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Category: long-term food storage

Friday, 17 March 2017

10:28 – When I took Colin out around 0730 it was 24.9F (-4C) with a light breeze.

Herschel from Shaw Brothers showed up about 0900 yesterday to install our new dishwasher. It took him about 90 minutes to install it and test it for leaks. In the afternoon, the FedEx guy sneaked up on Colin, who was outraged. The box had a dozen more 28-ounce cans of Keystone Meats canned pork.

Speaking of which, I think I’m going to start ordering Keystone canned chicken. We’ve been buying the Costco canned chicken, which comes in 12.5-ounce cans “packed in water” that specify the drained weight as 7 ounces. In other words, you get 7 ounces of chicken in 5.5 ounces of water. The Keystone chicken is 28-ounce cans that specify “no water added,” so they contain four times as much chicken at 3.08 times the price.

Several of the LTS food recipes I’d like to try call for sour cream. Obviously, the fresh stuff is out of the question for long-term storage. Even in the refrigerator, its shelf life is about a week. So I started thinking about alternatives that do have long shelf lives.

There are, of course, numerous companies like Thrive Life and Emergency Essentials that produce dehydrated sour cream powder and buttermilk powder that are intended for LTS. (The stuff sold in supermarkets, like Saco sour cream powder, require refrigeration once opened, so they’re not really an alternative.)

Sour cream (and cultured buttermilk, another useful LTS item) are simply cream or milk that’s been intentionally inoculated with bacteria that produce lactic acid, which in turn sours the milk. But that’s not the only way to produce them. Adding any acid, like vinegar or lemon juice, to cream or milk has the same result.

Cream is simply milk with a higher butterfat content–typically 18% or so versus 1% to 3.5%–so one can reconstitute cream from powdered milk simply by increasing the powder to water ratio. That’s assuming, of course, that one uses powdered whole milk like Nestle Nido rather than the more common non-fat dry milks. But even the latter work in terms of flavor, if not in terms of fat content.

I intend to experiment with this, starting by mixing 2/3 cup of Nido dry whole milk with 3/4 cup of warm water and a teaspoon of vinegar and allowing it to sit for anything from a few minutes to a couple hours at room temperature to sour. Just for comparison, I’ll try the same thing with LDS powdered non-fat dry milk. I suspect either one will work fine and taste much like commercial sour cream. We’ll try it the next time we make Beef Stroganoff.

And if that does work, making a buttermilk substitute for pancakes, biscuits, and so on would be just as easy. We’d simply increase the ratio of water to milk powder.

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Saturday, 11 March 2017

10:25 – It was 28.5F (-2C) when when I took Colin out around 0715 this morning. We’re still expecting snow over the next several days, but they’ve reduced the amount forecast. Originally, they were calling for 3″ to 6″ (7.5 to 15 cm) tonight and into tomorrow, which they reduced yesterday to 1″ to 3″, and this morning to a dusting to 1″. They are calling for more snow over the next four days or so, but with only moderate accumulations.

Barbara just left to meet some friends in Galax, VA, where they plan to wander around the craft and antique shops and have lunch and possibly dinner. Galax, like all of the small towns around here, is roughly 30 to 40 miles (48  to 64 km) and 45 minutes to an hour from us. Also like most of them, Galax is three or four times our population, and has a Walmart Supercenter, Lowes Hardware, and other big-box stores that we don’t have here.

I talked to Lori again yesterday morning about food storage, and particularly dehydrated supplemental foods like powdered eggs, cheese, butter, and milk. That got me to thinking that the last time I bought powdered milk was in June 2014 at the LDS Home Storage Center in Greensboro.

Back then, my immediate goal was a one year supply for the two of us and Colin, 2.5 people-equivalents. We hadn’t yet started to store additional LTS food for Frances and Al. So I bought two cases, 42 pounds, of LDS non-fat dry milk, which was marginally adequate for 2.5 people. Since then, we’ve added a couple cases of condensed milk and several pounds of Nestle Nido dry whole milk, but we really don’t have enough dairy for the 4.5 of us. So yesterday I decided to order more.

I first checked Walmart, which has four-pound boxes of their house-brand non-fat dry milk for $14.48, or $3.62/pound. I then checked the LDS Home Storage Center, which has their dry milk at $4.50 per 28-ounce retort pouch, or $2.57/pound. And that’s already packed for LTS, with an estimate shelf life of 20 years. Of course, we’d have to drive down to Greensboro to pick it up, a three to four hour round trip.

So I checked the LDS on-line store, where I found they had cases of twelve 28-ounce pouches for $46.50, or $2.21/pound. There’s a flat $3 shipping charge regardless of how much you order from LDS on-line, but even with that it’s cheaper to have them ship it to us. That gives us a total of 63 pounds of LDS non-fat dry milk, which with the other dairy stuff we stock is adequate for 4.5 of us for one year.

Note that this is all for cooking/baking, not for drinking. By all accounts, LDS dry milk is absolutely horrible for drinking. In fact, seven years ago, Angela Paskett did a comparison taste test among numerous dry milks, and LDS finished not just last, but far distant last. (Speaking of which, if you want a great reference about LTS food storage, order a copy of Angela’s book.)

But it’s fine for cooking/baking and doing stuff like making up pancake mix, and it’s cheap and already packaged for LTS. We like the Krusteaz pancake mix enough that I keep a couple 10-pound bags in stock, but it comes in a paper sack and costs about $0.75/pound, versus less than half that for mix we can make up ourselves from white flour, powdered milk, powdered eggs, and baking powder. Rather than deal with the hassle of repackaging it, it’s both easier and cheaper just to store the components separately.

I often get mail from people who’d like to buy LDS bulk LTS foods, but don’t have an LDS HSC within easy driving distance. (To answer another frequent question, LDS sells to anyone. You don’t have to be a Mormon or even have a Mormon friend go along with you to the HSC.)

LDS prices are generally excellent, although usually a bit more costly than repackaging your own. For example, the last time we bought a 50-pound bag of white flour at Costco, it was $12.50, or $0.25/pound. A #10 can of white flour at the HSC costs $3.00 for four pounds, or $0.75/pound. That’s much cheaper than third-party suppliers like Augason Farms, but it’s still three times as much per pound. Same thing with stuff like oats and beans. But for that higher price, you avoid having to repackage it yourself.

If you compare the LDS HSC price list with the LDS on-line store price list, you’ll find that some stuff is cheaper one place or the other, sometimes significantly. For example, in addition to the dry milk being cheaper from the on-line store, so are the canned onions (at $48.75/case on-line versus $54/case from the HSC). Also, the HSCs carry a wider range of foods than the on-line store, and you can buy individual cans or pouches at the HSC rather than buying in whole cases, which is the only option at the LDS on-line store.

Either way, if you’re building your food storage, keep both the LDS HSC and LDS on-line store in mind. For what they carry, they’re nearly always noticeably less expensive than commercial vendors.

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Thursday, 9 March 2017

09:14 – It was 39F (4C) when when I took Colin out around 0700 this morning, but it’s now warmed up to 57F (14C). Barbara and I are working all day at home on science kit stuff today.

When Lori delivered the mail and picked up a shipment yesterday morning, I asked her what she thought about the new TrumpCare proposal, which basically amounts to “if you like your ObamaCare you can keep your ObamaCare.” She thought I was kidding. When she realized Trump really didn’t intend to get rid of ObamaCare, she said that was the last straw and things were likely to get very bad very quickly. I agreed with her, of course, and asked how she was doing on prepping in general and food storage in particular.

She said she’d repackaged pasta, rice, etc. in Mylar bags with oxygen absorbers, but that she had nowhere near enough stored. Of course, as she said, she also has many tons of beef on the hoof, “if I can hold onto it”. We talked in some detail about what she should do next, and I later sent her the following email to reiterate and expand upon some of what we talked about.

Hi, Lori

I know I ran a lot by you this morning, so I figured I’d summarize it in writing. Here’s what I’d recommend you buy, assuming you intend to feed two adults. This doesn’t include anything for your dogs. I store the same stuff for Colin as for us, figuring him at 70 pounds to be half an adult.

I don’t know what your long-term food storage totals are currently, but if you’re starting without much I’d suggest you target a one-month supply to start. Expand that to three months’ worth, then six, and eventually 12 or more.

Water – At least one gallon per person/day (shoot for 3 gallons/person/day)

You have a well, which is great as long as you have power, and a year-round spring, which is excellent. Still, water is critical, so it makes sense to store at least some water to give you a buffer. I’d recommend you start by storing enough bottled water to keep yourself, Casey, and your dogs for at least one week, at 3 gallons per day. That totals 42 gallons for you and Casey, plus whatever you need for the dogs. We buy Costco bottle water in gallons at $3.60/six-pack, so enough for you and Casey for week would cost about $25. And in a real emergency, you could stretch that to maybe two or three weeks.

Assuming your spring water is not contaminated by agricultural chemicals, you can count that as your second backup supply (assuming you can’t pump well water). Unless you’re completely sure that the spring water is not biologically-contaminated, you’ll need the means to micro-filter it (as with that Sawyer mini filter you have) or chemically treat it. Many sources recommend using unscented chlorine bleach to disinfect your drinking water, and it’s a good idea to keep an unopened gallon on hand for that. However, the problem with liquid chlorine bleach is that it’s inherently unstable. It breaks down even in a new, sealed bottle. After a year it’s noticeably weaker, and before you know it the concentration is down to nothing. A better alternative is to keep a bottle of dry calcium hypochlorite (pool shock or similar) on hand. If you keep it sealed and dry, it lasts indefinitely.

Carbohydrates – 30 pounds/person/month (360 pounds/person/year)

You can mix this up however you like, but I’d recommend the following per person-month as a starting point. Adjust as you see fit, as long as the total is about 30 pounds/person/month. All of these foods provide about 1,700 calories/pound.

10 pounds of pasta (macaroni, spaghetti, egg noodles, etc.)
8 pounds of white flour (for bread, biscuits, pancakes, etc.)
5 pounds of rice (white rice stores better, but brown rice is good for five years or more)
5 pounds of white sugar (or honey, pancake syrup, etc.)
1 pound of oats
1 pound of corn meal

Protein supplement – at least 5 pounds/person/month (60 pounds/person/year)

Although all of the carbohydrates listed except sugar contain significant amounts of protein, it’s not complete protein because it lacks essential amino acids. You can get these missing amino acids by adding beans, legumes, eggs, meats, etc. to your storage. Beans are the cheapest way to do this, but most people prefer meat, eggs, etc. Note that canned wet beans should be counted as one fifth their weight in dry beans, so while 5 pounds of dry beans suffices for a month, if you’re buying, say, Bush’s Best Baked beans, you’d need 25 one-pound cans of them to equal the five pounds of dry beans.

We keep about 100 pounds of dry beans and lentils in stock for the 4.5 of us, but most of our supplementary protein is in the form of canned meats. Cans of chicken from Costco or Sam’s, Keystone Meats canned ground beef, beef chunks, pork, chicken, turkey, etc. You can order Keystone canned meats from Walmart on-line. A 28-ounce can of most of them costs just over $6. We order them in cases of 12 at a time. They also have 14.5-ounce cans, although they cost more per ounce. They might be better for you if you’re planning to feed only the two of you. The actual shelf life of canned meats, like other canned foods, is indefinite assuming the can is undamaged. Keystone, for example, rates their canned meats at a 5-year shelf life, but in fact they will remain safe and nutritious for much, much longer.

Oils and Fats – at least 1 quart/liter or 2 pounds/person/month (12 quarts/liters/person/year)

Oils and fats do gradually become rancid, but stored in their original bottles and kept in a cool, dark place they last for years without noticeably rancidity. Saturated fats (lard, shortening, etc.) store better than than unsaturated fats. Poly-unsaturated fats have the shortest shelf life.

We store a combination of liquid vegetable and olive oils, lard, shortening, etc. We also keep anything up to 40 pounds of butter in our large freezer. In a long term power outage, we’d clarify that by heating it and separating the butter solids from the clear butter, and then can the clear butter to preserve it.

Dairy – at least 1.5 pounds/person/month (18 pounds/person/year) of dry milk or equivalent

This amount is all for cooking/baking. If you want to drink milk, have it on cereal, etc. you’ll need more. You can buy non-fat dry milk already in #10 cans, or buy it in cardboard boxes from Walmart and repack it yourself. (There’s also a full-fat dry milk called Nestle Nido that’s sold in #10 cans and has a real-world shelf-life of at least a couple of years and probably much longer.) Another alternative is evaporated milk or sweetened condensed milk. For drinking or use on cereal, consider a milk substitute like Augason Farms Morning Moos (dumb name, but by all reports it’s the closest thing to real fresh milk). It comes in #10 cans and has a very long shelf life. It’s mostly non-fat dry milk, but with sugar and other ingredients that make the reconstituted stuff taste close to real milk.

Salt – at least 12 ounces/person/month (9 pounds/person/year)

Buy iodized salt. Sam’s sells 4-pound boxes of Morton’s iodized table salt for about a buck each, so a one-person-year supply is about $2 worth. The shelf life is infinite, so buy a lot. Repackage it in 1- or 2-liter soft drink bottles, canning jars, Mylar bags, or other moisture-proof containers. (You don’t need an oxygen absorber.) After extended storage, the salt may take on a very pale yellow cast. That’s normal. It’s caused by the potassium iodide used to iodize the salt oxidizing to elemental iodine. That’s harmless, does not affect the taste, and still provides the daily requirement of iodine (which the soil around here is very poor in).

Meal Extenders/Cooking Essentials (varies according to your situation)

You can survive on just beans, rice, oil, and salt, but the meals you can make with just those foods will get old after about one day. You should also store items that add flavor and variety to your stored bulk foods. (I consider meat a seasoning, but that’s just me…)

Herbs and spices – buy large Costco/Sam’s jars of the half-dozen or dozen herbs/spices (sperbs?) you like best. In sealed glass/plastic jars they maintain full flavor for many years. Your preferences probably differ from ours, but at a minimum I’d suggest: onion and garlic flakes/powder, cinnamon, thyme, parsley, dill, mustard, rosemary, pepper, cumin, etc.

Sauces and condiments – store your favorite sauces/condiments (or the ingredients to make them). We store spaghetti sauce, alfredo sauce, canned soups, ketchup, mustard, pancake syrup, etc. in quantity. Rather than storing barbecue sauce, we store bulk amounts of the ingredients to make it up on the fly. (See http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2017/03/04/saturday-4-march-2017/)

Which brings up another issue. You need to plan your meals and figure out how much of what you’ll need to make them. For example, we intend to have a dinner based on that barbecue sauce once every three weeks, or 17 times a year. The recipe makes up a quart or so of sauce, which with a 28-ounce can of Keystone beef chunks or pork or chicken is enough to feed the 4.5 of us. (The buns are just part of our flour storage.) To know how much we’ll need to store to do that for a year in the absence of outside resupply, we just multiply everything by 17.

17 – 28-ounce cans of Keystone canned beef, pork, or chicken
25.5 cups (11+ pounds) of white sugar
25.5 Tbsp (12.75 fluid ounces) of molasses
25.5 cups (204 fluid ounces) of ketchup
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of prepared mustard
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of vinegar
8.5 cups (68 fluid ounces) of water
17 Tbsp (8.5 fluid ounces) of Worcestershire sauce
17 Tbsp (8.5 fluid ounces) of liquid smoke hickory sauce
34 tsp (77 grams or 2.7 ounces) of paprika
34 tsp (194 grams or 6.8 ounces) of salt
25.5 tsp (59 grams or 2.1 ounces) of black pepper

Cooking/Baking Essentials – varies according to your preferences

You’ll almost certainly want to bake bread, biscuits, etc., so keep at least a couple pounds of instant yeast (we use SAF). On the shelf, it’s good for at least a year. In the freezer, indefinitely. You’ll also want baking soda, baking powder, unsweetened cocoa powder, vinegar, lemon juice, vanilla extract—all of which keep indefinitely in their original sealed containers—and possibly things like chocolate chips, raisins and other dried fruits, jams and jellies, etc.

Multi-vitamin tablets/capsules – one per person/day

Contrary to popular opinion, fruits and vegetables aren’t necessary for a nutritious, balanced diet. Still, most people will want to keep a good supply of them. As usual for canned goods, canned fruits and vegetables last a long, long time. We buy cases of a dozen cans each at Costco or Sam’s of corn, green beans, peas, tomatoes, mixed fruit, pineapples, oranges, etc. (Note that pop-top aluminum cans are problematic. Where a traditional steel can will keep foods good indefinitely, the pop-top cans don’t seem to do as good a job. I recommend you stick to traditional cans, and of course that you have at least two manual can openers.)

Give me a call if you need to talk about any of this.

 

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Tuesday, 14 February 2017

09:39 – It was 33F (0.5C) when I took Colin out this morning, with a light breeze. Barbara is volunteering most of today, and preparing to leave tomorrow morning for Winston. She’ll spend the night with Frances and Al and then drive back up to Sparta Thursday. It’ll be wild women and parties for Colin and me while she’s gone.

Our Wi-Fi router has started acting hinky over the last few days. It locks up and I have to go downstairs to do a power reset. I’m almost certain it’s not a cable problem. Both the Wi-Fi and 100BaseT ports lock up, so the only cable it could be is the one running to the fiber optic TA, which I’ve swapped out more than once.

The problem router is a D-Link DIR-615, which I bought as a spare in May 2015, and swapped out for an older DIR-615 that had started to misbehave several months ago. I also had a DIR-826L router purchased in late 2013 sitting there as a spare. The short story is that neither of the DIR-615’s now works reliably and the DIR-826L is apparently completely dead. It doesn’t even light up when I connect it to power.

D-Link used to be a good brand–one of the Big Three along with LinkSys and NetGear–but given my recent experience I decided to buy something else to replace the D-Links. I ended up ordering a Netgear AC1200, which is to arrive tomorrow.

Just out of curiosity, I opened a #10 can of Nestle Nido dry whole milk powder the other day. It was purchased 1 June 2015 and had a best-by date of 31 March 2016. Since this isn’t non-fat dry milk, I was concerned that the fats in it might cause rancidity. When I opened it, I sniffed it, but I’m not sure how full-fat whole dry milk is supposed to smell. It had a distinct odor, but it didn’t seem to be rancid. I had Barbara sniff it, and she said it didn’t smell like milk, but it didn’t smell rancid either. So I mixed up a quart by adding 120 grams of the powder to a quart of warm tap water. The result just smelled milky to me, but Barbara said it didn’t smell like her fresh 2% milk and she wouldn’t drink it. I tasted it, but I’m not a milk drinker, so I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to taste like. It wasn’t bitter or anything. I used a pint of it last night to make a milkshake, which tasted fine. So the upshot is that I’m not sure whether or not I can consider Nido to be a long-term storage product.

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Thursday, 9 February 2017

10:11 – It was 30.3F (-1C) when I took Colin out this morning, and the temperature has dropped since then. The winds were about 30 MPH (48 KPH) sustained, with gusts to twice that.

When Barbara and I went down to change the particulate filter for the well water the other day, we noticed a drip coming from one of the pipes that leads from the pressure tank up into the house. We called the plumber, and Herschel showed up yesterday to repair it.

While he was here, he changed the particulate filter. I mentioned that the last time we’d changed it was exactly six months ago. We hadn’t noticed any lower flow rate at the faucets, even though the filter is only rated for two months.

Herschel said everything depended on the amount of silt and grit coming out of the well, and that around here people often went a year or eighteen months between filter changes. He said we had a good, clean well. Even after six months, the old filter wasn’t used up yet, and the clear filter housing had almost no grit or sediment in it. I have a reminder in my calendar to change the filter every two months, but I think I’ll just wait until we notice a decrease in flow rate before we change it next time.

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While we were downstairs, Barbara checked our inventory of canned cream of * soups and said we’re actually in pretty good shape on them. We have a half dozen or so 8- and 10-packs, plus a considerable number in the kitchen pantry. So I guess we’ll hold off on a Sam’s run for the time being.

The next time Barbara goes down to Winston, if she has time she can make a Costco run and pick up more canned stuff, including three or four more 8-packs of Campbell’s cream soups, a couple cases of canned green beans, and several more cases of canned tomato sauce/paste. We have a partial case of small cans of Kirkland tomato paste in stock, but that’s it. And Barbara is making a batch of sloppy joe sauce in the slow cooker today.

Walmart came through on their two-day shipping promise. I ordered 18 jars of Bertolli alfredo sauce on Sunday, and they arrived yesterday. The box was pretty badly beaten up, but as usual they’d wrapped each jar individually in that crinkly paper stuff and then bagged them in groups of half a dozen. I also have a small order arriving from Amazon.com tomorrow: a case of 24 small cans of shiitake mushrooms and one #10 each of Augason dehydrated celery and dehydrated carrots. I think I’ll repackage the Augason stuff in quart canning jars with oxygen absorbers and keep one each up in the kitchen. We’re cooking a lot more from scratch/LTS, and many of the recipes call for either or both of those items.

When we do make up a batch of cream soup according to the recipe I posted yesterday, I think my first effort will be Cream of Ground Beef soup. We can make up a quadruple or octuple batch and freeze it in pint or quart bags.

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Wednesday, 1 February 2017

10:29 – It was 39.3F (4C) when I took Colin out this morning, but with not much wind. The snow is all gone, but we have colder temperatures and precipitation in the forecast for now through the weekend, so we may have more before the weekend. Barbara is off to the gym this morning and then volunteering at the Friends of the Library bookstore this afternoon.

If you’ve tried to order antibiotics from aquabiotics.com recently, you noticed that their site no longer lists any products. You can still order frm them, though, but you’ll have to pay with a check or money order. Their credit-card processors, originally PayPal and more lately WePay, find out that they’re shipping “prescription drugs” and refuse to continue to process payments, even though those drugs are for ornamental fish only and therefore completely legal to ship. I paid by check when I ordered last time, and they shipped what they were supposed to ship and in a timely manner. I got email Monday from Dave Folsom at aquabiotics.net.

Wepay has terminated merchant service, so we are now reduced to checks/money order payments. I have removed all items from the website, but left the site up as a point of contact. If you need anything, please use the table below, or the attached spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will allow you to enter your discount percentage(as a decimal) and calculate your total. Discounts are 5% for orders $35.00+, 10% for orders $150.00+, and 15% for all rescue/humanitarian groups on any size order. If you take the rescue discount, please give me the rescue name as our benefactor will pick up a portion of your discount.

I apologize for what has been 13 months of chaos, and in advance for what might be 100 months in the future.

The headlines yesterday said that Walmart was declaring war on Amazon, which is more than a slight exaggeration. All Walmart has done is announce that, as of yesterday morning, they are now selling many products with free 2-day shipping with a minimum order of $35. They’re very careful to point out that it’s literally 2-day shipping, as in two days’ transit time after they actually get around to shipping the order. It’s not going to arrive two days after you order it, because Walmart takes at least a day and often two or three to get the product to the shipper.

Even so, many people expect this to have a severe impact on Amazon Prime, which charges $99/year for unlimited two-day shipping. And Amazon’s actually is two-day from order to delivery at least 50% to 75% of the time.

I’ve been a member of Amazon since their very early days, and a member of Prime since soon after they started offering it. I’ve never particularly liked Amazon, starting when they patented their so-called one-click ordering. Bezos is also a big-time progressive, who now owns WaPo. He supported Obama and Clinton, and has apparently never seen a progressive cause he doesn’t support.

But the real reason I’m considering dropping my Prime membership is that their pricing is often no longer competitive. As in 50% to more than 100% more for exactly the same product I can get elsewhere. I also don’t like their pricing games. If I log on to Amazon and check a price, and then check that same product’s price in a separate browser without logging on, I often find that the logged-in price is noticeably higher than the anonymous price. Obviously, Amazon is punishing current customers because it assumes they’re willing to pay more.

I’ve already started to shift purchases away from Amazon. If they carry something at a better price than is available elsewhere, I can still get free shipping with a $50 minimum order, which is never a problem. That means the only Prime benefit is really their streaming video, but looking back over the last year we really didn’t watch much on Prime Streaming.

So I’ll talk about it with Barbara, but unless she makes a serious objection to dropping Prime, that’s what I’m going to do.

We had a decent January. Kit revenue was up 33% from January of 2016, although still 20% or so lower than an average January. Of course, we’re now into the deadest period of the year. In an average February, we might ship only three kits per week and have total revenues of only two or three grand.

Email overnight from Jen, who wants to get started home canning, and what she wants to can is bacon. She’s concerned because the instructions for doing so are all over the map. Some sites give detailed instructions, while many others say that canning bacon is dangerous. She doesn’t want to take a chance on botulism, obviously, and asked me what I thought.

The truth is that the USDA officially recommends NOT canning bacon, simply because they’ve never done the detailed testing required to determine how to do so safely. But millions of people have been home-canning bacon for a hundred years. Before pressure canning, our ancestors preserved bacon simply by layering the raw meat in barrels, pouring hot lard on top of each layer, and storing the barrel in the kitchen or on the porch. When they wanted some bacon, they’d scrape off the top, rancid layer of lard and eat the bacon beneath it, which was perfectly safe.

The worrisome aspect is our old friend Clostridium botulinum, an anaerobic bacterium that produces deadly botulinum toxin. But it’s safe to eat foods that are contaminated with C. botulinum bacteria, a very common soil bacterium, as long as they’re cooked properly. Boiling destroys both the bacteria and the toxin, although not the spores. Eating the spores is safe for anyone except infants, which is why it’s unsafe to give honey to infants: honey is always contaminated with C. botulinum spores.

I intend to pressure can bacon in the future. I’ll do so by cooking it until it’s soft and slimy, transferring those strips to a canning jar, filling the jar with a brine solution, and pressure canning the hell out of it. For canning bear, beef, lamb, pork, veal, or venison in strips, cubes, or chunks in quart jars, the USDA recommends:

Hot pack – Precook meat until rare by roasting, stewing, or browning in a small amount of fat. Add 1 teaspoons of salt per quart to the jar, if desired. Fill jars with pieces and add boiling broth, meat drippings, water, or tomato juice, especially with wild game), leaving 1-inch headspace.

They recommend different pressures depending on the type of pressure gauge on your canner and your altitude, but the top numbers they recommend are 15 PSI for 90 minutes. I intend to use 15 PSI (or higher if my canner allows it) for 120 minutes, which should kill the shit out of anything in there.

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Tuesday, 31 January 2017

08:58 – It was 40.7F (5C) when I took Colin out this morning, with a stiff wind. The little bit of snow we got is sticking around for now, but with today’s high to be in the mid-50’s (~13C) it’ll be gone by this afternoon.

Trump is the progs’ worst nightmare. Unlike just about every politician in living memory, Trump is actually doing what he said he’d do. Imagine that. Not that I agreed with many of the actions he promised to take, but it is refreshing to see an elected leader whose actions correspond with his words. And it is nice to see him striking terror in the hearts and minds, such as they are, of prog politicians and bureaucrats. Now I see that he’s going to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and probably the 1992 agreement upon which it’s based, not to mention going full steam ahead on the new pipelines. The squeals from the progs are deafening, but they’re music to my ears. I’m hoping his next actions will be to withdraw us from NATO, bring home our overseas forces, and expel the UN from US territory.

People keep talking about progs’ heads exploding, which is a nice image but unfortunately only a figurative one. It’d be nice to see some actual prog heads exploding, literally. A million dead progs would be, as they say, a good start.

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 09:44 – I just got email from a woman who questioned the shelf life of repackaged flour, coincidentally the day after Barbara and I just finished repackaging 50 pounds each of sugar and white flour. Some years ago, she’d opened a #10 can of white flour they’d bought at their local LDS Home Storage Center. It was a couple years past the best-by date on the can, which means it had been packed a dozen years before. She said the flour was tanning, caked, and had an “off” odor. She tried making some pancakes with it, and said it had an off taste as well. She ended up discarding all her LDS flour that was past its best-by date.

I’d heard the same thing from several other people over the years, but the solution is simple: just sift the aged flour and leave it in a container that’s open to the air for several hours. As it’s aerated, the off odor (and taste) disappears, and it’s perfectly usable.

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Saturday, 28 January 2017

11:08 – It was 25F (-4C) when I took Colin out this morning, with winds gusting to probably 30 MPH (~50 KPH). There was a light dusting of snow. The real snow is to start coming in tonight and tomorrow. We’re expecting as much as 4 inches (10 cm) over the weekend.

Barbara returned home about 3:45 yesterday afternoon. We unloaded the back of her car, which was pretty packed from the Costco run. A 50-pound bag each of flour and sugar, two 10-pound boxes of Quaker Oats, two 13.5-pound bags of baking soda, two large jars of cinnamon and one of Italian seasoning, a pint of vanilla extract, two 3-liter bottles of olive oil, and a bulk pack each of toilet paper and paper towels.

The only prepping-related things I added this week were two packs of oxygen absorbers and a case of dehydrated onions from the LDS online store. The onions are actually cheaper on-line ($48.75/case of six #10 cans) than at an LDS Home Storage Center ($54.00/case). They’re also half the price per pound that Walmart charges for Augason Farms dehydrated onions. The LDS on-line store does charge shipping, but it’s only $3.00 per order if you choose the slow-boat method.

I saw a blog comment somewhere complaining about the LDS on-line store charging shipping, which they didn’t used to do. I didn’t remember paying shipping the last time I ordered from them, so I went out and did a search. The top hit was to a discussion forum that had a Mormon complaining about now having to pay shipping on underwear orders.

There’s apparently a lot of discussion among non-Mormons about Mormon underwear, which Mormons refer to as “garments”, with lots of conspiracy theories among the anti-Mormon crowd. It’s all just stupid. Mormon garments have religious symbolism for them, just as a yarmulke does to Jews or a cross necklace to Christians. Yes, practicing adult Mormons, men and women, wear underwear. So what? I do, too, as does everyone I know. Or at least I think they do. There’s nothing to see here. Move along.

We’re in reasonably good shape on science kit stuff for this time of year, so we’ll be working on regular tasks around the house this weekend. That, and repackaging more LTS food. Some of that can wait for now. For example, the Quaker Oats that Barbara picked up at Costco have a best-by date 18 months out in their original packaging. That translates to a real shelf life of at least five years without being repackaged. We’ll eventually transfer them to PET bottles with oxygen absorbers, which gives them an extremely long shelf life, at least 10 to 20 years and probably more.

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Friday, 23 December 2016

09:47 – Barbara is off to the gym and supermarket. I just issued a PO for 10,000 15/415 bottle caps, which should hold us for a while. I remember the first time I ordered a carton (1,440) of those caps, and thought that was a lot. Then the first time I ordered a case of 10,000, I thought I had all the caps in the world and would never run out.

We repackaged some macaroni yesterday from the original 5-pound bags into clean, dry 2-liter soft drink bottles. We got 14 bags transferred into 24 2-liter bottles. We still need to label the bottles and add an oxygen absorber to each. Then there are the other 14 bags still sitting on the kitchen counter.

Barbara commented that this was more macaroni than we’d eaten in the 33 years we’ve been married. It isn’t, really. It just looks like a lot, sitting there in one place. Once we get this last batch repackaged, we’ll be up to about 475 pounds of pasta packaged for long-term storage. That’s enough to provide the grain portion of our diet for the five of us, including Colin, for about four months. The rice, white flour, and other grains we have stored extends that to about a year’s worth. And the 24 cans of Campbell Chunky Soup that arrived the other day can turn those grain products into 24 more tasty main meals.

The special session of the North Carolina house and senate that was called to repeal HB2 has failed, so it’s still illegal for perverts to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. The progs’ attempts to redefine biology has failed yet again, at least in North Carolina. People here are smart enough to understand that, other than a tiny number of monsters, there are exactly two sexes, male (XY) and female (XX), and two sexual preferences, gay (XX+XX or XY+XY) and straight (XX+XY). XX’s who believe they’re actually XY’s and vice versa are, to use the technical term, delusional, and people here understand that. And we understand that we’re under no obligation to humor their delusions.

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Tuesday, 29 November 2016

10:09 – Things are pretty quiet around here. Barbara is finishing up her Christmas decorations today, and we’ll probably bake cookies. I’d also like to try making up some peanut butter fudge.

It’s a good day to stay inside. It’s gone from cool, breezy, and dry to warm, breezy, and wet. We had more than an inch (2.5 cm) of rain overnight, with another couple of inches expected today and tomorrow. It’s just lucky that our temperatures have gone up 20F or so, or this might have been a real mess.

Barbara said yesterday that we’d had only 0.03 inches of rain from early October until now. That affects my water planning. Until now, I’d though that our rainfall was very evenly distributed throughout the year, with roughly one inch per week, usually in two or three weekly rains. Going almost two months with almost no rain means we can’t depend on rainwater capture, at least unless we have a lot more storage.

We’ve been doing a fair amount of baking-powder baking, and our only can of baking powder is almost empty. Barbara is going to pick up another can from the store today, and I just put in a Walmart order that included four cans of baking powder as well as half a dozen cans of Augason potato shreds and three pounds of Hershey’s unsweetened cocoa powder.

We still have a 250 pounds of macaroni to repackage for LTS. It’s the Walmart house-brand macaroni, and it’s smaller than some brands. I discovered experimentally yesterday that it can in fact be funneled into 2-liter bottles. It’s basically free-flowing, which surprised me given its shape. I figured it’d logjam almost instantly in the stem of the funnel, but it didn’t. The trick is to use the cut-off top of another 2-liter bottle to make the widest possible funnel. It’s helpful to have a second person to hold the funnel and keep it aligned with the 2-liter bottle mouth, but I was actually able to do it by myself. When a jam did occur, gentle jiggling freed it easily.

Incidentally, if you order Walmart macaroni (or anything else from Walmart or Amazon particularly) be very careful about pricing. I ordered the 250 pounds of macaroni on two separate orders. The first, for 100 pounds (20 five-pound bags) was $4.48/bag. The second order, for 30 five-pound bags, was $3.17/bag. The last I checked, it was back up to $4.48/bag.

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