Power Outages and Chicken on the Stove
Learning new cooking techniques
Power outages are nothing new to me. I grew up in rural America. It’s a common occurrence in some places.
In high school, I memorized the electric company’s phone number so I could report 4 AM outages. The memorization was necessary because I could never find a flashlight when the power was out. I’d find it later in the day and put it in a smart place for next time. When the next time came around a couple of weeks later, though, I’d find that someone had already moved the flashlight.
Freezing pipes was a bigger problem, but that’s another story.
Living in an all-girls dorm begged for someone with power outage experience.
Too many space heaters on? Power cut. Every girl is using a blow dryer, a curling iron, or a flat iron? Power cut. It took time to teach them how to sacrifice using their blow heater while they were using their blow dryer.
I got used to living with power outages as an adult. Snow day? Expect up to 6 hours without electricity. Stormy rain? The power goes on and off for most of the day. I have also gone a few days without electricity.
It was the worst snowstorm in years. I was in the middle of cooking chicken and potatoes. I had a cake that needed to get into the oven. There were clothes in the washing machine.
There was lots of stuff going on when–click–I was sitting in the dark. I didn’t panic. I was expecting this.
I turned on the stove and threw a blech on it. This is a piece of metal that goes on top of the stove. Folks normally use it to keep food warm. I threw my half-baked tray of chicken on top–it would finish cooking in time for dinner a few hours later. Up went a pot of soup too. I ate the raw cake batter. I really should have just put it in the fridge or simply thrown it away.
The power didn’t come back for the rest of the day. I lit candles in the bathroom, in the kitchen, and in the living room. I went about my business as if I enjoyed living by candlelight.
I woke up the next day still with no electricity. We had sunlight, but I was more worried about my refrigerator. I spent the whole day calculating if I really needed to open the fridge because I was too afraid everything would spoil.
On the third day, there was cellphone reception. My husband called his parents to make sure they were okay. We couldn’t go anywhere because we had a whole six inches of snow on the ground. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. When you live in a place where it basically never snows, everything shuts down.
By the end of Day Three, the lights came back on.
The snow stuck for two weeks that year. Some places didn’t have electricity the whole time, and were sent to live in hotels for a period of time while the grid got upgraded. My area was lucky.
The main thing I learned after that snowstorm was how to make chicken in a pot on the stove. If I don’t have electricity, I still have gas for the stove to work. For a whole year, I experimented with the best way to make food on the stove that I would normally use an oven for. I will never feel caught off guard by a power outage again.
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