Dec 17th, 2024

Author: donich_admin

Surviving a power outage

SSE decided in their wisdom to take the entire village off grid all day today. This is stupid in many ways a) it is cold b) it is dark c) many people have a lot to do with Christmas next week d) children are off school. Say they did this work in June – there would be very little impact because no one needs heating on, and it is light 18 hours a day. But against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.

R and I are broadly alright in power cuts of this nature because we have 10KWH in our battery, plus whatever the solar generates during the course of the day (not much at this time of year, but enough to keep the lights on and run a couple of laptops). So we had a normalish day only we didn’t run any big appliances.

To avoid putting on the electric oven (this is a huge power hog as it is 3KW in itself) I used a combination of old and new techniques. Last night I made a hunters’ pot in the slow cooker (venison, pheasant, mushrooms, potatoes in a tomato and cranberry gravy). It cooked up slowly for eight hours. Then I put it in a cast iron casserole dish with a tight lid, and heated it up on the stove until the whole thing (including the lid) was extremely hot. I cooked some sprouts and some little sage dumplings up separately. The sprouts I added to the pot, and the dumplings I wrapped up in tinfoil and tucked in beside it.

Then in a fit of brilliant inspiration, I used J’s old jumper to swaddle the pot.  I packed the whole thing in a box with towels all around it, closed the lid and put a weight on top of it.  This is called “hay box cooking” because people used to use hay for the packing.  It was very popular during WWII when fuel was in short supply.

 

Six hours later I opened the box and took out the casserole.  In theory, it should have gone on cooking and still been very hot, but in practice it had cooled down a lot.  I think either I had not heated the pot enough – or left it too long because R found it tolerably hot but I thought it was a bit lukewarm.

So I cheated and put mine in the microwave for a few minutes.  Also even after all that cooking the pheasant was a bit tough.