It amuses me when people find out that we live off-grid and they ask me how I cook our meals. My response is always the same – just like everyone else does, with a few exceptions of course.
I’m
not a gourmet cook and I don’t have “gourmet” items in our tiny temporary kitchen,
but I do have what is needed to cook from scratch – which is the preferred
method in our home. Cooking off-grid,
for us, just means setting up our kitchen the way our grandmothers and great
grandmothers did it - with plenty of manual (non-electric) kitchen tools.
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| These are a few of my favorite kitchen tools that I use all the time! Grater, Sifter, Can Opener, Hand Mixer & Whisk |
Sometimes
I am startled by what people lack in their kitchen. I’m not talking about newlyweds just getting
started in life; I’m talked about established families whose kitchens lack
mixing bowls or pie pans or a rolling pin.
I recently met someone who didn’t even own a single measuring spoon.
I
understand why this is. It’s because
fewer people are cooking from scratch anymore.
People are busy, convenience food is cheap and abundant, and the art of
a homemade meal is becoming rarer.
I don’t
pretend to be a culinary genius in the kitchen, in fact I prefer baking over
cooking and am way better when I have a recipe to follow – whereas my husband
(who doesn’t cook very often) is way better when he’s not following a recipe. Either way, knowing how to cook from scratch
is, I feel, very important. No, more
than very important – essential.
Scratch
cooking is one of those unheralded and under-appreciated skills that we should
all learn because it’s the answer to an obvious question: What would you do if a frozen pizza or canned
soup or boxed macaroni-and-cheese were not available? This is a particularly important question for
Preppers because it affects what foods they store.
With a
few exceptions, more of your food storage should be ingredients, not prepared
food. This means basic staples from
which you can assemble complete meals.
Most staples (properly stored) will also last longer than most processed
foods.
Endless number of Preppers have stored away endless amounts of rice and beans, but often they lack the ability to cook up those rice and beans in tasty ways. Worse, lots of people have wheat stored away, without any real comprehension of how to turn that wheat into a loaf of bread.
Sadly
that ability – to take raw ingredients and create delicious meals out of them –
is either watered down or gone. We are
so entirely dependent on prepared foods from the grocery store (or deli or
restaurant) that some peoples definition of “scratch” cooking means making a
cake from a boxed mix.
Our
pioneer ancestors were experts at cooking from scratch. They had no choice. The food they grew, raised, gathered or
hunted was in “scratch” form and needed to be transferred into something
edible. And yet pioneer recipes have
come down through the generations as testimonies of the wonderful and delicious
ways in which basic foods could make marvelous and nutritious meals.
Although
I may not bake or cook from scratch exactly like our pioneer ancestors did, I do
use similar kitchen tools – that is manual (non-electric) kitchen tools. And now I'm off to make dinner - cube steak with mushroom gravy, real mashed potatoes, and a tossed salad. Yum!
