We're about five miles outside town; the lines run through heavily wooded areas and there's a lot of wind here because we're basically at the tip of a peninsula. The rest is pretty self-explanatory.

Cooking without electricity is an interesting experience. At our old house we completely redid the kitchen — ourselves, by hand — and had everything ripped down to the bare walls and floor. Counting time to redo floors, walls and counters, we were cooking on a single propane burner and the BBQ grill for everything for about four weeks.

The cool thing is that we still make a lot of those "one pot meals" all these years later, and we never use the coffeemaker except when we have many people over... we always do "pourovers."