County Judge Richard Cortez during a cooking class Friday at the McAllen Chamber of Commerce. (Delcia Lopez | [email protected])

Hidalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez hosted the fourth and final Cooking School for Emergencies seminar Thursday evening.

The event saw Cortez, who serves as director of emergencies for Hidalgo County, joined by newly elected McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos, Texas A&M AgriLife Agent Andrea Valdez, McAllen Assistant Fire Chief Juan Gloria, as well as members of the Hidalgo County Fire Marshal’s Office to deliver safety tips about cooking meals during an emergency situation.

“The idea behind it is, you know, we’ve had the pandemic, we’ve had the hurricane, we’ve had the freeze, so we’ve had shortages — a lot of people didn’t have electricity,” Cortez said. “So we thought it’d be in the best of the public interest to start trying to educate or inform our community how to prepare food when you have no electricity, basically.”

Cortez hosted one of these seminars in each of the county’s four precincts. Thursday’s seminar was held in Precinct 2 at the McAllen Chamber of Commerce.

One of the messages shared during the event was the importance of being prepared for the unexpected.

“It starts by you preparing— preparing for at least a 72-hour time period without electricity where you can cook and still be able to enjoy some good meals without electricity,” Cortez said.

Cortez joined Valdez on stage to participate in various cooking demonstrations using chafing dishes and candle burners.

“It’s quite easy because Andrea (Valdez), who works for the Texas A&M AgriLife center basically did everything,” Cortez said. “All I did was mix some things that she said had to be mixed.”

Andrea Valdez with Texas A&M Agri Life Extension and County Judge Richard Cortez conduct a online cooking class Friday at McAllen Chamber of Commerce. (Delcia Lopez | [email protected])

Valdez was joined later by the McAllen mayor, who said that he had fun participating in the event.

“I hope — because it’s been done and done again — I’m hoping that the repetitiveness makes people finally understand and realize that they have to be prepared,” Villalobos said. “A lot of times people see something and they think, ‘yeah that’s nice.’ But you know what? It’s being done for a purpose. Hopefully people start realizing that you’ve got to be ready.”

Villalobos referenced the heavy rains experienced throughout the Valley this week as another reason why it’s important to be prepared for potential power outages.

“You’ve seen the water we’ve been having,” Villalobos said. “The ground is saturated. If something happens, it’s going to be difficult, so everybody needs to be prepared.”

Cortez said that he hopes to continue hosting the emergency seminars in the future, including classes focused on mental illness and help for veterans. The video of Thursday’s cooking class can be found on the Hidalgo County Facebook page.

“We’re going to speak to the different cities and try to have the different cities also become partners,” Cortez said. “If they want us to go to every city and do one of these, then we can do that.”

“It’s all about preparedness.”