To celebrate the first day of spring I decided to utilize the little firepit for something other then a circular object to burn a fire in while drinking a cold mojito or beer on a warm summer night and BS-ing with a friend or neighbor. Most people have a outdoor grill, whether it be propane, natural gas or charcoal to use if the power goes out to cook food especially if their house is all electric, but what if your grill tank runs up empty or just has disappeared during TSHTF? A lot of people also have the little fire pits or even a Chimera/terra cotta fireplace that are semi-legal to use in a suburban setting. Why do I say semi-legal? Because in many suburban neighborhoods having any type of fire outside of a outdoor grill will bring the police and fire department to your door via a nosy neighbor who believes their rights and beliefs are more important then yours - trust me on this. It happened last summer, but it was only the police who showed up. Yeah, neighbors suck especially the ones who are total tools. I know exactly which neighbor it is, and she is always complaining about something.
Anyway, to celebrate spring and to fight off a touch of cabin fever, I broke out our cast iron pot and decided to cook up some chicken thighs/legs that were on sale using a alternative cooking method - you do have to stay in practice for the big TSHTF event right??? I had picked up at a flea market the cast iron pot a few years ago for five dollars, the firepit was free from a neighbor who was throwing it out. It was 'too rusty' for his wife, so they needed to buy a new one. The grill laying across the rebar came from a old reach in cooler from work we were turning in for scrap and cement blocks were from a house cleaning project. The only thing I had to buy were the rebar rods, that I use during the summer for the garden fencing. I'm going to be buying a nice cast iron tripod so I can hang a grill or the dutch oven over the fire, but I think this worked out just fine. The height was just about perfect so I could still feed wood underneath it as long as it wasn't to thick. We kept it simple especially since our new diet/eating habits have made us both lose over twenty pounds each since the beginning of the year I just decided to put onions, carrots little bit of olive oil and salt and pepper into the pot and let it go for a hour and a half.
Half way through the cooking, a heavy rain shower rolled through the area so I had to go out and make sure the fire wasn't going out and had to stoke it with a few more pieces of wood, at this point I noticed a neighbor looking out their back window to see what I was doing then another next door. I waved to both of them and one just shook her head. They already think I'm nuts but I don't care anymore, I found it funny every time I went out to check on the meal, one of the neighbors would be poking their head from behind the curtains.
The meal came out pretty good, I wish I would have put more carrots or other vegetables in it or we should have put it over a nice bed of rice so it could be a true TSHTF meal. Since everybody knows that rice is a meal booster - right? So now I have another way of cooking meals or heating water if we lose utilities, but as always just having the items stored away isn't enough, you MUST go out and practice these alternative methods before you really need to. If my outdoor meal would have failed, we could fall back on having a salad or something else. If this was a real TSHTF situation and I ruined the meal because I haven't practiced cooking like this we would have gone hungry for the night or even for the entire day. Get out there and practice people.
Keep safe,
Tonto
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