Storm Food

~ Laura

Something about a blizzard just screams “Cocktail Party!!”

Here in the New York City area, we’re bracing for a three foot of snow blizzard. So, at 7:45 am, I was at the supermarket stocking up on fancy cheeses, bagel chips, and wine.

It was funny to see what areas of the supermarket were cleared out. Milk, eggs and bread, of course. The meat aisles were empty. You could guess what people were planning on cooking based on the empty zones — taco kits, fresh salsa, prewashed lettuce, soups. I grabbed the last tub of ricotta, because I’ll make a baked ziti tonight – Italian comfort food.

I filled the car tank and bought batteries. After we lost power for two weeks after Hurricane Sandy, I started paying attention to these things.

Jonah and I are recovering from the flu. We caught it in time and got Tamiflu, so our symptoms aren’t terrible. Just kinda sluggish. I’ll drag some wood in the house for the fireplace after I take a break for a bit.

What do you buy before a storm?

Published by Laura

12 thoughts on “Storm Food”

  1. I’ll bring my cookbooks to the store on my kindle, so I can adapt to what’s left on the shelves. If there are any left, I’ll buy eggs.

    Wine
    Meat of some sort–enough that we can cook it tonight, but not need to cook anything on subsequent days.
    flour
    apples
    grapefruit
    cheese
    spinach

    stuff we can cook on the gas cooktop, as we can use that even if we lose power.

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  2. Salsiccia, canned tomatoes, mozzarella, parmesan. Stuff to make chili and soup. Stuff to make homemade bread and brownies or chocolate chip cookies. Basically, keep the oven on. Coffee. Amaretto. Kahlua.

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  3. Stuff that can be eaten safely without power.

    Definitely lots of those little baby food pouches for the toddler.

    (This is purely a theoretical exercise for us, as it’s 40-something degrees and sunny in our part of TX right now.)

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      1. Fortunately, yes.

        We live in a tornado zone, which is still bad, but the area of damage is limited compared to a hurricane, and it’s all over very quickly compared to hurricanes. As I recall, we get through the tornado warnings (or whatever they’re called) in under an hour.

        I haven’t yet done the cover-the-family-with-a-mattress-thing, but every time we go through a tornado warning and then I read the harrowing news reports afterward, I keep thinking that next time, we’ll do the mattress thing. (Ideally you climb in the bathtub and cover yourself with the mattress. Heck if I know how to fit a well-nourished family of five into a bathtub.) First floor interior rooms (like bathrooms or walk-in closets) seem to work reasonably well, though.

        If you’re really serious, you can do a tornado shelter.

        http://www.grangerplastics.com/shelter.html

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  4. We haven’t had a serious storm in so long that I am starting to get lazy about safety. We’ve had nothing but dustings of snow in the last two years. Our last serious storm, for us, was 2008, though we have lost power

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    1. We’ve gotten pretty lazy also. We’re about three blocks from a grocery store and five from a liquor store, so I never really worry about running out of essentials. I do try to keep the car gassed up in case we need to leave. If something happened where we couldn’t get our for more than a couple of days, we would have problems but that seems extremely unlikely. For Snowmageddon we didn’t drive for five days because we didn’t have to. We were only stuck in the house for one morning. If we had drove out, we would have never been able to drive the car back for at least three days, but we could have gotten out.

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    2. It’s about time to change out the emergency water.

      It’s theoretically OK still, but suspect it doesn’t taste very nice after a while.

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  6. I bought fancy smoked meat and cheese and crackers and wine, but unless my college kid comes home, it will just be me. I’ll hard-boil a bunch of eggs, I have black beans and rice, and I need to figure out how to work the Pocket-Rocket propane burner so I can make tea even if we lose power.

    I need batteries, thanks for reminding me!

    When I lived in a house with gas heat, I’d keep the oven on and bake/roast like a fiend the whole time, but with an electric stove, there’s no point. I miss that.

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