Posts Tagged ‘food storage’

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Stocking up on spices to keep food preps lively

Saturday, August 21st, 2010

Both of my brothers are chefs, but I got the short end of culinary training. Some of the things I’ll mention below would be considered sacrilege in high-cuisine circles, but this thread is about spicing up your survival food preps, not making sure your spices are necessarily as fresh as you would find in restaurants.

For one thing, when I mentioned to my youngest brother that I had several dozen quarts of spices in mason jars, he chuckled and said, “You know those will go bad after six months, right?” I replied that first of all, the spices will only go “bad” if they’re left exposed to air for an extended period of time–but the seals on my mason jars are much more airtight than the containers which the spices came in at Sam’s Club. And I’d rather have “too much” spices than to not have enough and to have to deal with “food fatigue”–as I noted in another post, you can have the same basic ingredients–rice, beans, vegetables and meat–but depending on what spice combinations you use, you can create literally thousands of different dishes.

And while spices may “go bad” according to restaurant standards after six months, I’ll take “stale” spices any day over bland food. I’ve got at least 10 quarts of cayenne powder in my pantry at the moment, and I’m guessing it’d take a couple years to go through just what I’ve got at the moment, but having “too much” spices could literally mean the difference between people eating or not eating. The danger of “food fatigue” is well-established–people can have plenty of food on hand, but if they’re eating the same thing over and over and over, they may literally starve themselves rather than eat more of the same thing. Here’s an article I just came across:

http://www.frugalvillage.com/forums/preparedness-survival/113721-food-appetite-fatigue.html

I make it a point every week to buy a couple pounds of various spices at Sam’s Club and seal them up in mason jars when I get home. It’s going to be months, maybe even years before I go through some of the spices I have, but again, “too much” spices is much better than not enough. Parents, consider the danger of food fatigue if your kids refuse to eat the same thing another day. If you make it taste like something else, they’re much more inclined to eat it.

I prefer the spices that will give me the most bang for my buck taste-wise. Take a look at what you can get in bulk quantities:

www.bulkfoods.com/spices.asp

I’d suggest including mint, cloves, etc., in your preps not for their addition to food per se, but to make your own tea with these. (Get 5-lb. containers of honey at Sam’s Club for less than $11 to top it off.;)) And there are many other sites besides the one above where you can buy bulk quantities of spices, or if you live in larger cities you should have plenty of retail establishments (especially ethnic grocery stores) where you can buy them or order them. I’d be interested in hearing your own stories or recipes using spices to help keep your food storage from getting boring.

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Building up your preps $25 at a time

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

I think that especially when you’re just starting out prepping, it can seem like small amounts of money don’t matter. But those small amounts can add up over weeks and months and you can build your preps little by little. $25 might seem like a relatively insignificant amount of money, but here’s what you can get for $25 or less each:

25 lbs. of frozen carrots at Walmart (which I dehydrate and store in mason jars)

or…

17 lbs. of frozen spinach at Walmart

or…

50 lbs. of rice at Sam’s Club (with about $9 leftover)

or…

30 lbs. of dry beans at Sam’s Club

or…

18 cans of canned mackerel at Walmart

or…

6 packages of 30-count half-liter bottles of water from Sam’s Club for storage

or…

7 cans of Cafe Bustelo coffee at Walmart (my only addiction–gotta have my coffee)

or…

100 Winchester 9mm FMJ rounds at Walmart

or…

an extra magazine for my Kel-Tec PF9 (with about $7 leftover)

or…

a 400-count bottle of naproxen at Sam’s Club (with about $8 leftover)

or…

10 paperback Bibles (because man doesn’t live by bread alone)

And you can fill in the list with other items you want or need in your preps as well. But the next time you’re tempted to drop $25 for a week’s worth of fast-food meals, stop and think about how far $25 can go in helping you build up your preps. It can probably go a lot farther than you think.

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Just 24 pounds of carrots until vacation

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Sometimes when it comes to prepping, we can get overwhelmed if we start looking at the big picture rather than the day-by-day goals right in front of us. One of my long-term goals is to have a year’s worth of food for several people in several different locations just in case relocation becomes a necessity and/or the opportunity arises for anonymous charity. But this week I’m only going to worry about dehydrating the 24 pounds of carrots left in my freezer (well, technically, I’ve got 8 pounds of frozen carrots thawing at the moment, and 16 pounds of carrots still in the freezer — I just finished dehydrating another 8 pounds). Then I’m going on vacation so I can stock up on a little rest. ;)

Some people might experience brain freeze if I were to tell them that I’ve dehydrated 64 pounds of carrots in a little over two months. “64 POUNDS OF CARROTS?? How long did THAT take???” (Actual total dehydration time was just over four days, not counting time to thaw the carrots.) But just like tackling any other big task, baby steps are the key. You can’t eat an elephant in one bite — but you CAN eat that elephant one bite at a time until you finish it.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed as you try to tackle your prepping goals, step back and focus on just one facet of the big picture and work on that one thing until it’s done. Then work on the next thing. Or if you’re like me and tend to multitask, work on several things a little at a time until you finish one, then another, then another. And with steady, diligent effort, you’ll get there. One. Step. At. A. Time.

My goal for the week is fairly small: Dehydrate 8 pounds of frozen carrots on each of the next three days (1 pound per tray in two 4-tray Nesco dehydrators), then can ‘em up, label them and then it’s vacation time. What are your prepping goals for the day? For the week? For the month? What can you do to break down your bigger goals into smaller pieces so you can get them done? Like I said above, I understand that prepping can seem like a huge task that you’ll NEVER accomplish because there’s SO MUCH to be done! But baby steps will get you where you want to go, and probably much more quickly than you expect.

What do you want or need to do right now in your prepping? What small thing can you do this moment that will get you one little step closer to that goal?

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Mainstream online media post about stocking up on food

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

Some of you may have seen this article on Yahoo:

The top foods you should keep in case of an emergency

Some preppers may argue that when the mainstream media start to suggest stuff like this, things may be worse than we think. I hope that instead more and more people are just coming to the realization that they can’t rely on grocery stores to carry everything everyone needs at any given moment. The phrase “nine meals from anarchy” is a spot-on description of how far away from social unrest if the trucks stop rolling and the three-day supply of food on grocery store shelves is gone. Stock up now while you can. There’s no good excuse not to.

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Trying to catch up on my food dehydration…

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

I’ve been on the road so much the past few weeks that I’ve hardly had time to dehydrate anything and my freezer reached its limit tonight: 18 lbs. of carrots, 8 lbs. of blueberries, 8 lbs. of spinach…and a package of barbecued chicken that I took out before I took these photos. :P

Actually, in the second photo you can see a couple bags of Totino’s Pizza Rolls (hey, I have my vices) that I had to take out of the box so that all the bags of veggies would fit in the freezer!

As of a few minutes ago, I just put 8 lbs. of frozen carrots in two dehydrators (1 lb. per tray):

and in about 12 hours, those 8 lbs. of carrots will fit in a 1-quart mason jar:

I’m glad Friday is payday, because I’ll soon have an empty freezer! :P

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Are you just planning to prep? Or are you actually prepping?

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

It just occurred to me that I hadn’t posted anything new on here in well over three weeks. Quite frankly, I’ve been so busy prepping that I haven’t had time to write. But how many of you are so busy PLANNING to prep that you don’t actually get around to prepping?

In the past few weeks I’ve dehydrated about 40 lbs. of carrots, added about 10 lbs. of spices to my pantry stash and found out that blueberries can be rather tricky to dehydrate. (More on that in a future post.) I’ve also added a couple more cases of canned mackerel to my storage pantry and am about to place a large order (probably more than 50 lbs.) for dehydrated banana chips which I can order more cheaply than I can make them myself.

Are you planning to prep? Or are you actually prepping? What are you waiting for?

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Don’t skimp on your food storage equipment — your life depends on it

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

I came across a thread in one survival-prep forum recently where someone posted the suggestion that instead of buying allegedly more-expensive oxygen absorbers, why not buy iron oxide hand warmers, they said, since the hand warmers were cheaper and readily available in sporting goods stores and, they said, had the same active ingredients as food-grade oxygen absorbers? Well, that’s all fine and good if the hand warmers are cheaper and if they’re food-grade, but is cheaper necessarily what you want when it comes to food storage?

I’ve tried probably eight or nine different brands of food dehydrators over the years, and the only one I’ve tried that I would recommend to other people (disclaimer: I haven’t tried an Excalibur) is the one manufactured by Nesco, which has an internal fan for air circulation and helps food dry in half the time compared to dehydrators without fans. I like the Nescos so much that I’ve bought a dozen of them over the past several years just so I’ll have plenty of extra food preparation tools if I need them. (Shameless plug: You can usually get a Nesco on eBay for around $30 (plus shipping) if you pick your auctions smartly.)

Now, I could buy a Ronco or other model without an internal fan that would in fact use less electricity during the drying process…but if it takes the dehydrator twice as long to adequately dry food, am I really saving any money? I think it’s more than worth a few extra pennies of electricity to have dehydrators with fans so that I know my food will dry quickly and uniformly…and in the end, I have the security of knowing that I have plenty of food if I need it. (If you’re so worried about a dehydrator with a fan using more electricity than a dehydrator without a fan, maybe you should unplug the appliance in your house that uses the most electricity — your refrigerator!)

Which brings me back to the point about getting what you pay for.

In 1996, I bought my very first car, a 1984 Toyota Corolla. (Yes, a Toyota. The brakes worked on this particular vehicle…but nothing else did.) The car had about 162,000 miles on it, and the dealer was asking only $850 for it. The only warranty it came with was for me not to let the door hit me on the way out of the so-called dealership. More than $1,000 and 1,300 miles later, the car wouldn’t budge out of my mom’s driveway. Well, that’s not quite true…I could drive it three or four miles before the engine would overheat and I’d have to put more (and more…and more…and more) water in the radiator after it cooled down…and watch the water go right through the radiator to the pavement because the bottom of the radiator was rusted out.

I’d spent close to $2,000 and now had nothing to show for it. I was not a happy camper. But at least I could catch a ride on good days and hope I didn’t have to walk very far the rest of the time.

Which brings me back to my first point.

It’s one thing to shell out a couple thousand bucks on a piece-o’-junk car and have the thing eventually stop running altogether and then chalk up the experience to a lesson learned the hard way. But it’s a whole different story when your life depends on something.

And you can’t live without food.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that hand warmers technically do have the same oxygen-absorbing properties as, well, oxygen absorbers. I haven’t been able to try to vacuum-seal a jar yet with hand warmers because (at least according to the sporting goods clerk at Wally World) they are a seasonal camping-accessory item and won’t be available until later in the year. But do I really want something to heat up my food items as they are undergoing vacuum-sealing, and risk denaturing the vitamin content of the food that my life could depend on if TSHTF? Or would you rather use tried-and-true methods and materials that have been proven time and time again to work, so you don’t have to worry?

I’m not telling you not to buy that 1984 Toyota. I’m just asking you if it will get you where you need to go when you need it to get you there. If you’re buying cheaper food storage tools that you can’t be sure will do what you need them to do — keep your food fresh and safe until you eat it — are you willing to risk your health and maybe your life just to save a few bucks?

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Oh, carrots are divine, you get a dozen for a dime, it’s maaaaaagic!

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

ORIGINALLY POSTED 4-28-2010:
Some of you may have caught the Bugs Bunny reference in the title above, which seems appropriate given that I’m about to try my hand at dehydrating carrots. And I’m not imagining it will be too hard, as the only extra step between dehydrating carrots and spinach will be the dicing of the crinkle-cut frozen carrots I just bought at Wal-Mart. For just under $6, I picked up a Mainstays brand food chopper (pretty low capacity — maybe 2 cups?) that I will use to dice the carrots so the bits to be dehydrated will be as small as possible — exactly what you want, as small pieces dehydrate much faster.

Someone pointed out to me that frozen vegetables are already blanched before they are frozen, so that step is already take care of compared to fresh-packaged vegetables, and the frozen veggies are ready to be cooked and eaten…or dehydrated, as the case may be.

The price on the 1-pound package of crinkle-cut sliced carrots at Wal-Mart was 98 cents. Checking a couple different websites to see the going price for bulk dehydrated carrots, at a reconstitution ratio of about 1 pound of dehydrated carrots equal to 2 pounds of cooked carrots, pricewise I’ll be doubling my money by doing this myself instead of ordering an already-dehydrated bulk lot of carrots — one particular site I’ve ordered other items from is selling 20-pound lots of dehydrated carrots for about $3.95 per pound (which would be about $1.97 per pound for the equivalent volume of non-dehydrated carrots, twice the price of my package of carrots from Wally World). As I mentioned earlier, in most cases it will be cheaper to dehydrate fruits and vegetables yourself instead of buying pre-dehydrated products, with the caveats that high-sugar foods (especially tomatoes, apples and bananas) might be a bit trickier and stickier since their sugars will caramelize and get gooey and make it hard for you to remove them from your dehydrator trays. But obviously this isn’t a problem with carrots, so never mind. :)

I’d also like to reiterate the point I’ve made before that the food items I’m dehydrating for my long-term storage are either huge in nutrition, huge in flavor or both. Carrots (and spinach as well) are loaded with beta carotene, which our bodies turn into Vitamin A. Carrots don’t necessarily pack the flavor punch that other vegetables do, but they will add a huge nutritional punch to your food — 1/2 cup of dehydrated carrots (equal to 1 cup of cooked carrots) will give you about 130 percent of your daily recommended Vitamin A. Like Bugs said, it’s maaaaaagic!

I’ll post an update as soon as I get my first couple batches of carrots done.

UPDATE 5-17-10–I’ve gotten off to a later start than expected with the carrots, but the first thing I’ll say is that I’m amazed at the amount of shrinkage in volume once the carrots are dehydrated — but this is a very good thing, as it will give you more carats of carrots per quart! It looks like I’m averaging 8 pounds of pre-dehydrated carrots per one-quart mason jar AFTER dehydration–I’d estimate it’s about an 8-to-1 shrinkage in volume, similar to what I’ve encountered with tomatoes. I didn’t realize how much water was in carrots! But having said that, assuming reconstitution will work on the same water-to-carrot ratio of about 8-to-1, I’ll be able to fit the dry equivalent of 96 pounds of carrots per 12-jar case! I’ll post a photo of the carrots after dehydration…as soon as I can find the USB port for my camera. :P

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How a volcano thousands of miles away could affect your life

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

Many of you have probably been following news of the huge delays, disruptions, cancellations and other major problems since the eruption of a volcano in Iceland began last month. Travelers are stranded not just on both sides of the Atlantic, but around the world as well. Think problems on the other side of the world can’t really affect your life at any given moment? Travel to and from much of Europe has ground to a halt, and with it business and other necessary activities of daily life, because of a massive act of nature that we humans can’t control.

So tell me again why you aren’t stocking up on food and other necessities? Well, because volcanoes just can’t affect the U.S., right?

Remember the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980?

Oh, and then there’s the pesky little Yellowstone supervolcano that is believed to be thousands of years past-due for a, well, super eruption. Never mind the recent increase in seismic activity that may or may not indicate the increased possibility of a massive eruption sometime in the future.

But it couldn’t happen to us, right? Not here. Not during our lifetimes. Because it hasn’t happened yet.

What happens if you hit four empty chambers in Russian Roulette and decide to pull the trigger a fifth time?

Are you willing to gamble that because nothing major has happened to you yet, you don’t have to prepare for emergencies — or even the continuation of daily life minus any interruptions — because it just can’t happen to you?

Legendary Mount St. Helens figure Harry Truman (not the president) thought so in 1980, before the volcano exploded and a wall of rock and ash hit him at 300 mph, killing him (obviously) and at least 56 others.

We don’t have many volcanoes (zero so far) in my part of the country, but we have plenty of other disasters hit over any given period of time — floods and tornadoes are not-infrequent visitors. And regardless of the likelihood of any single disaster occurring in any one particular area, people usually have one kind of insurance or another — because you never know when you might need it.

Are you betting that you won’t need extra food, water, alternative shelter or personal protection anytime soon because you haven’t needed those things yet? Or are you just hoping there isn’t a bullet in the fifth chamber since there wasn’t one in the first four?

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Another good reason to stock up: Looting will get you shot

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

I’d had the thought above running through my head for some time, but I hadn’t really put the concept on paper (or in this case, on screen) because I thought it’d be obvious to most people. But since you can’t cure stupid, I’ll waste a breath and state the obvious:

1. You need to stock up ASAP on food and other important things.
2. Looters will probably get shot.
3. If you eliminate your “need” to loot for food or other things, you’ll greatly reduce your chances of getting shot.
4. If your only plan for stocking up on what you need after TSHTF involves bullets, then you’re probably going to be stocking up on other people’s bullets…at about 1100 feet per second.

I think the excellent article “The Art Of Not Getting Shot” at the link below pretty much speaks for itself:

ww2.zombieinitiative.org/node/1481

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