At 6 a.m. Monday the thermometer on the garage wall read 27 degrees, and the chest freezer was humming along like it had no idea there was a sheet of ice on the driveway. The garage-ready model we bought in August after the old one died is rated for a cold garage as well as a hot one, and it never missed a beat. I checked on it twice anyway.
Schools closed Monday and Tuesday, and so did the preschool where I work. That meant three kids, one heeler, me, and Matt for most of it, inside 1,920 square feet, with roads that were no place for the van. Here's what we ate, what ran low, and what I'd stock differently.
Getting ready
The forecast started sounding serious on Thursday, so I moved my Monday Aldi trip up to Saturday morning, along with what felt like half of North Dallas. Aldi was out of bananas and milk by 9:30. I spent $112.36 there, then $24.80 at Kroger for bread and two gallons of milk, then came home and opened the freezer to see what I was working with.
Funny timing. I'd spent most of January cooking the chest freezer down, so what was left in there was mostly finished meals instead of raw ingredients: bags of chili, a King Ranch chicken casserole, chicken tortilla soup, a pan of white chicken enchiladas, all labeled on blue painter's tape and stacked on the "ready to heat" side. A freezer full of dinners turned out to be exactly the right kind of full.
Two days of meals
Monday
- Breakfast: pancakes on the electric griddle, a double batch, because Eli considers pancakes a food group and it bought me a quiet half hour. The extras went into the freezer between squares of parchment.
- Lunch: cheese quesadillas and apple slices. Wyatt had three quesadillas.
- Dinner: chili from the freezer with a skillet of cornbread. For once, the oven heating up the kitchen felt like a favor.
Tuesday
- Breakfast: migas, which used up a stack of stale tortillas and a pile of eggs.
- Lunch: leftover chili turned into Frito pie, with plain chips and cheese for Eli.
- Dinner: the King Ranch chicken casserole, straight from frozen into a 375-degree oven for about 90 minutes, foil on for the first hour. I checked the middle with the Thermapen Matt gave me for Christmas before anyone got a plate.
Snacks were popcorn, hot chocolate, Rosie's frozen blueberries and an alarming number of Goldfish. We spent nothing either day.
The lights flickered twice Monday night, and I ran the backup plan in my head: if the power went out, the fridge food would go in a cooler on the back patio, which was colder than the fridge anyway. It never came to that. Matt's warehouse told the early shift to stay home Monday, and on Tuesday he drove the F-150 in at 10, slowly, and came home with a gallon of milk from a gas station, which is the most romantic thing he's done all year.
Payroll doesn't take ice days, so I did tuition reconciliations at the kitchen table Tuesday afternoon while Rosie "helped" with the calculator. The boys spent an hour sliding across the frozen backyard in sneakers, with Biscuit trying to herd them, which is what a heeler does when people move fast.
What ran low
- Milk. We go through about three gallons in a normal week, so two new gallons plus the half gallon already in the fridge seemed like plenty to get us to Tuesday. Hot chocolate and a double batch of pancakes changed the math, and by Tuesday afternoon we were down to a cup, until the gas station gallon arrived.
- Fresh fruit. Apples and oranges held out. The bananas I couldn't get were missed by everyone.
- Bread. We were fine, but only because tortillas filled in and I happened to have two extra packs.
- My patience, around 3 p.m. Monday. Not something I can stock.
What I'd stock differently
- A few quarts of shelf-stable milk in the pantry, just for this. Hot chocolate made with it would have kept the peace.
- More fruit that keeps: a bag of oranges, applesauce cups, and frozen fruit beyond Rosie's blueberries.
- One ready meal that doesn't need power at all. Our whole kitchen is electric. Matt's Weber kettle can heat a pot of soup if it ever comes to that, and I'd like at least one bag in the freezer that would work that way.
- A written power-outage plan taped to the freezer lid, so I'm not working it out at 9 p.m. by phone flashlight.
The roads were clear by Wednesday morning, and I went to Aldi at 9 with Rosie in the cart like it was any other week. They had bananas. I bought a lot of them.
