What Are You Doing To Prepare for Hurricane Irene?

Here’s what I did to make sure that I have plenty of healthy foods available for my family:

First, I have to say that Lyssie couldn’t have picked a better time to be on the West Coast!

Here I am in New York City, the city that never sleeps, and I’m staring to think it’s actually a ghost town. Restaurants and stores have been closed all day and many are boarded up. Already feeling the itch of knowing I’m going to be cooped up all day tomorrow, I headed out to lunch with my little girls and was out and about until nearly 6pm. Part of my mission was to stock up on plenty of food (although a little harder than I thought since most of the stores were closed).

After traveling throughout the Upper West Side today and also using the foods that I stocked up on the day before, here’s what I did to prep for Hurricane Irene:

Stocked up on:

• Seal pack chunk light tuna (no mess & lower in mercury than solid white tuna; also a great source of protein!)
• Single serve peanut butter packets (my girls love Justin’s Organic) and organic strawberry jelly (my daughter Riley’s favorite!)
• Whole wheat bread, whole wheat pita bread, whole grain cereals
• Gnu bars, Bella Bars and Kind Bars (They all taste great and are wholesome and a good source of fiber)
• Bags of pistachios, almonds and peanuts
• Washed fruits and stored in Tupperware in case we lose water (Apples, grapes, blackberries, strawberries, watermelon, cantaloupe)
• Washed veggies and stored in Tupperware (2 heads of chopped purple cabbage [one of my faves!], 2 large cauliflowers, 8 red peppers [another fave of mine] and sugar snap peas, baby carrots). I have a gas stove top so if I lose power I can still make a stir-fry with all of my favorites!
• Cooked and froze chicken breasts and turkey burgers (I put my freezer/ fridge on the coldest setting hoping if we lose power we’ll have several hours before it goes bad. I’ll heat it in my gas oven if we lose power.)
• Filled as many water bottles as I could find with water from my Brita filter!
• Oh– and I almost forgot– I got a “make-your-own-salad” at one of the only open delis so I could have it for lunch tomorrow (assuming we don’t lose power until after 8am)

OK, so maybe I went a little overboard??? But it is my job as a nutritionist (and a Mom!) to be prepared and have plenty of food for me and my family! And this is all unchartered territory for me– I’ve never been in NYC during a hurricane!

What are you doing to prepare for the hurricane? Have you ever prepared for a hurricane in the past?