7 Day Challenge: DAY 2 Recap.... yummy food with no power!

This post is part of our 7 Day Challenge RECAP series we promised you. Once a week we will be going more in depth on one of the days of the 7 day challenge to highlight our learnings, favorite comments from participants, and giving additional information where necessary.

What We Learned

We spent a large part of our summer practicing our powerless cooking skills, so on this day we were excited to put them to use. We did use the quickstove (use referral code jodi&julie and get 50% off per can) for the first time on this day of the challenge and we were pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to use. Julie also cooked pizza from scratch this day – like ground the wheat for the dough, used freeze dried cheese, and cooked it on the Volcano kind of “scratch”. This process will get its OWN video in another post.

Julie shows you how she cooked her breakfast:

What YOU Learned

A few of our favorite comments from our Facebook discussions and comments:

I personally think this one will be the easiest 🙂 We have a sun oven and have been using it for most of our cooking this entire summer. It saves on the utility bill, and doesn’t heat up the house like the oven does! as long as there’s a bit of sun we can cook with it. And because we’ve been doing it all summer, we’re used to it, I personally think all my food tastes better using it, stays moister.

We have many choices for powerless cooking – small folding hiking stoves & fuel (we need to add more cans of fuel), charcoal grill (could use a few more bags), a butane stove that we bought at the self reliance fair (only 3 cans of fuel & having trouble finding more), propane grill w/ 2 tanks (only a tank and a half on hand), several of those disposable charcoal emergency grills (caught them on sale for a dollar a piece), and Teff’s cat food stove.

Well, this was my 51st wedding anniversary! Thank goodness last year I canned swiss steak so that is what we had today. We heated it up on the grill, along with some peas and corn, made some instant mashed potatoes with water and canned milk and some home canned butter. We don’t eat cake in this family but we do like the hobo pies made with a pie iron held over the hot coals.

Trying to cook on the grill with pots that have wooden handles is NOT a good idea 🙁 Need to replace one of the wifes pots now and get at least one that can be used on the grill or over open fire. Wish we hadn’t given away all our camping gear when we moved.

Follow-Up Questions

How do I learn to cook without power?
We spent a large part of our summer practicing our powerless cooking skills. Visit our powerless cooking class page and learn more.

Where can I buy the Quickstove Julie used?
You can purchase the Quickstove at this link. As Food Storage Readers you get 50% off per can if you use referral code JODI&JULIE.

Our To-Do’s For This Year

To Do: Research generators (if we lose power, we may want to extend the life of our fridge/freezer foods)
To Learn: Learn more about canning without power (Jodi also wants to look into some more options for cooking inside)
To Buy: Generator – maybe – if we’re lucky (Jodi also wants to buy a butane stove to use for indoor powerless cooking)