Why A Kitchen Full Of Cooking Appliances Can Still Leave You Unable To Make Dinner.

If you have just realized that none of your gear actually cooks indoors during an outage, here is everything worth knowing before you fix it.

Kate Merrill

Mom of two, writes about home and family  ·  7 min read

Whatever you own, you probably had the same moment I did.

Maybe it is a grill you use all summer. Maybe a camp stove you bought for exactly this. Maybe a whole kitchen full of appliances that went dark at once. Maybe a clever little setup you saw online and felt proud to have saved, just in case. Whatever it is, when the power actually went out and one of your kids asked for a hot dinner, you found the same thing I found. It is all built for somewhere else, or it runs on the power you no longer have, or it was never really built to cook at all. And not one piece of it puts a warm meal on the table, inside, when the grid is down.

I want to walk you through what I learned after my own version of that night, because the fix turned out to be one small thing I had somehow never owned, and almost nobody talks about it.

First, the thing I had wrong for years

The problem was never that I was not prepared. That is the part it took me a while to see. I had spent real money getting ready. I had backups. What I had actually done was answer the wrong question, over and over, without ever knowing it was the wrong one.

Everything I owned answered how do I cook outside. The grill, the fire pit, all of it, built for the backyard. And the real question, the one that mattered the night the power went, was a completely different question. How do I cook inside, when I cannot go out.

I had never once bought an answer to that question. I am not sure I even knew it was a separate question until I was standing in a dark kitchen finding out.

What it actually is

It is a small stove that burns alcohol you pour from a bottle. That is the whole thing.

No propane tank to wrestle. No canister to seat. No cord, obviously. You pour the alcohol in, you light it, you cook. It is about the size of a small bowl, and it lives in a kitchen drawer.

If that sounds too simple to be the thing you have been missing, here is where it clicked for me. Think about a wedding, or any catered event, where the food sits out on trays for hours. Underneath those trays are little burners with a small blue flame, lit right there in the room, a few feet from where people are eating and dancing all night. That is an alcohol flame. It has been safe enough to run indoors, in crowded rooms, at more events than any of us could count, for longer than we have been alive.

This is the same family of flame. The only difference is that the burner under a catering tray is built to keep food warm, and this one is built to actually cook. Same safe idea. A real job instead of a polite one.

The part that scared me at first

I need to talk about safety plainly, because I was afraid of exactly this. The idea of lighting any kind of flame in a closed up kitchen with my kids in the next room made me nervous, and that nervousness is not silly. It is the right instinct to have.

So here is the honest version. This burns alcohol, not propane. There is no propane, no smoke, and no soot. It is not the fumes you are picturing when you imagine running a camp stove or a grill indoors, which is the exact thing every one of us has correctly been told never to do. It is the clean, quiet flame the caterers have been running in packed rooms for decades.

A quick look at how it works.

I am not going to tell you a flame is nothing. It is a flame, and you treat it like one, the same way you already treat the candles on a birthday cake or the burner under a fondue pot. What I will tell you is that the thing that actually terrified me, dragging propane and its fumes into a room with my children, is not what is happening here. That was the whole reason I could finally use it.

Why it is actually there on the night, when everything else is in the garage

Here is the thing nobody warned me about, and it is the reason every backup I owned failed me even though every one of them worked perfectly fine.

They were all in the garage.

That is not a small detail. That is the whole failure. My camp stove worked. It lit, it burned, it cooked. It just did all of that inside a box in the garage, behind the holiday bins. And on the actual night the power went out in an ice storm, I was not about to go dig through a freezing garage by flashlight to find it, and I could not have used it inside anyway. A backup you cannot reach, or cannot use where you are, is not a backup. It is a decoration.

This one lives in a kitchen drawer, next to the takeout menus. It is already where you cook. And the alcohol it burns keeps on a shelf indefinitely. It does not go stale like the propane canister that has been sitting in the garage since a camping trip three summers ago. Nothing to expire, nothing to run out in the middle of a meal, nothing to prime or seat. It is just there, in the room, ready, the way the salt is ready.

Whether you can actually use it at six thirty in the dark with kids yelling

This was the one I most needed to be true, because the last thing I wanted at the worst moment of a bad night was a gadget with a learning curve.

There is no learning curve. You pour the alcohol in. You light it. You set a pot on top. That is the entire operation, and you can do all of it in the dark with a flashlight in your teeth and two kids asking when dinner is.

I will tell you what actually convinced me. The first outage after I got it, I put on the exact same can of soup that had beaten me the time before, the one that sat over my improvised setup for twenty minutes and never got past lukewarm. Same can, same pot. This time it was at a rolling boil before I had finished setting the bowls out on the counter. A real, proper boil, in the middle of a blackout, on my own kitchen counter. Then I made grilled cheese, because I could. Nobody took a sip of anything and asked if it was supposed to be cold.

That is the whole test. It works, it works fast, and it works when you are tired and it is dark and you are the only one there to do it.

About the grill, since you are probably thinking it

You might be reading this thinking, I would just use my grill, or my fryer, or whatever it is that lives outside. And on a nice day, sure.

But picture the actual night you would need it. The power is out because something has gone wrong outside. It is an ice storm, or a hurricane band, or it is just pitch dark and pouring. That is not a stand at the grill for twenty minutes kind of evening. And if you are the one with the kids, you cannot post up in the backyard tending a flame while they sit alone inside in a dark house, and you cannot bring that flame indoors, because now you are back to the fumes you were trying to avoid. The one night the grill is meant to save you is the one night you cannot really use it. That is not bad luck. That is just what an outage is.

The alcohol stove is the thing that does not have that problem, because it was built to be inside with you the entire time.

On what it costs, and what the last outage cost me

I will not spend long here. But I think about the outage before this one, when a full refrigerator and freezer thawed out over three days and I threw all of it into a trash bag, hundreds of dollars of food, and then spent more on takeout on top of that. That is the real price of not having a way through it. This costs a fraction of one of those grocery hauls, and unlike the food, it does not spoil. You buy it once.

Why this is not a big deal to own

I want to say one more thing, because I know how it can feel to buy something like this. Like it is a statement about the kind of person you are. Like it belongs to people with a certain kind of garage.

It is not that, and here is how I finally made peace with it. I keep a spare tire in my trunk for a flat I hope I never get. Nobody thinks that is dramatic. Nobody has ever called me paranoid for it. It is just the sensible thing you keep for the ordinary bad day that comes around every so often.

The power does not go out because the world is ending. It goes out because it iced over, because the wind came through, because a line went down somewhere. Ordinary reasons, a couple of nights a winter. A small stove in a drawer for those nights is the spare tire. It is not a lifestyle. It is just the one tool a normal kitchen somehow leaves out.

Before you do anything, do this one thing

Go stand in your kitchen and picture it with the power off. Dark. Kids asking when dinner is ready. Now look at what you actually own, and ask yourself, honestly, which of it you could use, right now, inside, to put a hot meal in front of them.

The grill. The camp stove. The clever hack in the closet. Be honest about each one.

If the real answer is none of it, you have not done a single thing wrong. You are probably more prepared than most people on your street. You just filled the counter and the garage and skipped the drawer, the same way I did, because nobody ever tells you the drawer is the part that matters.

The one thing that actually fixes it is small, it is cheap, and it is the only tool in the house that will still cook when the power is gone. It is the one I keep in my own drawer now, and I will leave it right here for you.

A few notes from other people who keep one

"We lost power for most of the evening during a storm and this was the first time I didn't have to figure out dinner on the fly. I heated soup for the kids and made coffee afterward. Nothing dramatic, which was exactly the point. We just ate dinner like normal. I bought it hoping I'd never need it, but I'm very glad it was in the drawer when I did."

Sarah, Michigan

"I almost didn't order it because I assumed it would be another emergency gadget I'd have to learn how to use. It's much simpler than I expected and way smaller in person. I tried it once when it arrived so I'd know what to do, then put it in the kitchen drawer. That's where it has stayed ever since."

Michelle, Ohio

"I'm not really an emergency-preparedness person, so I honestly wasn't sure I needed this. Then I started thinking about what we would actually cook on if the power went out and realized everything in our kitchen plugs in. We have two kids, and just knowing there's one simple way to make something hot without the stove or microwave makes me feel a lot better."

Amanda, Pennsylvania

How it stacks up against everything else you could buy

Here is the whole thing on one page. It is not that the others are bad. It is that each one was built for a different job, and only one of them was built to cook, indoors, in a hurry, and still fit in a drawer.

“Made to be used indoors” reflects what each tool is designed and labeled for, not a promise that any flame is risk free. Treat any flame like one, and see the safety note above.