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Category: prepping

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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Monday, 13 February 2017

08:13 – It was 30F (-1C) when I took Colin out this morning, with high winds gusting to 60 MPH (96 KPH). As far as I’m concerned, that put the actual wind chill at -30F (-34C). I’ve started leaving a set of lab goggles on the foyer table for just such days. At that temperature and wind speed, I can’t keep my eyes open unless I’m wearing eye protection.

Email over the weekend from Cassie, a relative newbie prepper. When I last heard from her, a month ago, her self-employed husband had just hurt his hand and had to take time off work. Fortunately, he’s fully recovered now and back at work.

Cassie works as a checker at a small local supermarket, where she’s been buying dry staples in quantity regularly. Some of her co-workers noticed and commented on that, and Cassie has become friends with one of them. Because she lacks freezer space and has nowhere to put a standalone freezer, Cassie was considering getting into home pressure canning. She mentioned that to her new friend, who invited her over one day the weekend before last to show her the ropes on home canning.

The supermarket where they both work had a big sale on chicken, so Cassie bought 40 pounds on sale and hauled it over to her new friend’s house, where they pressure-canned it in pint Ball jars. Forty of them, at one pound per jar. Her friend supplied both the canner and the jars, which Cassie will replace with new jars she ordered from Walmart.

Her friend has been canning since she was a little girl and helped her mother and grandmother can. She has two pressure canners, a Presto she bought soon after she got married, and a big All American that her grandmother gave her when she was no longer physically able to can her own stuff. Cassie asked her if the higher price of the All American canner was worth paying. Her friend said she’d been using both for years and that although there were some things she really liked about the All American canner that the cheaper Presto could do everything the more expensive canner could do.

So Cassie ordered the same Presto 23-quart canner we have, along with a gross of pint Ball jars from Walmart. Forty of those go to her friend, which leaves Cassie with 104 canning jars. Her next project is to can a bunch of ground beef, so she’s just waiting for it to go on sale. Her new canner can process 20 pint jars at a time, so she plans to do two or three runs with ground beef to get 40 to 60 jars processed.

For now, Cassie will use the single-use lids that come with the jars, but she owes her friend the 40 Tattler reusable lids they used for her first canning session. Her friend swears by the Tattler lids, which she’s been using for 10 years, so Cassie plans to order a gross of them as well.

She considered buying half-pint jars for her own use, because a pint jar holds about a pound of meat, which is twice what they need for a single meal. But when she saw that half-pint jars sell for only about a buck less per dozen than pint jars, she decided that she didn’t want to spend nearly twice as much on jars to hold the same amount of meat, so she ordered all pint jars except for two dozen quart jars, which she just wanted to have on hand.

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Friday, 10 February 2017

10:00 – It was 21.2F (-6C) when I took Colin out this morning, but the temperature is gradually rising. No wind at the moment. We’re to top out today at around 45F (7C), and then warm up into the 60’s over the next few days. Barbara just left for the gym and supermarket.

It’s been three months since Trump was elected. I’m happy about some of the stuff he’s doing–notably his appointments, most of which are anything but business-as-usual–but not so happy about some of the things he says he intends to do. But on balance, my opinion hasn’t changed since the election. I’m afraid Trump is too little, too late.

He faces huge opposition, mostly from worthless progs, bureaucrats, public-employee unions, and other entrenched interests, but also from some good libertarians and conservatives. Indicative of this is the opposition to Trump’s appointments. Obama and Bush each made 30+ appointments that required Senate confirmation. Of those 60+ appointments, the Senate approved all but a handful overwhelmingly, by what amounted to a rubber stamp. Trump’s appointees have not been shown the same courtesy. They have so far faced extreme opposition, including from some Republicans, and that seems likely to continue with other appointees who are awaiting Senate approval. Obviously, the progs and lefties intend to do everything possible to make Trump’s administration permanent gridlock. The obviously senile prog/leftie Pelosi says she isn’t willing to work at all with President Bush.

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 Lori just showed up with an Amazon shipment that included a case of 24 small cans of mushrooms and one #10 can each of Augason Farms dried celery and carrots. The latter both have best-by dates in 2041.

Which brings up an interesting point. Like many preppers, I’m loathe to open those nice #10 cans because they’re already packaged for LTS. And in some cases, that’s fine. We have, for example, a couple hundred #10 cans of LTS bulk foods like rice, flour, sugar, potato flakes, macaroni, spaghetti, dry milk, etc. etc. We don’t need to open any of those. Rice is rice, so for day-to-day cooking we just use rice we’ve repackaged from 50-pound Costco bags. The same is true of the other bulk staples in #10 cans.

But some of the stuff we buy in #10 cans is not necessarily fungible. For example, we have #10 cans of Augason dried bell peppers, celery, carrots, cheese powder, etc. etc. Although I hate to open them, we need to learn to use them in day-to-day cooking. An open can is rated for a one-year shelf life versus 20 or 25 years on a sealed can. But opening a can doesn’t necessarily cut the shelf-life down to a year. We’ll simply repackage the contents immediately after opening the can. Put the contents into PET bottles, add an oxygen absorber, and we’re back up to a 20 or 25 year shelf life (and probably more).

And in some cases, we pay no penalty for buying LTS packaged food. I’ve mentioned before the Augason potato shreds, which we started substituting for the frozen Ore-Ida products. On a reconstituted weight basis, the AF dehydrated potatoes are actually less expensive than frozen. The same is true of things like onion flakes, which are actually cheaper to buy in #10 cans than they are in large jars at Costco.

In addition to the obvious benefit of eating regularly from LTS food, we’ve found that there’s another benefit to cooking from scratch with LTS foods. The results taste better. That was reinforced yesterday when we made sloppy joe sauce from scratch. Barbara announced a few days ago that she wasn’t buying any more of the canned Manwich sauce because she wanted to try making it from scratch. It’s cheaper to make it from scratch, we can do it from stuff in our deep pantry, and it tastes better. An all-around win.

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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, 8 February 2017

10:02 – It was 48F (9C) again when I took Colin out this morning. It’s to reach a high of 66F (19C) today, with colder temperatures and snow moving in this evening. Tomorrow the high is to be 34F (1C) and the low 18F (-8C).

A bit of excitement this morning. A couple of minutes after she left for the gym, my phone rang. It was Barbara. She was sitting up at the intersection of our road and US21, and said there’d been a minor accident. Her car wasn’t hit, but a guy trying to make the sharp turn off of US21 onto our road had almost hit her and then steered away from her and run down the stop sign.

She asked me to walk up to the corner. The other driver was an elderly guy with disabled veteran plates. He was unhurt and there was only minor damage to his car’s bumper and fender where it had hit the stop sign. Barbara had already called 911, so we stood around and waited for the cops to show up. While we were waiting, a guy driving a tractor with a hay fork came up our road and pulled over to make sure everyone was okay.

So we all stood around talking while we waited. It turns out the elderly guy served in Korea during the Korean War, and then in Viet Nam. He left Sparta at age 17 and finally got back when he was 38. I stuck around because I was concerned the shock of the incident might cause him to have a heart attack, but he seemed perfectly okay. He said there was no one we needed to call for him, and he didn’t even want to sit down.

As is the norm up here in Sparta among all us Deplorables, Barbara and I both thanked him for his service. So did the guy on the tractor when he showed up.

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Barbara mentioned the other day that the next time she went down to Winston she could ask Al to take her to Sam’s Club. We were Sam’s members for a year back a couple years ago, but we ended up dropping that membership because we just weren’t using it often enough to make it worthwhile. Sam’s does carry some stuff that Costco doesn’t, and Frances and Al have often offered to take us  as their guests anytime we like.

So I was putting together a Sam’s Club list for Barbara. One of the things we use a lot that our Costco doesn’t carry is Campbell’s Cream of * soups. Between casseroles and skillet dinners, we probably go through 100 or more cans of this stuff a year. So I was going to add four or five 10-packs of the cream of mushroom and another two or three 10-packs of the cream of chicken. I may still do that, because canned soups are convenient. They require no preparation, and can be stacked in minimal space.

But it’s also easy enough to make cream of * soups from scratch, at the cost of a few minutes work and another dirty pan. The bulk of it is simply a standard white sauce, with whatever the name ingredient is added in relatively small amounts.

  • 2 cloves garlic, minced (or substitute 1 tsp of dry garlic flakes)
  • 1/3 cup onion, diced (or substitute 2 Tbsp of dry onion flakes)
  • 1/2 cup main ingredient, diced or chopped (mushrooms, chicken, celery, etc.; fresh or rehydrated)
  • 1 Tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1/4 cup butter (or substitute 1 Tbsp of butter power in 2 oz. oil)
  • 1/4 cup flour (or substitute cornstarch or dried potato flakes)
  • 1 cup milk (fresh or reconstituted dry)
  • 3/4 cup broth or bouillon (chicken, beef, or vegetable)

Saute the garlic, onion and main ingredient (mushrooms, chicken, celery, broccoli, etc.) in the vegetable oil and set aside. Melt butter over medium heat, whisk in flour, and cook for two minutes. Add milk and broth, followed by the sauteed items. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer, stirring regularly, for 10 to 15 minutes, or until it thickens. Season to taste with salt and pepper and use as you canned condensed cream soup in any recipe.

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Until two or three years ago, Barbara refused to watch any TV series that we’d seen before, even if it had been 20 or 30 years since we’d watched it. Nowadays, because of the dearth of recent series worth watching, we’re mostly re-watching series that we really liked the first or even second time around.

Neither of us has any interest in watching zombies or serial killers or cartoons or progressive propaganda, which seem to make up the bulk of recent series. My strong preference is for peaceful series set in small towns or rural areas, stuff like Heartland, Everwood, Gilmore Girls (the original series, NOT the crappy four-episode follow-on that Netflix made), and even Jericho.

We’re just finishing up re-watching Lark Rise to Candleford, alternating with Jeeves and Wooster, so I pulled out the Everwood discs. I love watching Emily Vancamp as a 15-year-old cutie.

One thing I’ve noticed about the series I prefer is that with minor exceptions the young women main cast members keep their clothes on, not just in the series I watch, but period. You won’t find nude images, for example, of Heartland’s Amber Marshall or Everwood’s Emily Vancamp or Jericho’s Sprague Grayden. They simply turn down roles that require them to disrobe on camera.

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Sunday, 5 February 2017

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.

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Saturday, 4 February 2017

09:35 – It was a lot chillier when I took Colin out this morning, 17.5F (-8C). It’s supposed to warm up a bit over the next few days.

FedEx showed up yesterday with my order from LDS online, a case of six #10 cans of dehydrated onions and two 100-packs of oxygen absorbers. The box was emblazoned with the LDS logo and its contents, so now the FedEx guy also knows I’m a prepper. Not that that matters much. Preppers are pretty thick on the ground around here. As is true of any rural area, it’s more common for people around here to have deep pantries than not.

With only the first 10% of February gone, we’re at 33% of last February’s kit revenues. We’re getting low stock on all of our science kits, so we spent some time yesterday making up chemical bags for chemistry kits. Next up is forensics kits. A multiple order late yesterday took us down to just one of those in stock, so we’ll get another batch made up. After that, biology kits, which we’re down to only half a dozen of. And amongst all this, I have to work on taxes. Grrrr.

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Friday, 3 February 2017

10:03 – It was exactly freezing when I took Colin out this morning, with a slight blizzard: no wind and an occasional snowflake visible.

There’s been discussion in the comments lately about the suitability of various areas for preppers. Of course, for many preppers relocation isn’t really an option because of job and family responsibilities. For many others–those who are retired or wealthy or can earn a living anywhere–the question is where it is safest and best to relocate.

There are any number of sites on the Internet that purport to rank the states by suitability, and I looked at a lot of those before Barbara and I relocated back in late 2015. Michael Snyder has one of the better sites, where he ranks and grades the 50 states. He awards an A to only Idaho, a B+ to Montana, and a B to Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia.

I decided that none of these sites were useful, mainly because they broke everything down by state, which is a dumb way to go about it. For example, other than the fact that they’re both in Virginia, the far southwestern part of the state has nothing at all in common with the DC metro area. In terms of population density, the latter area earns an F in my book, while the former is very close to an A. Also, Snyder and many others consider the presence of nuclear power plants to be a downcheck, when in fact it’s a very good thing to have power  plants nearby that are independent of fuel resupply. And so on.

I’m not as good at multivariate analysis as I used to be, but I gave it a shot. The first thing I did was draw a circle of 50 miles radius around any metro area of one million or more population. Anything inside that circle was out. The next thing I did was overlay that map on another map that showed annual rainfall, which I used to rule out arid areas unless there was reliable surface water readily available. I continued doing that with various key criteria–such as percentage of land devoted to agriculture, politics, gun laws, etc.–until I’d eliminated most of the US land area.

What was left was large areas of the midwest, basically most of Kansas and Nebraska, along with non-arid parts of Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas. That and the Blue Ridge/Appalachian mountains of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee.

Barbara and I actually seriously considered the Montana/Alberta border area, but neither of us had ever lived in the West and Barbara much preferred to move to somewhere closer to where she grew up and where her friends were. Thus we decided on the Blue Ridge mountains and eventually on Sparta.

Not that prepping was our only criterion. We both liked the idea of rural/small-town living, where people are friendlier and the customs are much more traditional. Basically, we now live surrounded by Deplorables, and that’s just the way we like it. The inconveniences are minor, and more than made up for by the general lifestyle. If shopping is limited, who cares? There’s always Amazon, Walmart, and Costco on-line, and there are plenty of big-box stores within a two- to three-hour round trip.

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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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Monday, 30 January 2017

09:36 – It was 19.6F (-7C) when I took Colin out this morning, with a stiff wind. There had been a slight blizzard overnight, with what looked like maybe an inch (2.5 cm) of accumulated snow. With the more or less constant wind we have up here on the mountain, it can be tough to tell for sure. The wind scours surfaces like driveways and roads and piles up any accumulated snow on fields and other rougher surfaces.

I’ve been seeing lots of articles recently about rich people prepping, buying homes in New Zealand, etc. Rich as in multi-billionaire hedge fund managers, Internet entrepreneurs, and so on. Here’s one representative article I read yesterday. It included this image, with the caption, “Here’s an image of shelves at a Wal-Mart in Charlotte NC taken as a relatively minor snow storm was approaching the area on January 6th 2017.”

The takeaway of this article was intended to be that even very wealthy people have started to prep, because they know what’s coming down the road.

My takeaway is quite different, summarized by one quote from the article: “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”

Yes, prepping is a no-brainer if you have enough money that you can drop a million bucks on prepping without having to think about it. But the thing is, it’s also a no-brainer (or should be) for people with much smaller bank accounts, like the regular readers of this site.

I can’t afford to buy an island or even a second home in New Zealand. So what? Prepping isn’t about buying guarantees, even for billionaires. It’s about maximizing the chances for you and your family by reallocating assets. You probably can’t shift a hundred million bucks out of your bank account like many of these people can do, but unless you’re living hand-to-mouth you can probably afford to shift some of your assets from the ones and zeros in your bank account to hard assets like stored food and gear. If it’s $100,000, great. You’ll be better prepared than 99.999% of the US population. If it’s $10,000, well that’s a tremendous step forward. If it’s only $1,000 or even $100, well that’s a start.

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