If weather or another emergency prevents you from cooking and heating your food normally, you’ll have to find other ways of doing so. Here are some ideas to have on hand. Each may require a little preparation or supplies that you can put into place now. Be prepared, and you’ll be ahead of the game if an emergency should strike.
We keep a small house generator available, along with the gas it needs, and we run it intermittently as needed. Living in a semi-rural area with above-ground wiring, we have our fair share of power outages in any given year. While running the stove on the generator we have might be a bit much, we can easily heat food using a microwave oven, a toaster oven or a crockpot.
A camp stove is another convenient way to heat food in an emergency, and it is a pretty inexpensive one, too. Buy yours well in advance of any seasonal weather patterns to ensure that you can view a good selection at a good price.
An outdoor gas or coal drill can be very hand to use to heat or cook food. Granted, it can be a bit difficult to use in bad weather, so plan in a sheltered outdoor spot. It is best to use the grill after the weather has passed if you are still without power.
You might even be able to use a garage, the garage door is open and it can be vented outside and not into the house. (Having fire door on an attached garage is a must before you even think about doing anything like this). A basic plan is to keep the grill outside the garage and you just inside the garage tending it. If you try something like this, please use extreme caution.
Another form of cooking without electricity (or the use of a gas stove if your gas has been turned off) is a solar oven. Solar ovens are remarkably easy to build and use the heat from the sun to warm and cook food.