Emergency Preparedness

Has anyone ever heard of emergency preparedness causing an actual emergency?

Let me back track a little.

A few weeks ago I attended an Enrichment Night where several women presented different outdoor cooking methods that could be used for fun or in case of an emergency if you had lost power or gas. One of the methods was an apple box oven. I had never seen anything like this before and it looked like a great thing to have on hand in case of an emergency.

So my good friend and I decided that this conference weekend would be a great chance for us to make our boxes and give it a try.

Here is a picture of the first step in covering the box with foil

Here is a shot of the completed boxes in the process of cooking our food.

This is our finished meal. Yummy chicken enchiladas and peach cobbler!! We were amazed at how quickly the food cooked and how well it turned out. It only takes about 10 coals and the food only cooked for 30-45 minutes.

So what was the emergency you may ask......

Well, after we ate our delicious meal we gave ourselves a pat on the back for learning a new skill and then went out to clean everything up and this is what we found. Yes, those are actual flames coming off of the box!

One may wonder what was under the flaming box.

Well, under the flaming box was a flaming deck...Uh oops!

So we had fun but learned a few valuable lessons. I don't think we will be cooking on the deck next time around! Don't you just love projects like this where you take one step forward and then two steps back?

I have a feeling that our next learning opportunity is going to be in deck repair :)