Emergencies: Inconvenient by definition

Well, the title of this post is pretty much just my opinion, but I would be surprised if there are that many people who disagree with me. What happens if the emergency is that the adults in a household are ill, and the children in the household need to fend for themselves? This idea is not original to me, as you will find, but such a situation is definitely something that I should think about before it arises....

After reading the e-mail in this post over at Prepping 101, I decided that teaching my children more skills around the kitchen would be a really good idea. So I pulled out an old friend of mine: Top Ramen. That's right--those compact squares (or is it rectangles?) of dried noodles that require little more than boiling water and about 3 minutes of your time. Thanks to my best source, (Mom) I had picked some up one of the times I was visiting, so I had some on hand.

I don't know about anyone else, but back in the day I actually ate a lot of Top Ramen. The directions tell you how to make noodle soup out of the oh-so-inexpensive packages with their little flavor packet, but I've always been more partial to making them just as noodles. The difference comes when I drain off the water and just add a small portion of seasoning to mix around in the noodles. It probably just about took me longer to write this paragraph than it would to actually make Top Ramen. So you can see why I started with this particular little meal idea... We decided to have our children learn how to make it themselves, and we found that:

--People always joke about not being able to boil water, but boiling water is the skill required here, and it's not quite as funny when you are putting children in charge of the stove burners. That said, my children did a good job of getting the water to boil and placing the noodles inside.

--An added benefit to the Top Ramen meal option is that the directions say to boil for 3 minutes, so you aren't walking away from a project that takes 20 minutes only to return to find that you forgot to set the timer, or didn't add enough water, or your boiled food of choice is now stubbornly affixed to the bottom of a no-stick pan. Even if 3 minutes turns out to be long enough for a child to get bored, they won't be bored for very long...

--We added veg-all to the Top Ramen water--one of my favorite ways to eat it when it was more of a menu staple. Of course, any canned vegetable along the lines of corn or green beans would work, but only if you can open the can, so practice with the manual can opener was in order. And will be in order until it becomes a really easy thing to do...not every canned item has a tab for opening.

--Well, with my brilliant idea of eating it as noodles, I ended up draining the water for them. We will have to let them cook it as soup so that they have the option of letting it cool down and then dishing it out for themselves when it is safe to handle. Live and learn--hopefully ahead of time...

So, our little experiment went ok. The good news is that my children like Top Ramen (it was their first time trying it), which is extremely inexpensive, requires little fuel and cooking time, and is versatile because of all the add-in possibilities, like vegetables. Not a whole lot of bad news, just the necessity of teaching them to cook a few other things in case there is a situation where they need to provide their own meals. Cold cereal would only work for a little while... :)

Of course, there are things like canned soup and pastas, etc., if you have them on hand. Hopefully even if parents were sick at the same time, they wouldn't have to stay in bed for extended periods of time. But it's better to have a back-up plan, even if it's only necessary short-term--emergencies are not convenient, whether it's in the actual definition or not, and you never know who might have to do the cooking...