FRIDAY - Learn Something New

Since the recipe this week was about bread, I think I will share something I learned last summer. I learned how to cook bread on the barb-que grill. It worked!
The heat is pretty intense so it must be pre heated and then tuirned down. I put my bread on a cookie sheet on the grill part. I closed the lid so the heat would be maintained and cooked it. It took about 8 mins longer than my oven, but it worked! I did burn my first 2 batches until I got it adjusted. The problem is the direct heat coming from the bottom. The flames must be kept at a minimum while the bread is baking.
When it was done, you could smell cooking bread all over the neighborhood and soon there were people knocking at my door!
I would suggest practicing this to get a feel for it. This is a fun project!

THURSDAY - Inventory Needs

I bake all of our bread so we go through quite a bit of the basic ingredients.
Looking at my inventory, it is time to buy more yeast.
Yeast can be kept in your deep freeze and is viable 5-7 years frozen.
There are 12 containers in each case and each package of yeast has 32 oz.
32 oz will give me 48 batches of 2 loaves of bread or 96 loaves of bread.

My recipe uses 1 tbsp. of yeast for every 2 loaves of bread.
Each person on average on our current diet eats about one full loaf of bread per week.
However if we were in a survival situation , that would increase to at least double.

It is time to order more yeast. I give a few to our children, so a case works great for me.
It is much more economical to buy it in large bags than to buy it in packets or smaller bottles.
You will have to check around your area to find the best prices.

Without yeast you can still make bread, but it would be flat bread. You could obviously survive, but normal bread would help morale and is more of what most of us are used to.

I will share later on various ways to cook bread, should you not have electricity.

WEDNESDAY - Food Storage Recipe

I have the best bread recipe. It requires very little kneading if you didn't have a mixer. It works great with white wheat too. This recipe actually won a Gooseberry contest.

Homemade Bread

Heat 2 cups milk (or use 1/3 cup powdered milk in hot water)

Add 3 tbls sugar, 1 tbls. salt , and 1/3 cup oil

Mix 1 tbls. yeast in 1/2 cup water

Add 3 1/2 cups flour to the milk mixture and mix very well - this is very important if you are kneading by hand as it gets the gluten started.

Add yeast mixture and mix well.

Add 3 1/2 cups more flour and knead until well mixed and dough is smooth.

Put in greased covered bowl and let rise until double.

Punch down

Let rise again (This helps it to be lighter)

Punch down and put in bread pans.

Let rise.

Cook at 350* for 30 minutes.

Monday - Clean a Storage Shelf/TUESDAY - Learn a new skill

We took a wall out that was hooked into the rafters. (Of course we didn't know that when we started.) But because of being able to see the sky in 0* weather I didn't have electricity to use the computer. So nothing was posted yesterday and my cleaning up project wasn't a food storage shelf. Next week I will be back to the food storage shelf project.

FRIDAY - Learn Something New Day

I found a most interesting site about water purification.
Check it out, I am going to research it further.
http://www.sodis.ch/

THURSDAY - Inventory Day

Clorox is the item for this week. I was doing a load of white things and needed a bottle. It amazes me sometimes that I go downstairs to get something and there are only a few left.Clorox is pretty improtant for laundry, water purification, disinfecting etc. I try to keep at least a bottle available per month. I don't use that much now, but if we were in a crisis/survival situation, I would use more.
I have read that after 18 months it looses it's strength. I have personally opened bottle s up that are 3 years old that have been sealed and in a dark room, that is still just great!

WEDNESDAY - Recipe Day

If you had a family member who had serious diarrhea, or was dehydrated for some other reason, do you know how to replace the fluids and electrolytes in their body?

This is a recipe for Pedialyte:
one-half teaspoon table salt
one-half teaspoon potassium chloride (lite salt)
one-half teaspoon baking soda
4 tablespoons sugar dissolved in 1 liter (a little over a quart) of water

The above is the recipe for homemade Pedialyte, taken from Web M.D.
Unsweetened (NO SUGAR!!) Kool-Aid can also be added to this, to making it a tad more palatable to children.
Do NOT add sweetened Kool-Aid, this adds too much sugar, and makes the very exact balance of salts and sugar off.

This recipe is a really good thing to have on hand. You can measure all the dry ingredients and store them all in a one liter bottle (dry). Then if you need it, in an emergency, just add clean water, shake the bottle well, and use. Great thing for 72 hour kits. You can also mix up several batches of it, put in zip lock baggies, and store in a one liter bottle (dry). That way, it's all ready for emergency use.This recipe works to re hydrate animals as well...just don't add Kool-Aid to theirs.

TUESDAY - Learn A New Skill

I am always on the lookout for preparedness type articles. I learn so much from them. So many people with so much knowledge.

5 - HOW OLD CAN A BEAN BE?!
5 - HOW OLD CN A BEAN BE?The following comes from a newsletter putout by the Wooden Spoon, December 2006.“In a recent cooking class at The Wooden Spoon we were discussing the shelf life of legumes, which is recommended as 6-8 plus years. True confessions were coming from our students, some of whom inherited their mother's food storage . . .“We determined on an experiment.“Charleen Clark told us that she knew she had beans that were at least 40 years old, and accepted the assignment to go home and see what she could do with them.[She] added 1/8 tsp. baking soda and 1 tbsp. cooking oil to a cup of beans while soaking them in three times as much water. She put the beans to soak on a Saturday morning and left them for thirty-two hours, until she observed that the forty year old beans were beginning to sprout! Charleen drained the rinse water, cooked the beans, and brought them to class.“Christine Van Wagenen, teacher and cook extra ordinaire, put her discriminating palate to the test and sampled a bean and declared the results to be a marvel.~~~~~~General Information About Beans:Nutritious, filling, versatile, economical, and tasty - sounds like the perfect food!SortingSorting means picking over the dried beans before cooking them. Remove small rocks, pieces of dirt, beans with holes, badly misshapen or wrinkled beans and those greatly undersized or discolored.RinsingWashing is not part of the packing process because water would rehydrate the beans. Do not rinse beans until you are ready to soak or cook them. Even then you do not have to rinse beans if you're going to soak them. Any field dust will be removed and discarded with the soak water. If you cook the beans without soaking, rinse them after sorting.SoakingSoaking is not essential in bean preparation. Beans are soaked to begin rehydration and reduce cooking time..During soaking, beans increase two to three times their dried size. Enough water must be used to keep the beans covered while soaking. Once rehydrated, beans cook in 1 to 3 hours, depending on the type of bean.Cooking Without SoakingTo cook beans without soaking, use twice the amount of cooking water specified in the recipe. Combine the water and rinsed beans in the pot and bring to a boil. Cover the pot and reduce the heat to maintain a simmer. The beans rehydrate while cooking so you will have to watch them carefully and add more water whenever necessary to keep them covered.Things to avoid when cooking dry beansAdd only after beans are softThe following items will toughen uncooked beans and noticeably increase cooking time. * salt / unrefined sea salt * miso, tamari and soy sauce * sugars * acidic ingredients, including tomatoes, vinegar, and lemon.Baking soda?Many recipes call for baking soda to speed cooking and soften beans by increasing alkalinity. Use it only if you have extremely hard water. Baking soda will produce mushy beans, and deplete minerals.~~~~BEAN NUTRITIONPROTEIN:Dry beans are the richest source of vegetable protein (21-27% when cooked). Combining beans with a small amount of animal protein such as meat, cheese, or egg or small amounts of grain (corn, wheat, or rice) will create a complete protein equal to that of meat and other animal sources. Protein is important for human health because it supplies the materials for building and repairing body tissues – muscles, bones, glands, skin, and teeth. Beans consistently rank lowest of all foods in cost per gram of protein, according to the USDA.ENERGY: Beans have long been valued as an energy source. Complex carbohydrates in dry beans digest more slowly than simple carbohydrate foods thereby satisfying hunger longer. One half cup of cooked beans contains 118 calories or less.VITAMINS: A normal serving of cooked dry beans supplies as much as 40% of the minimum daily requirement of the B-vitamins, thiamine and pyridoxine, and significant amounts of other B-vitamins. The B-vitamins are important in contributing to healthy digestive and nervous systems, skin, and eyes.MINERALS: Iron to build red blood cells, calcium and phosphorus for strong bones and teeth, and potassium, which is important in regulating body fluid balance, all plentiful in dry beans. Beans are high in fiber, contain no cholesterol, and are low in sodium. Sodium content is low so, when cooked without salt, they are good in low-salt diets.

MONDAY - Clean A Shelf In Food Storage Room

I am rearranging my storage room. This is taking me a little longer than planned so I am not quite done with the area I am working on. I am arranging each area like the grocery store does. Right now I am working on the oils. I can see that I need to purchase some more oil. I read an article by Enzio Bushe about WW11 conditions and oil is such an important thing. I feel like I need to get a little more. I have rearranged it so it is easier to rotate. I am posting the article at the bottom of the blog. ARTICLE 4

Friday - Drop off Canned Goods List - Tomatoes

I honestly haven't done this since the first of December. I am ready to get myself reorganized!

Today's topic - Tomatoes

I have 2 recipes a week that use 2 cans of tomatoes.

That translates into 8 cans a month or 48 cans a year, x 2 = 96 cans for these two recipes for two years. I like to have extra's as well. Bottom line I need to order another case of tomatoes. I did can tomatoes in the fall, but our summer weather was so weird & I didn't get enough tomatoes for what we need and as I like to keep my supplies up.

I try to keep an extra case so as we use it we don't go under our 4 cases needed for the years supply. I have used 1/2 of the extra case so I need to get another. When I have that I will move the 1/2 used case upstairs and rotate the newest one to the back.

My food storage is my mini grocery store. I use most of the stuff down there through the year. We don't go through as many beans and a few dry goods like that, but the canned goods are things we use all the time. It needs to be rotated anyway so it all works out great.

Deep Cleaning Our House

Pix before - boxes just piled on top of each other.

Pix after - plastic buckets I picked up at garage sales and clearance sales. So much more room - gave me the ability to put all our non food items in another location all together and a different place than our food storage. It will be so much easier to track and rotate.

This really doesn't seem like something that fits into preparedness, but it really does.

Several years ago there were about 8 families in our neighborhood that did a 3 day without water/electricty experiment. It was fascinating and the things we learned were amazing.

One of those things was about clutter.

After about a day of not having conviences the clutter drove everyone nuts. I can see why the pioneers lived so simply. My house isn't cluttered in the living area's. But the storage area's tend to get this way. After when we evaluated, every person made this comment on their form independent of the other participants.

If I could offer some advice on your preparedness, things to do list. It would be to go through your house and room by room declutter and dejunk it now. That is what I am doing this winter. I am decluttering.
So far I have moved the water, redone the non food storage room - items like TP, personal care, etc., cleaned up the holiday room, dejunked a bedroom downstairs, redone my Christmas storage, now I am working on the family room. Then the storage area and our food storage room. The basement needs it the most so that is where I have started and where I will be for the next few weeks.

Changing Water!

WOO HOO I got our water all changed out! That was a huge job. We had a bathroom downstairs that was used occasionally for years. We had stored all of our water in that area. Now that our fmaily is growing, that bathroom is being used more and more. I had to get the water out. So we moved it to the little storage area across the hall. It is winter in Idaho and very cold, so this was tricky. but I wanted to get it done so I can continue deep cleaning our house. It took three days but it is finished and looks clean and wonderful. We have about 300 gallons stored in this area. There is more in other parts of the house, but this is our drinking water.

A friend of mine told me he had water stored for 20 years and had never changed it. He got some and drank it and it was FLAT. He tried to areate it by shaking and never could revive it. He is changing out his water too.

I try to change ours out about every 2 years. The clorox ration needed is listed at the end of the blog.