X-Treme Food Stamp Challenge--When the lights go out

No it wasn't because we didn't pay the bill.  It was probably due to the snow and ice storm we'd had the night before, but yesterday, right as we were finishing eating breakfast, the power went out. 

For breakfast, we had whole wheat blueberry muffins, made with blueberries I got at the farmers market in-season and froze (as a bonus, the farmer said that, while they weren't certified organic, they were grown without chemicals), and with real butter and cheese omelets.  I had a Diet Coke to drink, as is my morning custom.  The kids were so excited about the freshly fallen snow that they didn't want to wait for breakfast to go outside and had some frozen blueberries and a couple slices of cheese as a pre-breakfast snack. 

I was just taking the last couple bites of my food, when the power flickered a few times and went out.  I hadn't even put away the remaining eggs and butter from when I was making breakfast, but with the power out for who-knows-how-long, I wasn't going to open the fridge and risk the rest of the food in there just to put away a couple things!  Instead, I got a bucketful of snow from outside to use to keep the food cold until the power came back on.

I didn't want lunch, and my husband was out trying to contact DHS in person in an effort to get our benefits raised now that neither of us are working, but the younger children had peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. 

With the power still being off by the time I needed to get dinner started, I wasn't able to make pasties as my meal plan for the week told me I should.  However, since I had a chunk of venison in the sink thawing when the power went out, I was able to roast that up for dinner along with potatoes.  I decided to serve up applesauce and pickled beets (applesauce canned by me and the pickled beets were ones my mom had grown and canned) with the roast and potatoes (and of course I was going to have gravy!), but then the power came back on!  I grabbed some carrots my mom had grown and I had packaged and frozen out of the freezer and tossed them in the pan to complete my roast dinner.  The kids wanted the pickled beets anyway though!  The kids and I also got to have milk with dinner, since we could get back into the fridge.

After dinner, I had planned on making popcorn balls for my 12 Weeks of Christmas Cookies entry and was going to even if the power was still off, which would have been possible since we have a gas stove and that butter I mentioned before was still chilling in snow.  Silly me guessed how much popcorn I should pop for the project, since it is bulk popcorn from the farmers market and there was no label to say how much yielded how much popped and I didn't feel like looking it up somewhere and, boy, did I guess wrong!  I ended up with about twice as much popcorn as I needed, but everyone was happy to help me *ahem* dispose of the evidence (that means we ate it).  The popcorn "balls" ended up not being sticky enough to be balls, so I left it as loose pieces and most of it was pretty quickly eaten up (except the container of it I hid behind the kale chips, so no one will find them but me.  Muhahaha!).  For some reason, the kids were still hungry later in the evening, shortly before bedtime, so they had some cheese to snack on.  I also had a ate night snack, more of those tortilla chips and apple-tomato salsa (I've actually been working on the jar pictured in the post for the recipe all week!).

For most of the day, we were drinking water, since we weren't going to be getting in the refrigerator for anything!  However, today, we weren't drinking tap water, since the electricity being off invariably means that the water would be under a boiling water advisory, because the water system in the trailer park is on the same electrical system as our house.  We've lost power and/or water (due to main breaks, etc) enough times though that we keep a small supply of bottled water around for such a contingency, so we were drinking that.  After the power came back on, I did have a couple cans of Diet Coke and the toddler had some juice, in addition to the milk we had for dinner.