"I Feel Like I'm In Lost"

“’Lost!’ ‘Lost!’ ‘Lost!’  I feel like I’m in ‘Lost!’  was the mantra Ana kept repeating over and over again during dinner.

We were indulging in a dinner of APack Ready Meals on Day Three of Tropical Storm Irene.  Without TV or computer Ana had to transport herself to the ‘Lost’ TV set and these meals were the perfect way!

There are just so many meals you can make without electricity so when we saw cases of APack Ready Meals at Town Campus we grabbed a few for our dinner.  Charging up our devices in the Town Campus Community Room has opened up so many new doors for us including new friends and an introduction to a new cuisine!

“Self-Heating Emergency Meal” is exactly what we needed and so the Ready Meal was on the menu for dinner.  Bob and Sophia chose the Spaghetti with Italian Style Meat Sauce, Ana prepared a Homestyle Chicken with Noodles and Vegetables in Sauce meal and I was eagerly looking forward to my Pesto Sauce with Chicken and Noodles.

Directions need to be followed very carefully to “cook” our meal so Ana took on the responsibility of reading them aloud, by candlelight.  It probably gets easier the more of these you “prepare” but just getting the packets open proved to be difficult. We decided against using scissors to get the full effect!

After successfully opening the sleeve that held our main course we had to pour in a small packet of salt water, which generated a chemical reaction; this heated our food to a temperature that was almost too hot to handle.

While waiting for our food to “cook” we ate our appetizers, peanut butter and crackers and raisins. We also enjoyed our powdered lemonade.  Not cold enough, but as thirst quenching as it could be! Not a bad start to the meal.

After 12 minutes we were ready to indulge in our main meal. We all had very different reactions to what we had carefully chosen.  Even in the dark I could not stomach a bite of my pesto sauce dish.  I was not expecting a 5-star meal, but there is something terribly unappetizing about eating a brown pesto sauce.  So I moved right onto the oatmeal cookie.

Sophia, with her spaghetti dish, was right in concert with me.  The noodles were chopped into centimeter lengths and the meat sauce was “mushed” in with it, making it look very unappetizing.  Luckily we had made a side salad and one bite later she dug into that.

Bob would eat pasta every single night if he had his way so the spaghetti meal was the perfect choice for him.  “The consistency was unusual,” remarked Bob.  “After you got used to the coarseness of the meal the food was very tasty.”  Both he and Ana were members of the clean plate club at this dinner.

Ana’s homestyle chicken dish was “delish.”  It was that much more exciting as she took on the persona of a ‘Lost’ cast member.

While we all had very different reactions to these meals they definitely serve a purpose and are useful and essential in certain situations. It was reassuring that the town had these available, along with the other supplied they've provided us over this very trying week. It was also reassuring to see the Madison Food Pantry provide emergency bags of food for anyone who wanted them earlier this week.

For us, we cannot wait for full power to be restored and get back to our sometime boring, sometimes mundane meals.  Just having a running refrigerator and freezer will be a treat!

At 10:20 p.m. the lights went back on at the Kyrcz household. If you're still in the dark, you're not alone, CL&P is making progress on the complicated task of recovery, but more than 68 percent of the town is still without power.