11:34 – I’m doing laundry and my other usual Saturday tasks. Barbara just got back from running errands. Our friend Bonnie Richardson is stopping over sometime this afternoon in her pickup to haul off a load of leaves for her compost pile. For years, Barbara has been piling leaves in the natural areas in the back yard, so the lower layers should already be pretty well composted. Bonnie has quite a bit of land devoted to her garden, so I’m sure she’s constantly on the lookout for more compost.
We just finished transferring a 50-pound bag of white granulated sugar from Costco into 14 empty wide-mouth PET nut jars, also from Costco. With the white sugar in #10 cans we got at the LDS Home Storage Center, that takes us to about 200 pounds total. I didn’t bother to erase the old dates on the jars, because sugar stored in those PET jars remains good indefinitely. There’s no difference between month-old, year-old, and decade-old white granulated sugar, assuming proper storage. On average, Americans each consume about 150 pounds of caloric sweeteners per year, mostly white sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, so those 200 pounds are only about a 16 person-month supply, although we do have additional sweeteners like maple pancake/waffle syrup stored. At some point, I’ll pick up another 50-pound bag or two of white sugar at Costco and transfer it to clean 2-liter soda bottles, which’ll take us over 300 pounds total.
We also have more than 250 pounds of white flour, macaroni, and spaghetti in #10 cans from the LDS HSC, along with about 200 pounds of rice. At some point, I’ll pick up another 150 or 200 pounds of white flour at Costco and transfer it to one-gallon Mylar foil laminate bags with oxygen absorbers, but before I do that I want to experiment a bit with white flour. In particular, I want to experiment with quick bread recipes, which require neither yeast nor kneading nor long rise times.
Most commercial quick breads and home baking recipes use double-acting baking powder, but the problem with that is its limited shelf-life. Baking soda works just as well and many people prefer the flavor of bread made with baking soda, but using baking soda requires also using some form of acid to react with it to create the carbon dioxide bubbles that cause the bread to rise. We have 25+ pounds of baking soda packed for long-term storage, but I’m debating what to store as the acid. One option is vinegar, so that’s what I’ll test first. If it works well, rather than storing gallons of vinegar (which is essentially 5% acetic acid) I’ll store a liter of glacial (99% acetic acid). The stuff I have is both ACS reagent grade and FCC (food) grade, so one liter of it can be diluted to form the exact equivalent of 20 liters of distilled white vinegar, more than sufficient to cover 25+ pounds of baking soda.