One would think that a big storm would have preceded our Sunday outage, but noooooo….just a beautiful day in San Diego.  I had remembered to put the Rhodes Frozen Dinner Rolls out on a cookie sheet to defrost and rise before I left for church.  They would be ready to go into the oven when I got home from church…nice, hot Rhodes Dinner Rolls – a family favorite! 

I'm not always that prepared.  Being really prepared would have been dinner in a crock pot, but this is one time I'm glad that didn't happen.  About 3pm, the power went off.  We didn't discover this until we got back from church.  After calling SDG&E, I got the recorded message that they expected power to be back on at 6 pm.  I have to say it was quite the experience!  To be in the room, one would have thought that we hadn't eaten for days.  I'm sure it was the uncertainty of what would become of our Sunday meal:  those rolls were getting too big and then it's just like a little bit of fluff once they cook up.  Maybe it was the fact that I was going to be making up a favorite casserole – Chicken Broccoli Cheesy Rice, and it's hard to switch those taste buds to a different meal once the brain has established the menu.  I don't know for sure, but the conversation was funny even though it somehow turned to talk of cannibalism (don't ask!) along with who would be tastier.  Our front windows were open to those walking past our house and I'm sure that our animated discussion was either amusing or disturbing to the passersby.

After our calls to the power company kept extending the time for power to be back on, my husband deemed it an emergency and time to go out for dinner.  We do not make it a habit of eating out on the Sabbath and don't unless we are traveling, and somehow I just didn't think that this constituted a big enough emergency, and while we vacillated between a drive-thru or sit-down, we – the parents – decided that we needed to be more inventive and come up with something else.  I mean, what would we do in a REAL emergency?

I have a gas grill, but all our meats were frozen and we didn't want to open the freezers and disturb the cold in case the power was off for an extended time.  I had this tray of "too risen" rolls, but had never cooked rolls on a grill.  So…

I put foil over the grill, sprayed it with a little PAM, let it heat up a little, and then I flattened the rolls and put them on the foil.  They only needed 2 or 3 minutes on each side.

Scott was the first to try them with a little honey and butter…those were yummy.  But I wanted to make them more of a meal, so I heated a can of refried beans in an aluminum bowl on the other side of the burners, and with a little cheese… 

 
YUMMY!!!

I know, where's the vegetable?  If you remember a way earlier post about me being a Taco Bell sauce hoarder - it hasn't reduced in size much!  So we had the 3 options – plain, with cheese or with beans and cheese. 

 
I think I'll call these Rhodes Grilled Rolls…that's a tongue twister, but a tasty tongue pleaser for sure!

We had a few defrosted hot dogs that we cooked up right before the power came back on.  All in all, it wasn't a bad meal, just not the usual big Sunday production.  I'll be cooking the casserole later today.  But it was a funny experiment on how my household deals with the lack of electricity, even if for just a few hours.  Personally, I think we should pretend as if the power is out again sometime…sooner than later!