Just bought a bucket of dehydrated food this week, and I'm quite pleased with it. Planning to get a 2nd. But that brings up the subject of cooking. You need boiling water to make that stuff edible.
That is accomplished fairly easily with a basic camp fire in the backyard. Trouble is, if you cook over it, you're basically announcing to the neighborhood that you've got food. And aggressive or not, everybody with a nose is going to be coming over for a taste 😕 Cooking indoors, in that case, is way more preferable. But how?
Having a propane camp stove in the house is iffy. Cans of Sterno are a little more friendly, but they have an ambiguous expiration date. I could buy a case of the stuff, then forget about it for 20 years, only to find they don't work when I need them. Then I remembered something my Dad once made with me. I don't think he had a name for them but the accepted name seems to be "Buddy Burner." Basically a can with a rolled up wad of cardboard, soaked in paraffin wax like a big candle. Should have an indefinite shelf life I'm thinking, and they're easy to make.
But then comes the question of how best to use them for indoor cooking. I thought about this for a while, and eventually realized I could just rearrange the grills in my oven and have a makeshift "fireplace" to boil a pot over the buddy burner without setting fire to the house. Now I haven't tried this, and I'm not in a hurry to (I rent) but does anyone see a problem with that?
Make a few models of rocket stoves time well spent thinking of moding the oven.... think what do you do when if power comes back on? just have a vent pipe that you can send to your vent outside with some high temp flex hose.
that way you can burn just about anything with the exceptions of treated wood, and painted things which are toxic... even that if you are so cold you dont care.
You can use a butane stove in the house. They can be found in the camping sections of Walmart, Home Hardware, Canadian Tire, etc. for about $25.00 or cheaper when they are on sale. They come in their own carry case. The butane for 4 canisters is about $10.00. These are the types of stoves that are used for cooking demonstrations.
Yup, just about any ethnic people I know owns one. It says warning do not use inside of enclosed areas so open a window when using it indoors. I too own one myself. There is a electric version that is like a portable ceramic top stove but in a power down shtf that will be useless. I also have one of these still in box and never had a chance to use. Its good stuff if you can stock up on butane. I also suggest having a backup of a backup stove(s) just wanted in case one fails. A portable ammo can grill would be my next project as my backup.
Hmm..ammo can grill is an interesting thought. I think I'll go ahead and get one of those butane stoves as a short term solution. For longterm I was just checking out those "Solo Stoves" today; one should fit in my emergency kit quite nicely.
The reason for ammo can grill is it can be used as a grill or tent/space heater if you make a sectional vent pipes for it. Use steel or aluminum tent pegs along the top as the grills. It has multi use and good thing about ammo cans, I can get em for free pretty new.
I've used several types of small burners inside an oven during power outages. The burners rest on one grate and the cookpot rests on the upper rack, positioned to cook however close I want it to. Open-flame burners need to have the oven at least cracked and in some cases need to have a window cracked somewhere for ventilation. I've also used them on the stovetop, but the oven has several advantages.
One, it's less likely to get bumped and knocked over than the folding stoves over cans or double-can systems with a pot on top would be on the stovetop. Two, once that array is on my stovetop, there's not a lot of space between the hood and pot sometimes; using the existing grates in the oven doesn't require delicate stacking. Three, the oven helps hold heat and warms faster.
Four, the oven absorbs a fair bit of the heat from either candle stoves or alcohol stoves; if it's cool weather, once it's done cooking I can leave the oven cracked and it will radiate all that extra heat out slowly, especially if an extra cast iron skillet was used as a base for the can candle and the pot or kettle that were being heated. However, if it's rainy outside and summertime during an outage, I can close the stove after cooking and skip the cast iron, and it doesn't heat the house up as badly (or as notably, maybe, since less heat is radiating out over a longer period of time).
I don't use the rocket stoves that require little chunks of wood in my oven. I have grills and a box grill I can use inside the oven when I'm sure it's done-done for good, never coming back on, so I can modify it. I don't really like gas because I have a mental hangup (I know it's just me, they're perfectly safe, but it's there). I don't always want to light a large fire or have charcoal that will burn forever. The cans in the oven make a good option for us for short-term outages where I don't want to use the generator for coffee or soup, and are a backup for times we either don't want to be outdoors or don't want to start a fire.