreign [Music] the roads thought out pretty quickly on the third day so we took a little walk through our neighborhood and we noticed some down power lines and a lot of broken branches and trees down in our neighbor's yard as well with all of the tree damage and the power lines down no one's house seemed to be affected which we were so grateful for with temperatures expected to go up on that fourth day we knew we were going to be really busy getting rid of all of this debris foreign thank you so much for spending your time with me here today if you were affected by the storms let me know down in the comments I would love to be praying for you and I just want to let you know we appreciate your thoughts and prayers so much we received some really sweet comments from some of you and I want to let you know that we are doing great and we felt your prayers if you enjoyed today's video don't leave without giving me a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already done so we would love to have you join our faith and flower Community subscribing is absolutely free and easy all you have to do is click on my picture and be sure to activate the Bell icon so that you're notified every time I upload a new video I'll be right back here next Sunday at two o'clock Central Time so come over and join me and until then have a wonderful week [Music] thank you

Channel: Faith and Flour

Views: 44,950

Keywords: homemaking tips, simple living in america, real homemaking vlog, food storage ideas, slow living vlog, simple living in america vlog, food storage containers, emergency food supply, food storage, food storage for beginners, 3 month food supply, 3 month food storage, how to start food storage, emergency food storage, food storage room, prepper pantry, food storage tips, 1 month food storage, 4 week food storage, kitchen pantry, marys nest, Shes in her apron

Id: 20nmqVj68dA

Length: 33min 27sec (2007 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 05 2023