10:56 – It was 34F (1C) when I took Colin out this morning.
Email from a regular reader who wondered what we actually store in our deep pantry. That’s a complicated question, because unlike most preppers we don’t have a very large separate deep pantry. We store mostly only stuff that we actually eat day-to-day, just in larger quantities than most people do.
I’ll define our deep pantry as including only items that we stick on the shelf with the intention of never using them unless there’s a serious long-term emergency. All of this stuff is commercially packaged for long-term storage. With that definition, here’s what our long-term pantry includes:
o White flour – four cases (24 #10 cans) for a total of 96 pounds, all from the LDS Home Storage Center.
o Macaroni and Spaghetti – four cases each of LDS HSC products, for a total of 156 pounds.
o Rice – four cases of LDS HSC white rice, for a total of 129.6 pounds, plus two 26-pound buckets of Augason Farms brown rice, for a grand total of 181.6 pounds.
o Sugar – four cases of LDS HSC white sugar, for a total of 139.2 pounds.
o Potato flakes – four cases of LDS HSC potato flakes, for a total of 43.2 pounds.
o Dairy – two cases (24 28-ounce pouches) of LDS HSC nonfat dry milk, for a total of 42 pounds, plus a case of six 3.5-pound #10 cans of Augason Farms Morning Moo’s milk substitute, for a grand total of 63 pounds.
o Miscellaneous – about 50 #10 cans of assorted dehydrated foods, from powdered eggs, cheese, and butter, to beef and chicken TVP, to dehydrated fruits and vegetables and soup mixes, totaling about 180 pounds.
The grand total of our very deep pantry totals about 800 pounds of dry bulk staples, which is sufficient for Barbara, Colin, Frances, Al, and me for about 6 months.
Beyond that, we also keep a fair amount of other foods stored, both commercially canned wet foods (probably a thousand pounds of meats, soups, sauces, peanut butter, etc. etc.) and bulk dry staples that we’ve repackaged ourselves. The amounts of those vary, because we actually use them day-to-day, but for example at any one time might include roughly 200 pounds of flour, 200 pounds of sugar, 300 pounds of pasta, 40 pounds of oatmeal, 40 pounds of pancake mix, 30 pounds of cornmeal, 80 pounds of pinto beans, large amounts of herbs and spices, a bunch of salt, a bunch of evaporated milk, etc. etc. All told, our shorter-term food inventory added to our deep pantry would feed the five of us for more than one year.
And another email from a regular reader who has a cunning plan. She’s ordered a lot of jarred Bertolli and Classico sauces, both of which come in glass jars that look very much like canning jars. She uses them regularly, and intends to build her stock to a year’s worth for her family. As she accumulates empty sauce jars, she plans to wash them out and re-use them as canning jars for pressure-canning foods.
I replied that the first part of her idea was good. As a matter of fact, I just ordered another 18 jars of Bertolli Mushroom Alfredo sauce from Walmart this morning. (Walmart price = $2.12/jar, Amazon Prime price = $6.81/jar …) But the second part of her idea is truly bad.
As much as the jars look like canning jars, they’re not, and it’s a big mistake to re-use them for pressure canning. Yes, standard lids and bands fit them. The problem is that they’re made of thinner glass than real canning jars, and the glass isn’t annealed. If you use them in a pressure canner, when you open the canner you’re going to find from one or two to all of the jars fractured. And even the ones that look okay probably aren’t, because the thinner glass of their rims doesn’t allow a proper seal.
I recommended she do the same thing with those empty jars as we do: use them to store dry staples that are stored in smaller quantities. Things like herbs and spices, baking powder and soda, yeast, etc. They do fine for that and are good enough to maintain a seal if you add an oxygen absorber. Don’t try to make them what they’re not.
* * * * *
Do you store much fruit juice, iced tea and soft drink? I store quite a lot of that, plus water. When TSHTF I don’t want to be bored rigid just drinking water.
Yes, we store a lot of powdered drinks (like Country Time Lemonade), #10 cans of coffee, tea bags by the thousand, jugs of pancake syrup, etc. etc.
We also store a fair amount of bottled water, along with microfilters and chemicals to purify more.
Most of mine is already in hydrated form, for instant use. Bottled water here is comparitively expensive so that makes sense to me. And I couldn’t last without fizzy soft drink. Hopefully any crisis won’t last so long that I run out of the stuff I love.
Prepping? Yeah right.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-38795967
“A fool and his money are soon parted”.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-romania-corruption-decree-idUSKBN15J0RU?il=0
“Prepping? Yeah right.”
I dislike criticizing anyone’s prepping choices. Doing something is always better than doing nothing. But anyone who believes he can continue living normally after a TEOTWAWKI event is delusional. You can afford to buy one of those bunker condos? Great, but you’d better plan on moving to Kansas full-time now, because you’re not gonna make it there after TSHTF. Or, if you do, you’re gonna find it already occupied by well-armed squatters.
Congrats, Eugen.
Just saw this on a tv ad.
http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2016/09/home-freeze-dryer-review.html
$3k
Nice hobby if you can afford it. Commercial canned food just seems a better choice to me.
Living on the surface in Kansas would be farely safe now, given that so many Titan II and Minuteman silos have been decomissioned. Not much left for the Ruskies to aim at. Western NC, northern Vermont and many other places should be fairly safe nowadays.
If you can afford one bunker, you can afford more than one. And I’ll be that companies are the ones actually paying in many cases.
I can see any survivors of a big event taking a very dim view of anyone who rode it out in a bunker, and emerged after the hard work was done.
I also can’t really see a bunch of alpha cats working in the hydroponics lab.
And considering the perversions practiced by many of those same cats, I can’t really see anyone bringing their kids…
But hey, good way to make some money, and build your own bunker at the same time.
n
@dkreck,
there have been several reviews of home freeze drying at thesurvivalblog.net. Generally, once you start it seems like you keep doing it and finding more ways to use your new tool.
I know RBT says ‘don’t waste time and money home canning now, commercial is good and cheap’ but that rationale doesn’t necessarily hold for freezedrieds.
n
added, $3k split 4 ways would be WAY cheaper than commercial FDs….
“I know RBT says ‘don’t waste time and money home canning now, commercial is good and cheap’ but that rationale doesn’t necessarily hold for freezedrieds. ”
Home canning is fine, but only for high-value stuff, e.g. meats. It just makes no sense to can low-value stuff like vegetables, given the cost of the canner, jars, supplies, etc. and the amount of time, effort, and fuel it takes.
As to freeze-dried, it seldom makes any sense at all to buy commercial FD products, and it makes even less sense to buy a FD machine for personal use. Commercially dehydrated foods contain (typically) 5% to 7% moisture. Freeze-dried foods contain differing amounts depending on the product, but it’s typically 2% to 3%. If there is any evidence whatsoever that freeze-dried foods have longer shelf lives than dehydrated foods, I’ve never seen it (and I’ve looked). The idea is that if dehydrated foods with 5% or 7% moisture last X number of years, then FD foods with 2% or 3% must stay good for longer. That’s a huge assumption, because the available evidence suggests that getting moisture below 8% or so is all that’s required to extend shelf life indefinitely.
Oh, yeah. If you’re concerned about moisture level in dehydrated foods, you can just toss a silica gel do-not-eat packet into each container. Of course, most oxygen absorbers also dry out the food to some extent, because their mechanism is rusting of the iron filings in the packet and that doesn’t occur without some moisture being available.
Re Classico jars, etc. While all of the official sources say only use jars produced for canning, my experience has been different. My mom used mayonnaise jars, when they were still made of glass, but only for water batch canning. I’ve used a few of those and many Classico jars for water bath, and pressure canned with Classico jars. I don’t recall either of us experiencing a single failure, other than a couple dropped on the garage floor. Not to say one shouldn’t be wary of scratches, chipped edges, etc. Note that not all of the canning jar look-a-likes actually fit canning jar lids, some are a slightly different size or thread design. Otherwise I think the well intended advice is akin to best buy and expiration dates, advisory. On a related note I found many years ago that champagne bottles work great for home brew soda and beer and accept standard crown caps. They will break under the right (wrong) circumstances, but in my experience they only fracture and leak in place vs. the beer bottles my father used that burst shrapnel all over the garage when they failed.
“Home canning is fine, but only for high-value stuff, e.g. meats. It just makes no sense to can low-value stuff like vegetables, given the cost of the canner, jars, supplies, etc. and the amount of time, effort, and fuel it takes.” Largely agreed but if there is a lot of garden overflow wasting it is a shame too. I started back canning when my wife had to seriously cut back on salt so I was doing things like making our own broth, soups, and such. Freezer space became a problem and it finally occurred to me that I had a pressure canner, puts in on the shelf instead of in the freezer and it doesn’t have to be thawed for use. Buying salt-free foods is expensive, when possible, and they rarely go on sale with the regular versions.
I read Senate Redumblicans don’t want to get involved in President tRump’s EO ban on the 7 countries “whose name you can’t say on MSM TV”. That is why they are Redumblicans. If they would get behind tRump, they could stay in power for decades, but fear losing the next election and hence losing their gravy train.
The Repubs are utterly fucking useless; I hate them worse than the Dems. The latter have an excuse: they’re evil. The Repubs are just super-dumb and lazy. Good riddance to bad rubbish; I was done with them when I moved up here in 1997-98. Registered as an Independent right away and have voted as such since.
“The Repubs are utterly fucking useless; I hate them worse than the Dems.”
Don’t mince your punches and pull your words DH, tell us what you really think!
sounds kinda familiar…
https://youtu.be/jz4BZJvWkmM
Redumblicans == RINOs ! ! !
“NASA / NOAA Climate Data Is Fake Data”
https://realclimatescience.com/2017/02/nasa-noaa-climate-data-is-fake-data/
“NOAA shows the Earth red hot in December, with record heat in central Africa.”
“The map above is fake. NOAA has almost no temperature data from Africa, and none from central Africa. They simply made up the record temperatures.”
Fake news and fake data ! Wow, we are rolling in it.
After the successful counter-revolution, the RINOs should be stood against a wall right alongside all the progs and SJWs they were kissing buddies with all these years.
One step closer to the Holodeck–
“Ultrasonics Brings Haptics to Augmented and Virtual Reality”
http://electronicdesign.com/embedded/ultrasonics-brings-haptics-augmented-and-virtual-reality
Won’t take off commercially until there’s a porn application for it.
What am I saying? Porn apps were probably the first thing developed, before the first proof-of-concept was complete.
You did see this line– “although it will work with most body parts when not covered by clothing.”
Right??
n
The new hottest thing is robot porn and robot VR, said to be better than the real thing.
Isn’t it amazing that we have this great knack to put our latest and greatest technology to its best use.
A better opiate for the masses.
We are going to need a longer wall …
Porn has always been a major driving force for IT/innernet stuff. Billions to be made.
Why does the NFL let Ladyparts GooGoo have the halftime show. Surely there is someone that relates more to football fanatics. The way I understand it, the halftime performers don’t get paid. Does the NFL think Ladyparts GooGoo will make more people watch?
I liked the show.
WTF was the illegal alien mom and kid commercial for Lumber84?
Halftime looked ok, but I thought (since it’s famous) that Laddy Googoo would be more dynamic and entertaining. Ya gotta wonder what Tiffany & Co. was thinking with her as a celebrity endorser too. Those tats looked really bad and the crotch cam was NOT flattering. Freakin’ video director stayed in too tight, too often. No real sense of what it looked like, just the freaks crotch.
Oh, and IN YOUR FACE PATS FANS!!111!! Lotta weeping at my wife’s family’s parties tonight…..
nick
Oh, and FUCK YOU AUDI. You’d have saved that pos commercial if you’d ended the diatribe with “…under sharia law.” (Guy doing VO about how his daughter is automatically worth less than a man, for 1 minute.)
Why do you guys watch that crap? You’re just helping the enemy.
I have friends working the half time show, and so does my wife. Saw a couple of minutes before, and a few minutes after. Skipped a bunch. 7 yo daughter’s comment about Gaga was “why does she look so funny? why isn’t she wearing pants?”
Spent 10 minutes trying to explain football to the kids (who wanted to see what it was all about.) They were not impressed.
n
The “Wall” commercial for 84 Lumber didn’t make the cut. Shortened version broadcast. Shortened version discussed in FOX commercial.
http://fox13now.com/2017/02/05/rejected-super-bowl-ad-features-border-wall-a-message-of-welcome/
[snip] the RINOs should be stood against a wall right alongside all the progs and SJWs [snip]
I’m torn on this point. If you shoot the RINOs before the SJWs, you’ll let the SJWs wallow in their fear and sudden grasp of harsh reality just before. If you shoot them after, the RINOs will have more time to consider their heresy. Hmm…
@rickH,. well, they’ve certainly raised awareness of their brand. Not sure that’s gonna help them with their coming “expansion.”
n
We’ll see how they like it with 50 day laborers standing around in front of their stores, drinking beer, leaving trash everywhere, and pissing behind the store.
I’m baffled by the Eighty Four Lumber commercial. Don’t get me wrong, I am very pro-immigration. I only support legal immigration. I’m tired of living in a country where let anyone walk across our border and come here and don’t really do anything about it. Canada and Mexico both are more effective at policing immigration than we are.
I think we should make it harder to come here illegally. Once we do that, I think we should make it easier to legally immigrate to the United States. It’s a shame and a mockery of law to make it easier to come to the country illegally than it is to come legally.
Update: I’m baffled because two of the three closest Eighty Four Lumber locations are in small towns farther from the city center than we are.
I’m baffled by the Eighty Four Lumber commercial.
Crazy spending by the family that runs 84 Lumber almost put the chain out of business when the last housing bubble burst. I guess they didn’t learn anything from the experience.
Well, I’m not a football fan, and this is the first hour I’ve watched in at least a decade, but that was quite a finish.
n
(only watched when I heard an air traffic controller tell a pilot that it was tied with less than a minute to go.)
Mrs. OFD couldn’t bear to watch any of it and is always afraid she’ll jinx the Pats. And figured they were dead in the wotta by halftime. I told her the Pats’ usual M.O. is come out after halftime and slaughter whoever the other team is. Which they did in the 4th quarter, and then in OT simply ran the ball up the field in about four minutes flat. Buh-bye, Houston and Atlanta!
I have to admit the last minute of the regular game was nerve-wracking as was the OT, but my boys came through. Again. Many records blown away. Again. Brady had 466 yards and now he has five Super Bowl rings. Awesome.
Halftime sucked rocks. What stupidity, a bunch of gym rats dancing around in weird-ass costumes to the usual hip-hop-style Afro beat crap. I gather that LaLaGooGoo has authentic talent but she mostly wastes on this chit. I could have picked a hundred other musical acts that would have gone better with a red-meat football crowd. What about Skynyrd? Or the Charlie Daniels Band?
Oh well, no more tee-vee here until September, probably, other than DVDs, Roku, Netflix, maybe, and I might see wussup with the Red Sox from time to time.
Yes, I still waste my life watching sportsball. But I’m usually doing other stuff at the same time, like tonight, when I was sorting through our tools. And reading during commercials, of which there is never any shortage, most of them shitty and loud.
And to top off this lovely week, my first accrued VA disability check arrived in our bank account this morning. Which makes wife’s travel plans easier for the next three weeks and got a bunch of overdue bills paid. Now we’ll have two regular checks every month, piddly though they are, but it saves our bacon in between her random and always-late checks.
Pax vobiscum, fratres….
“Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html
“The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.”
“A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.”
Any chance that this is true ?
Was there some sort of major sporting event over there recently? This article is almost unintelligible:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-06/patriots-come-back-from-the-dead-to-beat-falcons-in-super-bowl/8244536
“Any chance that this is true ?”
Any real chance that it ISN”T true?
n
And to top off this lovely week, my first accrued VA disability check arrived in our bank account this morning.
Yay! You deserve it buddy.
I didn’t watch any of the SB and they even had DRONES during halftime. MrsAtoz and I worshipped at Our Lady of the Dauber during the SB. I won four times.
SB = Southern Baptist? What’s to watch?
Missionary style…
And MrAtoz wins the innernet for this morning!
The way I understand it, the halftime performers don’t get paid.
Sure they do. Pepsi paid for it.