Great idea...
Couple of days ago I came back home and discovered that we didn't have electricity at home as there was a storm and no way to know when the electricity will come back... As my home is fully electricity dependent I saw that I could even boil water... I have a fireplace but it is not adapted for cooking but still I found to way to prepare some tea there... That's fine... and I found that I don't have light and candles.
So I told to myself that I need to be prepared in case of electricity doesn't come back (in my case it was like for 6 hours without it... it's fine...) but for 2 or 3 days it could be less fun...
Went to buy led lights, more matches and candles and now thinking to get a generator and some gas in stock)))
Who knows when shit is gonna happen!!!
We went for 5 days without electricity. Thankfully, the weather after the storm was incredibly pleasant, no heat or AC needed. I do worry about losing power in very cold weather.
One item that I was happy to have was Sterno. We had a gas grill available, but the Sterno was really convenient for heating up coffee, soup, and grilled cheese sandwiches. (Sterno is
flammable hydrocarbon jelly supplied in cans for use as fuel for cooking stoves or chafing dishes.) It is available for $1 a can at the party store. Each can is good for about 2 hours. I put the can of Sterno inside a small Pyrex mixing bowl and then set my old cooling rack above the flame. This wasn't a survival item, though I suppose under different circumstances it could be, but it did make life easier for those few days.
Fire gels are great. There's a great number of other flamable items you can cook with too. I once, for a challenge, made lamps of bacon grease and used that to cook bacon and eggs. The same tricks work with almost any kind of fat or oil. I'd do that in a power out situation - but if it was SHTF then I'd be saving the fats/oils to eat.
You can also cook on candles - but you either need a bunch of them to get it hot enough or you need to turbo charge the wicks (try corrugated card with the corrugations running upwards).