Cooking from scratch
With no shops or takeaways, every meal is cooked from basic stores on limited energy. Cooking skill keeps food safe, varied and filling.
How
- Learn to cook the staples you store: grains, dried beans, flour, oil and preserved vegetables. Plan two weeks of menus that use only stored food.
- Learn food safety temperatures and use a food thermometer: poultry 74 C (165 F), ground meat 71 C (160 F), whole cuts of beef, pork, lamb and goat 63 C (145 F) with a 3-minute rest (FoodSafety.gov).
- Practise on every backup cooker you own (solar, wood, gas) so nobody learns in a crisis; link thermal-24 for cooking energy and living-15 for seasonal routines.
- Teach bread, porridge, soups and one-pot meals to every teenager.
- Keep a family recipe binder in the reference library (skills-19).
Safety: Use cookers that burn fuel only where the manual allows, with CO alarms working (safety-10).
Do these first
Sources
- Safe Minimum Internal Temperature Chart. FoodSafety.gov (US government), accessed 2026-11