Why in Hell We Prep

In a dim thunderclap, S.D. and I realized we're preppers, and that we're rather getting into prepping for the ZA (or as other preppers call it, when the SHTF).  I was reflecting why we do this, and first and foremost, because it's fun, really fun, actually.  We get to discover all kinds of things about ourselves and about others around us as we make our lives more snug and secure, and that's just really neat.  Secondly, it really gives us purpose and reason to keep moving forward by sometimes looking backward at how things used to be done, how it is done now and how to improve on the future process of things.

Both S.D. and I see the folks we work with daily have what we see is an incredibly drab and purposeless existences, where they work, go home, eat what they are told to do, and watch tv until it's time to go to bed when they are told to.  We build our purpose daily by turning off the instruction box and swimming upstream whenever we can, working around and against the system, doing not what we are told, but what feels right to do.  We feel purpose in forging our own lives and making them what we want.

Thirdly, we save money doing this.  I've been buying foods and produce in bulk and canning them up on otherwise lazy afternoons, foraging and gleaning has become a new hobby for me, too.  S.D. has figured out the savings on making our own alcohol from found and bulk fruit.  While I've encouraged him to keep track of expenses on this, he feels the layout of cash for equipment is something we'll just keep using.  Overall, the cost of things has been going down for us as we watch the cost of healthy food goes up all around us.

On a fourth level, we hate GMOs.  Only by being fiercely protective of our food supply can we avoid as many GMOs as possible.  This is for health reasons, not only for us, but for those around us. (more on that to come later)

So, you look for reasons, here are 4 for you.  Keep on it, stop doing what the television tells you to do, think for yourself, and start prepping.

During the ZA, Things Ought to Taste Good, Too

Ketchup has been around for a couple hundred years of so, and has only really recently become the flavorless, red, runny goo we now see in stores.  It was almost any color, made of a mixture of fruits, vegetables, spices and seasonings.  S.D. and I are rediscovering what ketchup really was.

To make ketchup, a couple things are really really helpful, one being an electric turkey roaster, the other being a kitchen aid with the proper attachments (Food Grinder and Fruit & Vegetable Strainer Parts), and a food scale that goes up to 10 or 11#.  We're really getting into recipes by weight when it comes to produce, because it relieves the asspain of trying to figure out how many tomatoes in cups or some such.

We did leave the tomatoes, peppers and onions just on slow rot in the roaster for about 36 hours, and a bit here and there got a little done, but it just made the tomatoes more roasted tasting, which is really not bad at all.

25# tomatoes, cut in half, at least

2.5 - 3# onions

10 - 16 oz garden peppers (we plant a hot mix, but also some bells.)

-Roast in an electric roaster, mashing and stirring occasionally, for about 36 hours, with the lid ajar to allow steam to escape.

-Run tomato mixture through the juicer of the Kitchen Aid, sometimes running the pulp back through until the pulp is rather dry and you have all the good stuff

-Stick 2 heads of garlic into the oven on 350 - 375 degrees to start roasting

-Cook your tomato mixture down to about 1.5 gallons

Add (and adjust to taste)

1c red wine

1.5c cider vinegar

2T celery powder (or 3 stalks celery, really finely chopped)

1T canning salt

1.25c brown sugar

2T Sweet Hungarian Paprika

2tsp dry mustard

1tsp cloves

1/4tsp cinnamon

2 heads roasted garlic, all mashed up

cook all in a non-reactive pot to mix and mellow flavors.  Process in pressure canner 30 minutes at 10#.  Label and put on the canning shelves.

Now, S.D. and I like things a wee bit snappy, but we did document the ketchup as we did it.  We did taste after the addition of each ingredient into the pot and adjusted.  You might want to do the same thing.

Really Useful Thing

When you are involved in as much food prep in the house as S.D. and I are, often your largest dishes and serving items are just not big enough to do the job.  I found a large chafing dish as a garbage score a couple years ago, and it owes us nothing at this point!  It's big enough to start a double batch of pickles (10# of squash), sort grapes in, process crabapples, and do quite a number of other things.  I highly recommend having one on hand, and we'll likely be going to a restaurant supply house to get another rather soon.

Another incredibly useful thing has been the large capacity Nesco roaster.  With the roaster, we have been able to pre-cook meats for canning, reduce plum and peaches for butters, and take the pan out to thaw wine making fruit in.  It has the added bonus of not heating the house up as it works.

So, big pans are always a help when it comes to prepping your stores, and roasters can take the burn factor out of making fruit butters.  A good thing to keep in mind.

Preserving by Making it Small

S.D. and I have been canning and preserving the summer's bounty as much as we can, and have observed that 2011 has been the year of the experiment.  One experiment that has gone reasonably well is dehydrating foods.  Generally, I freeze things or can them up, but some things just can handle dehydration well and take up far less room that way.  After my sister, F.J. had a power outage that lasted for about a week, S.D. and I started thinking about what would be lost if the ZA came to being, and there was no power anymore, how would we deal with things, then?

So we figure, food storage that lasts a while but needs no additional energy to maintain, that means canning or dehydrating for now.  So far, we've dehydrated peppers, tomatoes, celery, pumpkins, and onions, all of which are easily powdered for use in recipes as seasonings, sneaky vegetables, flour replacements, thickeners, and a wider culinary repertoire.  There is higher energy use at the start end of things, but less for long-term storage.

We're practicing FIFO and other forms of stock rotation, and labeling is a must for this situation, but so far it's looking pretty good.  It goes back to something I learned the hard way: there is often more than one right way to do things.  We're just figuring out which right way is best for us.

Along with the year of the experiment, we are keeping notebooks of what we're doing.  If humanity rises again, perhaps they might want a record of all that we're figuring out, or, we just won't make the same mistakes twice.  

As a bonus, while doing these things, the grocery bill has come down considerably, and we're eating less and less processed food with ingredients we can't pronounce, less GMOs and other nasty things.  Hopefully it will keep us alive longer and less like the walking dead.

Do It Yourself For Yourself

Do you ever stop and think about how much money you spend on some things?  Relatively small (or large) purchases add up over time.  A gallon of milk is a little less than $3 unless you live on a farm.  Eggs are about $2/dozen, again, unless you live on a farm.  Beer and wine can be anything from almost trivial to very expensive.  But none of this sounds like a lot, until you look at consumption over time. 

A family may go through 3-4 gallons of milk a week and that's $500 per year!  Say you drink 1-2 bottles of wine per week at $12 each.  That's not much for 2 people, and $12 can be getting off pretty cheap.  Still, that adds up to about $1000 per year in wine.  And that's not counting house gifts or dinner parties.

We had a trip to the South last year and visited a winery.  They didn't do much with grapes because the climate there wasn't good for grapes.  But they did a whole lot with fruit of all kinds, most of grown locally and in some cases sustainably.  This gave us some ideas.  So this summer we started home winemaking.  This was done mostly for the flavors we enjoyed but cannot obtain locally.  Sure, we can get 6 bottles of whatever we wanted delivered to our door for the low-low price of $240 (not!), but we really like to provide for ourselves.  We especially like to tailor our things to our tastes.

It was a trip to our local discount food store that really put us over the edge.  We picked up 3 flats of strawberries (8 quarts each) for $10.  Next stop, the home brewing store for a one time purchase of enough hardware to get us started (about $150, including some special equipment for fruit wines, but if we knew then what we know now, it would have been under $100).  That plus sugar and we were off to the races.  Total cost per bottle excluding durable goods, including the sugar and glass will be around $3 for strawberry wine.  Same thing happened the next week when we found 56 LBS of plums for $10.  Yield on these two batches will be around 2 cases of wine, per batch.

Added bonus: not this Chirstmas but next, a lot of people will be getting homemade wine for gifts.  They like that because they don't really want more stuff, it's something truly unique, and they can use it up.  Double-added preparedness bonus: if something awful happened to our economy, I can think of worse things to have to trade than 15 cases of wine.

Is processing fruit for wine time consuming?  Yes, but so it watching TV.  Is there risk?  Yes, we don't know how these will turn out.  They may be awful, and we know people that had bad experiences making wine.  But we also know people that routinely have very good experiences making wine, and don't shop in liquor stores anymore.  There are easier ways to do this; you can buy kits that are essentially everything but the water and yeast.  But what is there to learn in that?  If we rely on a pre-mixed product, did we really gain much other than a price break?

The best thing is to really learn a skill and understand a process.  It's been done for thousands of years.  Sure, biblical wine wasn't as good as we have today, and chemistry from the 19th century improved the process, but now we understand it at a fundamental level.  We can take what we learned and start over anywhere with some very rudimentary equipment if we had too.  We can also pay it forward by helping others to understand that modern conveniences, no matter what they are, can be learned and done at home with some good old fashioned learning and elbow grease. 

Freedom lives where there is independence, and little is more independent than providing your own shelter, food, security, and best yet, luxury items.  That is a statement of real personal power, so what can you do to be more independent?

You're Not Gonna Die From This

S.D. and I have been playing with the idea of making sauerkraut at home.  While this could conceivably be the stinkiest idea we've ever come up with, it could also be very rewarding.  

One of the things I kept hearing about on homemade sauerkraut was the possibility of botulism in your handmade product.  I had to find out, as how can you survive the ZA only to fall to botulism poisoning from your own preparedness?  Not a good idea!  So I looked.  And looked.  And searched.  

And came up with nothing.  No scientific proof of botulism from properly made sauerkraut.  na-da.  Oh, there were second hand accounts and "heard once upon a time" storied aplenty, but no actual scientific research, mention or proof.  This also jives with my chemistry background, (and micro and food science) as the pH of sauerkraut is at least one point more acid than botulism can survive and thrive.

The warning I did run into is to never make pickles with homemade and untested vinegar of unknown pH lever.  This is a far cry from "botulism from sauerkraut ate my baby" scare tactics that were going around all over the internet.  There is, by the way, a litmus test for pH of vinegar using, well, litmus paper that is easily acquired off the internet of from a science supply store.  And then you know.  Funny how things can get carried to an extreme simply by word of mouth and not by critical thinking.

In any case, I will be buying cabbage to do this experiment, as my cabbage did less than nothing this year, unless you count a dramatic death-scene that would've been good for a freshman in high school drama class.

I'll keep you posted on the fermenting news as it comes along.  In the meantime, don't get bit, know your exits, grown your own when you can, and stay prepared!

What if We Didn't Notice?

S.D. and I went on our annual state fair date, and among the shuffling hordes, shuffling along, were likely plenty of zombies.  These zombies were easily placated by fried foodstuffs on a stick, but it brought my attention up sharp!  If we were at a populous event and the ZA broke out, would we even notice until it was too late?

Unlike most (S.D. included), I have a strong mental map of the fairgrounds, so escape would not be difficult if necessary, but many other there would become brainy appetizers.  It also occurred to me that perhaps zombies would be easily distracted by shiny 4H displays and crop art, it seemed so at the time.

So, the next day, at home, we took a few more steps to make the house secure, lay in more provisions, and recuperate.  Most people won't understand or "get" the preparedness, so I just don't explain, I just let them think we're nuts.  It's a strategy that works.

Do you know your escape plan for when the time comes?  It could be mighty important!