Last week's storm knocked out our building's power for 5 days (!!!). The lengthy power outage happened only in our building - all other buildings in our condo compound had electricity a day after the storm. Apparently, it was a breaker issue that the wonderful building electricians resolved after only (sarcasm!) 5 short days.
I didn't come away empty-handed from the 5 days of power-less existence. Here are some of the things I've learned, one for each day we were without electrickery:
1. Cooking rice on the stove doesn't take as long as it does when you use a rice cooker. It's actually really easy to cook rice on the stovetop, but you need to keep an eye on it. That's the rice cooker's value; put rice and water and walk away.
2. Marinated daing na bangus keeps for days! Our awesome freezer kept the ulam meats cold for about 2.5 days, but they wilted and spoiled immediately after the cold faded away. The marinated bangus was the only one that was still edible after 3 days. I'm definitely stocking up on this.
3. Canned food is a lifesaver. We don't really keep a lot of canned food because we prefer fresh, but the several cans of mackerel and Spam we did have sustained us during our hungriest hours.
4. Always charge your emergency lights and fans. Self explanatory and common sense-ical but we learned this the hard way.
5. Complain productively. Complaining and ranting to your neighbours don't accomplish anything. Complain to the people who could do something about the situation.
While we could've saved the food we stocked in the freezer by driving over to my MIL who lives a couple of minutes away, we so stubbornly clung to the hopes that the power will return within an hour or two. Bad decision. It was heartbreaking throwing away a grocery day's worth of ulam ingredients, and I couldn't help but feel guilty for wasting food.
Well, now that the power is back and the fridge is all clean and pleasant-smelling, we're still a bit hesitant to buy food the way we used to. We bought some chicken and fish, but this time, we bought more canned goods. It's not good, I know, but it's always good to have some non-perishables in the pantry.