How To Adjust Spices In Recipes

 If you have read my posts about preparedness food you already know that I consider spices to be an important part of your preparedness food. A good selection and use of spices will allow you to keep eating the same things repeatedly without getting tired of it during an emergency.

I gather from my reading that many people do not know how to adjust their spices for cooking. This can be serious if you are depending on spices to give you a variety of tastes for your storage food both in your everyday diet as you use and replace your food storage and in emergency use.

This post is to help you learn how to adjust your spices to your personal tastes. The first part of this process is to examine what you like. Do you find yourself adding a lot of pepper and salt to your food when you use the recommended amount of spice in a recipe? If that is the case or if you think it is tasteless or bland, then you can probably increase the amount of spices called for in ordinary recipes.

Some exceptions to watch out for are Szechuan, or Sichuan Chinese food. That is the extra spicy Chinese food. They use the hottest peppers in the world. I believe  eating the Szechuan food could substitute for a tonsillectomy. When I go to a Chinese restaurant that serves Szechuan food, I ask them to go easy on the spices. I don't even use Szechuan recipes, but if you do, like most people, you will probably need to reduce the spices called for in the recipes. 

Some recipes have the taste of the spices in it as an important part of the entire recipe and in those you WANT to taste the spices. In other recipes the spices are meant to be subtle and you don't even want to be able to specifically notice a particular spice taste standing out from the background taste.

My pineapple/blueberry smoothie is one of those. If you taste the spices, I think you have too much spice in it. In that recipe, the spices should just give it a little bit of a wild berry taste so that you don't especially even notice that it has spices in it.

One of the problems with getting spices correct for a recipe is that there is a tremendous variation in how strong spices can be. If you get your spice from a grocery store, it can have been on the shelf for over a year. That will mean that spice will be weaker in taste than a fresher spice. You will need to use more of the grocery store spice to get the same amount of spice taste. That could mean doubling the amount of spice that you use to get the same taste.

I have been increasingly using bulk spices from health food stores instead of supermarket spices. The health food store spices are usually much fresher. I believe that this is healthier as well as more tasty. The variety in a health food store's bulk section may be less than is available in the grocery. This means that you will have to get some spices from the grocery.

If you think food is usually bland and tasteless, then you might want to start out a new recipe by increasing the spice called for in it. My personal preference is to use a recipe the first time, exactly as written. Once I know how the author meant it to come out, then I feel free to adjust it to my preferences. That is the point where I add or reduce the spices. I think that 1/8 teaspoon or less is a safer increment to adjust the amount of spices in a recipe. 1/8 teaspoon measuring spoons can be hard to find, but they are available. If this is too difficult you can take a 1/4 measuring spoon and estimate what half of that would be.

A pinch is an old measurement for spices. It is the amount of spice that can fit held between your index (pointer) finger and your thumb. The size of your hand can really make a difference in this measurement. If you have a very large hand you will probably do well to assume that it is best to go scant on your pinch for a standard recipe. A pinch can help you be consistent in adding spices to your recipes. I kind of use an eyeball method, which has its drawbacks. If you spice directly into the recipe, it can vary quite a bit and make your cooking unpredictable.

You can reduce this unpredictable element by shaking your spice into the lid of the spice container or the palm of your hand so you can control the amount before it hits your recipe.

Emergencies are kind of miserable to live through anyway. It could make you and everyone who eats your cooking during an emergency feel nibbled to death by ants if your cooking is wildly variable. It might be safer to learn to shake your spices into the container lid or palm of your hand before you actually put them into your recipe.

Basil is my favorite herb. I will use it as an example to explain what you are dealing with on herbs. You can take seeds from the same packet and grow them up into a plant to use for cooking. Each plant from that same packet can produce leaves that will taste noticeably different. The difference can include stronger or weaker basil taste. Each plant will taste different depending on whether you use the leaves dried or fresh.

How you dry the leaves and how you store them and how long you store them can all affect the taste and strength of the basil taste when you put it in your food.

When you have all of those variable and more affecting how your food tastes when you put basil on it, you can see that using spices can require more than automatically putting a half teaspoon of a spice or herb into your food.

You have to know how that spice you want to use tastes. I have learned to have a pretty good idea of how an herb will taste by smelling it. I don't believe that this ability is very common, but if you can develop it, it saves a lot of trouble. If not, then you will need to taste your herbs before you use them. If a dish turns out to be too strong tasting for a particular herb or spice, then you know to reduce that herb or spice a little the next time you cook. 

I dislike taking the chance that I will ruin an entire dish by really over-doing the spices in it. That means I make small adjustments each time I cook it until I get the spices where I want them. 1/4 to 1/8 teaspoon is about as fast as I like to go to adjust my herbs or spices in a recipe. I usually keep the herb or spice adjustment even smaller than that, though. Spices can really change a dish for better or for worse very fast. 

A post-it note or a pencilled-in notation on the recipe can help you to work out the change you need to make for that herb or spice the next time you use the recipe. Once I get the spice adjustment down to where I like it, I like to change it in my computer and on my hard copy recipe book.

Every person has different taste preferences. This is even more true for cooks. It is often possible to tell who cooked a dish by the herb or spice "signature". Every chef has a special palette of herbs and spices that they like best. Once you get used to adjusting herbs and spices to your own tastes, you too will develop your own herb and spice signature.

Buy Local, Save Your Life

A lot of people like to buy whatever they can for noble reasons, like saving the planet and bringing prosperity to their local economy. Those reasons are all very admirable, but there are some good selfish reasons to buy local as well. Not the least of these is that it might save your life in the near future.

"How can buying local products, produce and services save my life?" you might say. In order to understand the answer you need to know what, "peak oil", means.

I does not mean that there isn't any more oil, it means that it is harder and harder to come out ahead on the energy you use to get that oil out of the ground and ready to use it. We have already used up the oil fields with the easy-to-get-out nice clean oil that burns well without a lot of work to clean it first.

Sure there is plenty of oil in the Canadian Tar Sands oil fields. The problem is that it is some of the dirtiest oil in the world. It is also very hard to get the oil out of those tar sands. It can take the equivalent of two barrels of oil in energy to get out three barrels of oil. That doesn't even include refining it so it won't kill your engine if you use it. 

By the time the Canadian Tar Sands get oil ready to use in your car, we barely get above breaking even in energy. That leaves out the enormous damage getting all of that filthy oil does to the Earth. It ruins vast areas of land, water and air and kills off plants, animals,fish and people in the process. Here is a link to look at what it does:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=YkwoRivP17A&list=UUBVvvf57HOm5DGhcTew4E2g&index=2

The supply of oil worldwide is not even. Some areas and some people are already feeling the pinch of the oil shortage. My area is one of them. 

That means, unless you live in an oil exporting area, you should start worrying now. Alaska has been an oil exporter for years. Next year our largest city in the state, will need to find oil to keep the municipal power plant going through our long, cold winter.

Right now, the United States government helps with shipping costs for food for the people who live in Alaska. Only a tiny fraction of the food eaten in Alaska is produced here. The rest is shipped from thousands of miles away. The state of Alaska is estimated by our government to have only about three days of food supply on hand.

We are in trouble if there is a problem with shipping or prices for it go up much. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that shipping prices will go up very fast and very soon. 

Our national postal service is cutting delivery days and raising prices because of its own problems. None of this takes into account having our two main political parties playing chicken with the comfort, safety, and even the lives of the rest of us.

I was vastly relieve to discover today that other Alaskans are thinking about our supply chain problems in our state. I found this site: http://alaskaflourcompany.com/index.html

They are an Alaskan family who grow and raise wheat and other grains and grind it to sell in our own state. They mention that part of the reason they do this is to help achieve "food independence" for Alaska. 

We do have farmers in Alaska who grow lots of other foods during the summer, but these are the first I have known of who produce enough grains beyond their own needs. 

This is what more people need to do worldwide. We all need to work for food independence and stop counting on cheap oil to allow us to ship food, that can be grown locally, thousands of miles instead.

Climate Change Humor

I notice occasionally that there are still people out there who are denying that climate change is in progress. I hope that hurricane Sandy makes a dent in a few of those hard heads.

Here is a funny video that is about climate change. It is easy to watch, but has some good information in it that you need to know if you are a recent or potential newbie to accepting climate change. If not it is just funny.

http://www.permaculture.co.uk/videos/todays-weather-report-weather-girl-goes-rogue


I live in the Arctic area. This area has climate change happening faster than anywhere else on earth. A lot of glaciers are melting and will soon be gone in the Arctic area. There is much less sea ice every year. That means that polar bears that used to have territory out there are now crowded up against land based polar bears and they are have territory problems. 

Polar bears have very large territories for each bear. The extra territorial crowding caused by sea ice melting and taking away lots of polar bear territory has forced some polar bears to move further and further south than they ever have before. 

Polar bears have begun mating with Grizzly bears because of the southern moves. The hybrid bears are called, "Grolars". They are mostly white with some brown or very pale brown or ivory colored with some brown.

Grolars were first discovered by hunters who shot them. They are still rare, but we can expect more of them. This is because there is less sea ice every year and more polar bears are forced to crowd ashore.

Melting sea ice is also more hazardous for polar bears. They are stranded too far out at sea more often now. If the polar bears are too far out when the ice melts around them they can not swim to land before they drown. Polar Bears have been spotting swimming out where it is too far for them to get to land.

Lots of people like Polar Bears. The babies are especially cute and adorable looking. Even more people are not very interested in Polar Bears. Even if you are not interested in Polar Bears they are still important to you.

The reason why the problems of Polar Bears are important to all of us is because they show us how climate change can hurt humans.

Climate change causes lots more problems than big storms in New York, or New Jersey. One of these is weather changes in the whole world.

Climate for most of the earth is affected or even made by what happens in the Arctic. Weather people used to call the Arctic, "the weather factory". 

Two easy to understand ways that the Arctic creates weather in areas far from the Arctic are streams of moving water in the oceans called, "El Nino", and "La Nina". 

These two streams of moving water in our oceans can determine the weather for the next year over large areas of the world. They can mean the difference between good weather and bad; storms and drought or nice weather that is good for crops.

Since everyone has to eat, good weather for growing our food is important to us all. When we have droughts over such a large part of the United States as this year, food prices will go up a lot all over the world. 

Even people who can afford food when the prices go up, don't like paying higher prices. Other people can not pay higher prices and they starve or fight other people to try to get food. That means more wars. Wars have a nasty way of spreading. Even if you are not fighting over food, you can end up in a war, or someone you care about can end up fighting.

People are like dominoes, you bump one and lots more can fall down. Climate change bumps a lot of people.

Food Poisoning Recall List - Check Your Storage

There is a serious food contamination alert. People can die from it, or become very ill from eating the contaminated food. 

This update on the food recall is written October 11, 2012. The list on this post still applies, but I got on an email notification list and have been getting hundreds of additional foods that have been recalled. The majority of these additional recalled foods are highly processed desserts and snack foods. 

The FDA site should have some additional recalled foods on it. Eating highly processed foods is not that great just because of the preservatives and other chemicals in them. Now they can make you sick or die from food poisoning as well. I find the huge list of recalled foods to check for to be too much work to check. My approach to this is to stop eating any desserts or snacks that I don't make myself. If you are overwhelmed by the immensity of the number of recalled foods to watch out for, you may wish to only eat homemade snacks and desserts for a while, as well.

I am giving my readers a list of foods that have been recalled due to a salmonella contamination. The largest group of items on this list are peanut butter and things made with it, but there are also other nuts and even tahini.

The original source of the contamination was a wholesale company that sells peanut butter by the barrel to other manufacturers who process it and put their own labels on it. Many of the labels are ones that might be found in health food stores.

You need to read the list and make certain that none of your food storage or everyday foods is on the list.

Here is a link to a site that has the list of contaminated foods:

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/food-poisoning/news/20120926/peanut-butter-recall-expanded

Here is the Food and Drug Administration's site for recalled items. 

http://www.fda.gov/AJAX/All/default.htm?Label=All%20Recalls

It has a lot more on it than the peanut butter, almond butter, tahini recall. You might want to print it out and examine your food storage and carry it with you on shopping trips. 

The length of this list is daunting to me. Since I already looked at the other list, I also know that this list does not go into adequate detail and items on the other list are not on this one. That makes me wonder what else is left off of this list.

I am going to include a link to the Center for Disease Control site for you here also. I hope that one has recalled items that are not on the FDA site. 
http://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/bredeney-09-12/index.html

Here is a link to different types of food poisonings by year - there are a lot more of them than this one for 2012.
www.cdc.gov/salmonella/bredeney-09-12/index.html

Here is the CDC "advice to consumers, etc.":

Advice to Consumers, Retailers, and Others

Contaminated peanut butter and other products containing nuts and seeds   [PDF - 5 pages] may make people sick.

• Based on available information, CDC recommends that consumers do not eat recalled peanut butter and other products containing nuts and seeds and dispose of any remaining jars of these products in the home or return the jars to the place of purchase.
  • This is especially important for children under the age of 5 years, older adults, and people with weak immune systems.
• Persons who think they might have become ill from eating possibly contaminated peanut butter or other products containing nuts and seeds should consult their health care providers.
  • Symptoms include:
    • Diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection.
    • The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most persons recover without treatment.
    • See Signs and Symptoms for more information.

Contaminated peanut butter and other products containing nuts and seeds may still be in consumers' homes or available for sale on the internet.

Here are the signs and symptoms of this type of salmonella illness:

Signs & Symptoms

Most persons infected with Salmonella bacteria develop diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection. The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most persons recover without treatment. However, in some persons, the diarrhea may be so severe that the patient needs to be hospitalized. Salmonella infection may spread from the intestines to the bloodstream and then to other body sites and can cause death unless the person is treated promptly with antibiotics. Older adults, infants, and those with impaired immune systems are more likely to have a severe illness from Salmonella infection. More information about Salmonella, and steps people can take to reduce their risk of infection with Salmonella in general, can be found on the CDC Salmonella Web Page and the CDC Vital Signs Web Page.

You can also get food borne illnesses from your food at home. It is a good idea to read more about how to prevent this by using good food handling techniques and cleanliness. 


I will not post this weekend, but will be back with a new post on Monday, October 1.

How We Can Feed Us All

The human race can not survive unless we continue to eat and drink. We are not paying enough attention to this fact.

Having enough food and enough good drinking water to go around is going to be a worse and worse problem from now on. We humans have largely created the problem with growing enough food for us all and having enough good drinking water.

We like to plant cities where we have the best land for growing food.  Our food is grown in ways that ruin the land that is used to grow it. We have been doing things that have even changed our weather to make it harder and harder to grow food. 

Climate change, bad farming techniques and pollution have all combined to ruin a lot of the good drinking water on earth. Many of our large cities all over the world are in such great need of drinking water that they destroy agriculture by stealing agriculture water, for long distances around them. 

We need to stop wasting our time and energy fighting each other and start working on growing food in ways that will keep on working in the future. These land wrecking ways to grow food have to stop. 

The fight to keep growing enough food to eat and repair the damage we have done to the earth is a greater battle than any battles between humans. 

We don't have enough people who are good at growing food, to be able to grow as much as we need on small sustainable farms. Growing food is not something that can usually be learned overnight. It may take even longer than learning regular agriculture to learn to grow food sustainably.

sustainable [səˈsteɪnəb^əl]

adj

1. (Economics) capable of being sustained

2. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Environmental Science) (of economic development, energy sources, etc.) capable of being maintained at a steady level without exhausting natural resources or causing severe ecological damage sustainable development

3. (Economics) (of economic growth) non-inflationary

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003

The definition above came from here:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sustainable

I think we will not only need to make use of sustainable agriculture techniques to get ourselves out of this mess. I think we will have to use our spiritual gifts to grow our food. When you use spiritual gifts for growing things you can get a good crop during circumstances such as droughts, or other bad weather and grow more and better food in a much shorter time than usual. With extremely moody weather, we will need that.

Using spiritual gifts for agriculture is not something that you could get a timetable for learning. I expect everyone has their own time for having it kick in. The biggest barrier to getting your spiritual gift of growing things working seems to be not believing you can do it. If that is going on, you will have a brown thumb and kill every plant you get your hands on. 

If a brown thumb is happening, you probably are meant to have a green thumb. It is against chance for you to be that bad. It means you have some kind of reverse thing going on with your green thumb spiritual gift. The minute you get over whatever is blocking your gift, every plant you touch will grow like crazy. 

Just having your green thumb gift working won't completely make up for a lack of knowledge. If it starts working, or you want it to, do whatever you can to learn about growing things. I think sprouts are the easiest way to start. Don't waste any time. You will need that green thumb spiritual gift working and educated, and so will the rest of the human race.

What Can You Do About Your Food?

Even anorexics will admit they need to eat something. The rest of us are even more interested in eating. We are also interested in continuing to eat. 

Climate change and how our food is produced now are a threat to our being able to grow enough food, get it to the people who need and want it and afford to buy it.

I get sticker shock when I see the prices in the produce section of my local grocery store. The rest of the grocery store is not necessarily much better. 

The severe drought that struck most of the food producers in the US will probably raise food prices quite a lot in the whole world. I will probably have company in my food price sticker shock.

There are many things you can do to help out with our food situation. One of these is to grow as much food as you possibly can. Even if you live in an apartment and have no yard, you can still manage a pot or two of herbs. You can grow sprouts even while you are backpacking. I have already posted about growing herbs and sprouts.

You can grow much more even if you only have a balcony or rooftop. You can make a substantial contribution to your food budget and quality of life if you have a yard and can manage even a very small garden. 

If any form of gardening is absolutely not your forte' you can patronize farmers' markets and buy locally grown food. Not only will local food taste better and be fresher, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are helping out your community. 

You are even being very ecological because local food has not used fuel to ship it across the world. You are also helping to keep a small farmer on his farm. This is a strike against the huge corporate monoculture farms and a help to the Earth.

mon·o·cul·ture  (mn-klchr)

n.

1. The cultivation of a single crop on a farm or in a region or country.

2. A single, homogeneous culture without diversity or dissension.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/monoculture

My favorite contribution that you can make to helping with the world food situation and your own food is your spiritual contribution. Find out what your own spiritual gift(s) is/are. 

There is a very high chance that your spiritual gift involves growing something. You won't know unless you try. Don't make one attempt and give up either. 

Instinct and a spiritual gift don't compensate for knowledge. Read the directions or get somebody to show you how to get started. There is a big chunk of your happiness missing if you don't find and use your spiritual gift(s). 

Good News And Bad News About Your Food

This blog post is about eating and getting food to eat. I don't want to only tell you the bad news with this post. I want you to know the disasters we need to get ready for so you can prepare to survive them. Then I want you to start thinking about what we can do to fix this climate change mess and make it better. It won't be easy. 

It probably will take a long time. It could even take many generations to fix our climate mess. Part of this mess affects our food. For some people to understand this takes a bit of explaining.


I would like to do whatever I can to survive the many disasters that I believe we have coming, as a result of the changes humans have made to the planet we live on. One of those changes is climate change. 

Climate change does not sound that bad when you first hear it. You might think that it will be rather nice having warmer winters. We have already noticed that means warmer summers too. The warmers summers we are getting are bad enough to kill people. We have barely gotten started with climate change.

Climate change is a much better term to use for what is happening on Earth than global warming. That is because we won't get anything as predictable as only warming. It is going to be as if weather all over the world was put into a giant blender and scrambled. 

Weathermen will probably all have gray hair before their time. Our weather is already doing lots of record highs, lows, wet, dry, etc. It is going to get more and more unpredictable for the rest of our lives. We are going to get more storms and bigger ones. 

Really bad unpredictable weather can kill us, especially if we are unprepared for the disasters it causes. The worst part of all of this unpredictable weather is our food. 

There is a smaller part of the human race that has any connection to producing our food now than ever in history. In the US it is less than 1% of the population. That brings a bad lack of understanding about where food comes and how it gets to our tables. This means you may have to work a little to even understand how bad our food problem is.

Even without climate change, we would be in very bad trouble with food worldwide. Good farmland and good water and the fuel to run farm equipment and get the food from the farms to our tables are disappearing fast. This is happening while we are making too many more people who need to eat that food. 

Giant factory farms that raise only one crop have been the answer to this problem for a while. They do produce a lot of food. The cost to produce that food on the giant factory farms is too high, and it is not only the money cost.

Those giant factory farms are the agricultural equivalent of the banksters and mega corporation moguls who keep robbing the public of money. 

There is no way that I can explain how all of this works to people who think milk comes from the grocery store and tomatoes grow in cans, in this blog. If you care about continuing to eat, you need to find out more for yourself about what is involved in your food.

I can tell you simply that what we are doing now to get our food will not keep working. We need to do something different and we need to get right on making the changes.

There are necessary changes that even little everyday people like you and I can make. I would like to begin telling you tomorrow about some things to think about and do to help you and others be able to keep eating.

Diatomaceous Earth For Food Preservation

I tried out my first batch of cat food with diatomaceous earth on it. Rather I did it and my cats ate it. They seemed to appreciate it. I mixed a different kind of cat food with their usual when I did it. I am not certain what did the trick to get them to like it. I will keep doing the same thing since it worked.


I can see why one is advised to use the diatomaceous earth in small batches. It took a LOT of stirring to coat the cat food nuggets evenly. 


The amounts of diatomaceous earth for preservation of different foods seems to be consistent between people advising about it and the different foods as well.
Most say about a cup of diatomaceous earth for about 50 lbs. of food. I have seen some that get as low as 1/2 a cup for 40 lbs. of food, but that is not that much difference.


The exact amount does not seem to be as important as evenly coating each grain/piece of food. 


I suspect that once I have diatomaceous earth coated grain as a regular part of my diet, I will be able to stop or cut down my daily dose of diatomaceous earth for treatment and prevention of parasites.


The cats probably won't need to be dosed for parasites with DE either, once they are always eating it on their dry food. 


If you decide to treat your pet's food with DE, you might want to take extra care that they do not become constipated. I think oat grass is the best prevention. It is also very good for the general health of cats. If cats stay indoors they especially need oat grass.


Once cats start eating oat grass they really like it. Mine try to persuade me to give them a fresh tub before they finish the one they are working on. I am working on getting more tubs of oat grass into their rotation, so it will be fresh for them more often.


Both of them get very excited and yell a lot and sit up and beg for it when they see me bringing out a new tub of oat grass. They are always really happy when they get it.


My equivalent of oat grass is sprouts. I grow my own and eat them a lot. I keep sprouts in my sprouter all the time, but am probably going to make some extra ones to make it easier to have more than one kind at a time. I like the mixed sprout salads better than only one kind of sprouts at a time.


You can mix seeds of different types of sprouts in one container, but I don't like the same mix in everything I use the sprouts in. An example is radish seeds. The sprouts from radish seeds are spicy tasting and overpower the flavors on some things.


It is a pleasant feeling to eat a meal that I grew myself, even if it is only something as simple as sprouts. You might like it as well. It is also a way of eating what we store.

Make Your Money Buy More For Every Day And Preparedness 1

When you decide to make your money go farther you have to think about where your money goes now and what is possible to change. You also have to think about what changes will make the most difference, in the shortest amount of time.

Some of the changes that I have picked to do first, show wildly varying income levels, so not all will apply to your situation, maybe none. You will have to take the idea and change it to fit your own situation.

One change that I chose was to stop buying from vending machines. I worked a night job, stores were closed and I never ate breakfast before work. That meant I got hungry and hit the vending machines. It wasn't a lot of money for one item, but I figured out the average cost and added it up for the month. 


Those vending machines cost me more than dinner at a fine restaurant. I could have had several dinners at fine restaurants each month instead of vending machine junk.

I started eating breakfast, even it it was a breakfast bar or a glass of instant breakfast. That filled me up and helped me resist the vending machines. I did even better when I started to eat lunch. At first I went out to breakfast at a local restaurant that opened early. I had breakfast for lunch. It kept me away from the vending machines. 

After that I started bringing my own lunch that I packed myself. That cost me much less than the restaurant and still kept me away from the vending machines.

The next example of saving money is light bulbs. I discovered that even though compact fluorescent bulbs cost much more than regular incandescent light bulbs, they save a lot of electricity.


My power bill dropped a lot when I had compact fluorescent bulbs all over my apartment. LEDs cost much less to run than even a compact fluorescent bulb does. I am still not buying a lot of LEDs. The one I am testing does not work well. They may need to make those better.

I used to have such a low income that electricity was one of the main areas that it was possible for me to save. I got drastic. 

I bought a wind up radio that also had a light on it. It was a nice bright light and the wind up battery lasted me almost an hour on a full charge. I kept my lights off and just carried the wind up radio around with me at night. I rarely turned a light on in my apartment after I began using the wind up radio.


This post is growing too long, so I will continue the subject of saving money for every day and preparedness in other posts.

How To Keep Your Stored Food From Spoiling

Drying, canning, pickling, and smoking are all good methods of food preservation. They all may require specialized equipment. I posted earlier on how to use minimal equipment to dry some food for storage. 


Canning, pickling and smoking are more of a short term way of storing food. It is possible to prepare some foods to last many years without spoiling. I like to use the long term method especially for grains and dried foods.


I start with a 5 gallon bucket. They come with lids that must seal very tightly. The seal has to be good enough to keep out air. The problem with this is that the lids can be very hard to get off of the bucket.
There is a special tool that helps open the lids more easily. You can usually order this lid opener from the places that sell the buckets online.


They also sell smaller and larger buckets. If you are small you probably won't want anything larger than a 5 gallon bucket because it will be too heavy to safely lift. 


Another solution for opening 5 gallon bucket lids is "gamma seals". Gamma seals transform an ordinary 5 gallon bucket into a screw top lid. I like these for foods that I will access frequently, like sugar and grains that I am currently using.


Some of the places on line that sell preparedness, or bulk foods, also sell gamma seals. They are considerably more expensive than regular lids for 5 gallon buckets, but I think they are worth it. I only have a few of them, though.

Five gallon buckets are good for long term storage, but the buckets alone will not keep your food safe from spoilage. Mylar bags and oxygen absorbers will do a lot more to keep your food safe. 


If you want to spend the extra money, you can buy 5 gallon buckets that have the mylar bags and oxygen absorbers inside them. Those buckets usually come sealed with the sealed mylar bags inside them. They already have oxygen absorbers inside the mylar bags. They cost a lot more than doing it yourself. 


If you want to put your food into 5 gallon buckets yourself, you can buy them, the mylar bags and the oxygen absorbers from some of the companies online that sell preparedness or bulk foods. You can buy different sized mylar bags. 


Some mylar bags are bigger than necessary to fill up a 5 gallon bucket. I like those because you can seal the edge. When you cut open the bag to use the contents, you will still have lots of bag left to reseal again and again. I wash out my mylar bags after I use the food stored in them and reuse them. This is not only economical, it is better for our environment.


As often happens, this post is getting too long for my blog, so I  will continue it.

Eating Cheaper Is A Survival Advantage

Most people, like you, who can afford to be on the internet are probably well fed and are able to eat things you don't really need to survive. In a The End Of the World As We Know It (TEOTAWKI), situation, this could be a disadvantage. As soon as you know you can't have something that you like to eat, you are likely to start craving it. This can be very hard to deal with. Americans often do this when they travel outside the USA. 


I enjoy asking people what they miss eating. The most common American answer is hamburgers. Ice cream is usually next and then ethnic fast food from their part of the USA. I think Mexican Food is the most common of those. That is what it was for me. I just thought I was dying for a spicy burrito. 


I made up a saying for myself that I use to explain some things. It is, "Get more or want less." If you simplify your food and other needs now, you will miss them less when you can't have them. This will also lower chances that you will face a nuclear disaster as soon.


When you have x resources and x+ people want to use them, people are more likely to fight over them. Bearing that in mind, I have deliberately reduced the level of resources required for what I regularly eat. This means that I eat more one dish meals and I use more simple ingredients that I might be able to grow myself or get locally. I eat more food made with basic staple ingredients like beans and rice. I have also learned to make more of my own Mexican food.


"Eat local, think global", is a saying that will help you understand how to do this. When you eat food that is grown closer to you, it takes less fuel to get it to you. You are using less resources.


None of this means that you have to eat food that is not tasty or satisfying. I have learned to eat well, even though it is simpler and costs less.


You can learn cooking techniques that allow you to eat less prepared foods. I do grind my own flour some of the time, for example. That is really basic, but it also saves a lot of money. Grain is a lot cheaper than flour, and fresh ground is better nutrition and tastes better.


Making your own mixes is another way that you can eat more simply and save money as well. There are a lot of nice sites on the internet that have great recipes for making your own mixes for just about anything.


Before all of the sites with mixes were available, I bought a book about making your own mixes. It is called "Make-A-Mix", by Karine Eliason, Nevada Harward, and Madeline Westover. 


You can look at the recipes you use the most and see what dry ingredients are in them. Once you do that, you can invent mixes for your favorite foods. 

More About Dried Foods For Emergency Preparedness

The best way to make sure that your emergency food stores will work for you in an emergency is to use it. It should be food that you already eat regularly. You can rotate your emergency foods into your daily diet and replenish it as you use it. 


When you do that, it will never spoil or go stale and you will know how to cook it during an emergency. You can use your ordinary recipes and won't have to spend time looking up recipes.


I use dried foods in my daily life to save a lot of money. When you shop on an empty stomach you are much more likely to spend more money than you planned or need to spend. The way to stop this is to make certain that you have a full stomach before you get in the store.


There have been many studies done that show that people will even spend more on non-food items when they shop hungry. I blogged a little about this in one of my earlier posts about weight loss.


If I am going to be out all day and know that I will get hungry before I finish shopping I take along a snack in my pocket. A full meal of dried foods will fit in a small pocket. I take a bottle of water along as well. In the summer when I lived in a hot climate I took a bottle of frozen water so it was nice and cool to drink.


You need to drink extra water when you eat dried food or you can easily get dehydrated. Your digestive system must have water to work properly or it will pull the liquids out of your body if you don't drink enough water.


There is an important warning about dried foods: Even though the dried foods seem like just a little bit of food because most of the water was removed, it will  be just as big as it was before it was dried, inside you. That means you can get a really horrible stomach ache if you eat too much. 


It works best to eat the dried food slowly; chew it very well and drink plenty of water as you eat it. That way you can gauge how much to eat to fill you up comfortably. Be sure to share this warning with anyone you share your dried foods with. I believe it is possible for someone to be seriously injured without knowing about this.


I plan a balanced meal when I take my pocket meal of dried foods along. That means a protein, a carbohydrate and something from the fruits and vegetables group. The carbohydrate of my choice is usually crackers I make myself because they are small and don't take much room either. I can share a recipe for the crackers if people want it. They are  very tasty and everyone I have given them to really likes them too. They are also healthy.


I used to make them with freshly ground flours, but my grinder that I have now is not satisfactory. I found one that will probably work ok, but have to put it on the list to get later. Things made with freshly ground flour taste much better and are lots healthier as well. Once you get a routine down, it is not too much trouble to grind your own grains before you bake.


This blog post seems to be long enough so I will end here by telling you that I want to add more about dried foods in my next post or so.