Suzanne - Try the cooking forum, you'll get fast expert help there.

Some of the same experts are here too, but you might want to go both places to be sure they see it.

Here is a link that might be useful: Cooking Forum

Thanks, Steff.

Never mind. Trash truck was on the way, so I bit the bullet and tossed it along with several other things. It seems silly to cringe over $18 in meat while we're spending thousands and thousands on a reno ('fridge, by the way, is in the living room!), but that's the way it is.

P.S. The stores are having to dump all their milk, too, so no one's going to have any until re-stock. I'm envisioning a huge fleet of milk trucks descending on San Diego County restocking - how many thousands of grocery and convenience stores do you suppose there are? All things considered, we got off light.

That's awful, so much food tossed out. Better to be safe.

It will take a while to restock such a large area. Well anyway you know about the cooking forum now if something happens again.

I feel your pain, suzanne. I went to the grocery store yesterday morning- sure wish I hadn't. I decided to throw out meat and milk products. Some other things, like jelly and salsa, I'm keeping. I agree, we got off light too. Would eggs be okay?

As steff said, there are people who are very good at answering these questions on the cooking forum. For myself, if the eggs were going to be used in the next day or two and well cooked, I'd use them. I wouldn't want to have them in something where they would be lightly cooked (soft boiled or runny sunny side up eggs). I expect that there are others who would throw them out.

I'd keep hard cheeses and butter. Those are more stable than the liquid milk products.

I guess you didn't expect the power outage to be that long, but some food and any ice in the freezer could have been moved into an ice chest to save it. Any reasonable ice chest should keep food cold with ice for over night. A good one can do it for a couple of days before more ice is needed.

Actually, the fridge IS an ice chest, as long as you keep it closed. But I do have some ice chests around for emergencies like this.

Milk will go bad quickly. Meat may last longer if it stays packaged. Of course, the thing to do with meat is to fire up the grill. Invite the neighbors for a cookout jamboree.

On eggs: We had a neighbor years ago who delivered eggs to cruise ships. I asked him about refrigeration and he said that on the big ships they just stack the eggs on the floor and flip the whole pile every week (?) or so. So I'm not really worried about the eggs. Maybe that's what we'll have for dinner.

Thank you for the info!

Suzannesl, I feel your pain! We were recently without power for 8 days, and lost every blessed thing in the fridge and freezer. And to add insult to injury, we had no trash pickup for two weeks. UGH!!

Just for the future, it wasn't spoiled and would have cooked up nicely. You needn't worry at all about anything that requires a long cook time as long as it smells nice when you start.

Much sympathy. If it should happen again, don't open the fridge! Urgently needed medicine would be a good reason to open it. Otherwise, a good residential fridge should keep most of your food from spoiling without electricity for at least a day. Once you've opened it and let out the cold air, it's pretty much over, even on a quick open and shut. I've had it happen on a fridge from a couple of decades ago, and the only thing that spoiled was some opened milk. The sealed carton didn't spoil (less air exposure and possible bacterial contamination).

Another option, although this works better for a local power outage than a widespread one, is to get some dry ice (maybe 10 lbs) and add it to the fridge/freezer (the fridge if you don't mind things near it freezing).

I read this tip before the hurricane and thought it not so helpful at the time -- if there is a widespread crisis, either the stores will be closed or sold out.

Then a week later, the workers at our house cut power to our detached garage for all day on a hot day without letting us know. We have a chest freezer, and upright freezer, and a fridge out there. Oops. We lost about half the stuff (ouch) -- the parts in the colder areas of the freezers and the chest freezer were still solid and so we made a quick dry ice run to salvage the rest until they could come back the next morning and fix it. We have temperature probes on the devices (but the remote alarms have been off for a bit -- I'm upgrading to a new system that should work better, but we have to manually check right now until I get it up and running).

3 days later we noticed the fridge in the house being not so cold -- we were faked out by the fact that its LCD display had frozen on. Lost pretty much everything there but made another trip to our local 24-hour grocery for some dry ice to make it cold again.

If you don't know where to buy it, it might be good emergency planning to look up your local stores and then make sure they do carry it and know how to sell it (most have it in a locked cooler and some have clerks that don't know how to open it).

Yikes!

We made a trip to Lowes last evening in search of electrical stuff. It was really quiet so we were talking to the poor young woman who's job it is to stand and watch people doing the self-checkout thing. She said they were open during the outage as they have a back-up generator. She told us people came racing in for flashlights and water, and then brought the flashlights and water back in for refunds in the morning. Who are these people?!

Evidently relatives of the folks who live in FL near me who rush to buy plywood every time there's a storm then return it as soon as the threat passes.

I believe that using dry ice in your freezer can damage it. At least that's what the hurricane preparedness guides the local papers put out always say.

In elementary school we had drills in case of nuclear attack; crouching under our desks holding our heads between our hands LOL. In high school, we were taught medical self help; setting broken bones, wound care, as well as basic survival skills. I was told that chicken, pork & seafood should be tossed if unrefridgerated but beef could be eaten. Of course, this was nuclear attack. For a normal outage, I would throw away everything but the beef. This would be cut up and cooked for the dogs.

It's amazing how some folks are so unprepared for an emergency that they were given plenty of notice. How hard is it to have batteries (even freshly recharged ones), a radio, matches, candles and flashlights on hand? Don't people use these items in non-emergencies too?

Dry ice can take the temps of the freezer below its normal low temps, so the biggest danger is cracking plastic/glass/shelves and the like (and, of course, don't use it in a freezer turned on, unplug the freezer first). Best to not nestle it into corners nor place it directly on freezer parts (wrap it in a towel). Using it properly will prevent any damage to the freezer.

Since we use temp probes on our freezers we monitored ours and the ambient temps inside never dropped below about -5 or -10 F, actually still within the temps a freezer normally holds anyway. Near the dry ice it likely got much colder. It saved us several hundred dollars of meat.