Save Money And Be A Hero While You Make Dinner - Hot Pot Cooking

Hot pot cooking is a very old way to save energy or fuel for cooking. It also allows you to do something else while your food cooks. The first time I read about it, I thought they meant, "Crock Pot", instead of "Hot Pot". 

A hot pot is probably a distant ancestor of the crock pot, but only requires heat to start the cooking process, so uses much less heat, energy or fuel to do the cooking.

Some of the oldest ways to make a hot pot were probably done with straw or other dried plant materials used as insulation around the hot pot to hold in the heat. You can still use straw or other dried plant materials, if they are free or cheap and easy for you to get. 

There are now many more alternatives to straw to hold the heat around your hot pot and allow it to keep cooking without adding more heat. Old clothes, blankets, or other fabric can work for insulation around your hot pot. Natural fibers are safest to start out with until you understand what the heat will do to different kinds of fabric. Some synthetics are very flammable, so should not be used for a hot pot. 

Styrofoam, either the solid pieces, or peanuts for packing make excellent insulation around your hot pot. Shredded paper can also be insulation for your hot pot.

Your hot pot will stay warmer if you have something to hold your insulating materials around it. A cardboard box will work, at least when you are starting out with your experiment.

An ice chest would make a very good hot pot, as long as it belongs to you and isn't extremely expensive. When you start out, you will be finding out how hot your hot pot can be to start with and how you can safely hold that heat around your hot pot.

If you have enough insulation around your hot pot, it can keep cooking for most of the day. Although the hot pot does not need to be tended to keep cooking for a long time, when you first start you should plan to be around and check it frequently. You don't want synthetic fabrics scorching and burning, and you may want to add more insulation.

I read that it is believed that hot pots were first used so that people could work in the fields growing more food while their meal was cooking. Even if you don't work in the field, it can be nice to finish whatever kind of work you do and have a nice hot meal ready for you. 

Not only will practicing the use of a hot pot give you a pleasant meal that you don't have to fuss over, but it is teaching you skills that you can use in a disaster to cook with little fuel. It also helps you use less fuel now to save the environment and slow down climate change. You can cook dinner and be a hero at the same time.

Develop Expertise In A Survival Skill For Barter

Even if you do not believe in any kind of TEOTAWKI  or WTSHTF events  happening in your lifetime you may be starting to see how you could end up in a disaster that will last for an extended period of time. Examples of this could be a hurricane or earthquake.

Destruction can be so extensive that it will require a long time for things to return to normal in your area. That can mean you will have to deal with chaos for a while.

Preparedness for long term disasters is different than for short term disasters. Long term preparedness requires more planning and a different way of thinking and looking at your planning.

Supplies, infrastructure to get more supplies in, and financial structure can all be in short supply for a long time. This means that if you are ready for a barter economy in your disaster area, you and your loved ones will be better off than if you are not prepared for a barter economy. 

You can plan to have extra essential supplies to barter during a long term disaster, but they will eventually come to an end and might not be replaceable. Having a skill to produce items that others will want or need during a disaster could be more helpful to you than having a finite amount of extra supplies to barter.

Some of the skills that you already have may be useful for barter. Part of your disaster planning could be taking a look at the skills that you and your loved ones already have. 

If you and your loved ones do not have any skills that might be good for barter in a long term disaster, you can pick a skill and develop it. 

Survivalists and preppers have many views on what kinds of skills might be good for barter. This blog post does not begin to have enough space to go into detail about what kind of skill you should develop for your own use and for barter during a long term disaster. 

Medical care is a skill that is always in demand during disasters and should include alternative medicine. If you know the herbs in your area and are well stocked and know how to get more, you can barter those skills and take care of your needs and those of loved ones.

That is just an example to get you started. You can look at your own likes and dislikes for what skill you might like to develop. If you think a certain skill might be helpful during a disaster, others will probably need the same thing.

If you can not afford to go to school or pay to learn a survival skill for barter, then look on the internet. You can learn almost anything you really want to learn on the internet for free. I already wrote a post on the use of search engines for preparedness. That can include preparedness by learning a new skill. You can look on the internet and learn that new skill.

What Do You Want A Survival Bracelet For?

I believe many of my readers are new to prepping and survival information. Because of that belief, I tend to keep my posts pretty simple so that newbies can understand them. 

Since I am weird, I often have a very unusual take on emergency preparedness. This means that I often think of things that experienced preppers and survivalists never even thought of. Even if they did think of whatever it was, they may get ideas about it that are helpful.

Experienced preppers will know all about survival bracelets, but maybe newbies have never heard one and would not recognize one if it bit them. I would hate to see a new prepper savagely bitten by a survival bracelet, so I will tell you about it for disaster risk reduction purposes. :-)

Survival bracelets are made out of "paracord". This is extremely tough skinny rope that parachute strings used to be made out of. Parachutes may still be made out of paracord. I have not had occasion to examine a parachute lately, so I wouldn't know.

Military people have justly earned a reputation for resourceful use of available materials, (and making "midnight requisitions" - but that is another subject). Paracord became used for an infinite variety of purposes due to this military resourcefulness.

Since paracord became widely used for survival purposes by military survival experts, they often carried it with them. Sometimes the paracord was formed into items worn on one's person, like bracelets.

"Survival bracelets" were the result of all of this survivalist popularity. They moved into the general, non-military population, especially among preppers. Some ex-military people began to earn some money by making them and selling them.

Eventually every, "Tom, Dick, and Harry" was selling survival bracelets, either in person or online. They have many sites that tell you how to make your own survival bracelets, using fancy or plain knots, in any color you can imagine, and some that a military person could not imagine.

You can buy jigs to help you make your survival bracelets to the exact wrist measurements that you need. There are even sites that tell you how to make your own jigs for making survival bracelets. 

You do not need a jig to make survival bracelets, but if you have a big family and want all of them to have survival bracelets, then you might want a jig. 

I have a favorite site that I go to when I want to know how to make something. It is called, "Instructables". It usually has at least ten or twenty different ways to make just about anything, with a supplies list and step by step instructions for each one. I like it a lot. You probably will too.
Here is a link to it: http://www.instructables.com/tag/type-id/

Here is a short list of things that you can do with paracord for survival purposes:
You can hang your food over a high tree branch, out of reach of animals like bears. You can tie branches together to start a quick survival shelter to keep you warm. You can hang food over a fire to cook. 

You can rescue someone from a hole or cliff with paracord. You can tie stuff to your backpack with it. You can make a backpack with it. You can make snares to catch animals to eat. You can make tripwires to let you know if someone is trying to sneak up on you while you are sleeping. You can do a lot more things with it.

It is not absolutely essential to have paracord with you at all times or even in your go bag. It just happens to be much easier than hunting down plant fibers and processing them into cordage during an emergency. You will have plenty of other things to think about instead, during most emergencies.

Make Your Money Buy More For Every Day And Preparedness 2

This post is a continuation of a post about saving money for every day as well as for preparedness. 

The next way to save money was laundry. I have already posted several times about doing laundry during and after a disaster. I will not repeat that information here, except to say that coin operated machines suck up a lot of your money. 


If you wash your laundry yourself, especially by hand, and stop using dryers, it will save you a lot of money. Saving money on laundry is possible if you have your own washer and dryer at home as well. Dryers do take a lot of money to operate. You may want to use it as little as possible or not at all.

Stop going to corner grocery stores and use the big cheap places as much as you can. Buy your food in bulk. If you can't eat that much before it spoils, find someone to split larger amounts with.

Either don't use convenience foods or make your own. I have posts about doing that as well. 

Saving money works best when you pick something that will add up over time. An example is the change to compact fluorescent bulbs. Every electric bill after switching to compact fluorescent bulbs was lower. 


That gave me money to use to buy other things that would help me save even more money. An example was buying a big enough bowl to mix my own convenience foods in and a container to store the convenience mix in. I was able to buy those with electric bill savings.

Even if you and your family are not vegetarians, you can use some vegetarian food to save on your food bill. The first one I am talking about is called, "textured vegetable protein", or TVP for short. You can add it to meat dishes to make them go farther. If you get TVP by mail in bulk, it is much cheaper than meat. 

It is a good idea to avoid serving an all meat dish that you plan to put TVP into very close to the time you serve the TVP. Your family, and you, are more likely to notice the difference that way. If you wait at least a week to put TVP into your chili, it will not be as noticeable. I chose spicy dishes to help hide the different taste of the TVP. 

TVP comes in different flavors such as beef, chicken, pork or fish or sausage, etc. It also comes in different shapes and sizes. The most common form is small hard pieces that are about the size of cooked ground beef. You can find this size and type of TVP in a lot of health food stores, to try it out and see if you will like it.


Since TVP comes in so many flavors and shapes, you can easily substitute it for meat in many of your favorite recipes. TVP is also a convenience food since you only need to add boiling water and soak it for five minutes to have it ready to use.


This post is too long so I will continue it in another post.

Poor People's Disaster Preparedness

You would probably not be reading this if you feel good about how things are going in the country, economy and the world. We have all noticed that there have been a few glitches in the financial sector for a while and Mother Nature has been on a rampage too. I am against a lot of pointless worry. If I am going to worry it needs to do some good. I intend to get ready for disasters.


Most disasters have a certain generic quality. If you are ready for one disaster, you are ready for most other disasters, with a little tweaking for specifics. We all need water, food, clothing, shelter, warmth, a way to eliminate body wastes, safety, etc. That still applies in a disaster, any disaster.


My first step is to figure out how to survive long enough to find out what is going on and have an idea what to do about it. That is the first day or 24 hours. If you are on a tight budget that is a good place to start to avoid being overwhelmed with the cost of it all. Every time you go shopping think of one small item you could use to eat for a meal without too much preparation, especially cooking. If you can't manage a whole meal, get part of a meal at a time.


Water is something you can probably do something about for free. I am sorry for getting ahead of some people here. Lots of people do not know why you might want water in a disaster. You just turn on the tap and water comes out, right? Nope. Lots of disasters can stop water from coming out of the tap when you turn it on. An earthquake, for example, can break the water lines. Cold weather disasters can do the same thing. A radioactive disaster can make it so you won't want to turn on the tap and drink what comes out, depending on where the water comes from. Ok, I'm not here to explain every possible disaster to you. youtube does that. :-p


If you ever drink soda pop, bottled water, juice, or milk and other things besides, you sometimes have nice plastic bottles that they came in. Wash out the bottle and you now have a water container for you to store water for disasters. Free water storage for disaster preparedness is good.


Smaller bottles of water may not feel as satisfying and secure as a 50 gallon container, but they sure are a lot easier to find a way to store. You can put them under the couch, or bed or in the closet or behind the books. Find some nooks and crannies to put them in. You will need more water than you drink because you have to wash your hands and dishes, etc. A gallon a day per person is conservative. You can use less if you are careful. Experts stress that trying to ration water for drinking is a bad idea, but you can save on the cleaning water.


The next problem is what to do if you tap water is not great. I do not like drinking the water that comes out of my tap and I do not want to lug a lot of heavy water bottles around all the time, or pay for them. I like my Mr.Coffee coffee maker. It has a permanent filter that you can get to filter your water. I do not drink coffee, so it is easy for me to dedicate my coffee maker to water filtering only. If you use yours for coffee, you need to decide whether you are going to clean it out in between coffee and water filtering use or get another one. Not every Mr. Coffee coffeemaker will hold the permanent filters. My local Costco has the right kind on sale now. Unfortunately I found that out after I had already paid more somewhere else. It may not be too late for you. They say on the side of the box that a permanent coffee filter is included.


Your hot water heater may be a water source for disasters. It depends on what kind of hot water heater you have. The newer ones do not have a spigot on the bottom, but on the top. That means you will have to have a pump to get water out of them. You must know how to shut off the water going in and out of the hot water heater so it won't go down the drain, literally. If you have a disaster, keeping the clean water in your hot water heater for drinking later needs to be a priority. As soon as you get up off the floor or whatever, go take care of the hot water heater. You need either a wrench that will turn a thing that closes in the water in the tank or a special tool made only for that purpose. The special tool is less likely to walk off, so I favor it, taped to the hot water heater with instructions for use. If the heater runs on gas, you may want to turn it off if the gas is not working, to avoid an explosion.


If you live in an apartment building, you will have to talk to the manager about the water in the hot water heater, and using it in a disaster.


Toilet tanks can be considered a water source for emergencies. I gather they need to be considered contaminated. Even contaminated, they can be purified for emergencies. It is water you don't have to go out and bring home. That can be pretty valuable.


I am not going to cover purifying water for emergency use yet, because that is kind of advanced.  I am starting with the easy stuff for a few days of preparedness first.


Next post will have ideas for places to find non-consumable disaster preparedness items, and links.