10:21 – We decided to make a quick Costco run yesterday morning. The only prepping supplies I picked up were a couple large cans of Country Time lemonade ($6.79 each), 10 pounds of oats ($8.29), and an empty 20-pound propane cannister ($26.69). Well, that and two pairs of Kirkland jeans ($13.99 each).
I grabbed the 10 pound box of Quaker Oats right as Barbara was picking up two large boxes of cereal. She told me not to buy the oats. She doesn’t like oatmeal, and I almost never eat breakfast. Oddly, she likes oat bars and oatmeal cookies. Perhaps I’ll make her a batch of oatmeal cookies and/or oat bars with whatever is left after I transfer the bulk of the oats into 2-liter bottles. Even without an oxygen absorber, they’ll stay good in 2-liter bottles for at least five years if not ten. With oxygen absorbers, their shelf life is essentially unlimited.
What about Plodia interpunctella (pantry moths, weevils)? Not really a problem. They lay eggs in flour and other grain products that are stored in paper sacks or containers otherwise subject to access by the adult bugs. Using an oxygen absorber in a foil-laminate Mylar bag or a PET or glass bottle is a definitive solution. It suffocates the eggs or immature insects. But transferring the Quaker Oats from a sealed bag directly to clean 2-liter bottles also works pretty well. It’s not like a passing pantry moth is going to have much chance to land on the oats and lay eggs.
Some sources recommend putting the bottles in the freezer for a week or two to kill insect eggs. The only problem with that method is that it doesn’t work. It reminds me of that old joke about the guy tearing off strips of paper and tossing them out the train window in Vermont to keep elephants away. That works for the same reason freezing works. They both keep away the pests, elephants or weevils, because there weren’t any there in the first place. And a long line of scientists ending with Pasteur and Tyndall in the 19th century finally definitively falsified the concept of spontaneous generation, despite the millennium-long insistence by the Roman Catholic Church that spontaneous generation was the source of life.
I need to ship overnight kit orders and build more kits.
12:08 – It seems that Amazon is clearing inventory of their Fire HD7 tablets. Not the HDX7, but its predecessor. They have them on sale, today only, for $79 in the ad-supported version. I just ordered one for myself, along with a $12 folding case. The original HD7 is more than good enough for what I use a tablet for, which is mostly quick checks of email and web sites.
I got an HDX7 for Barbara, but I use it as much as she does. So much, in fact, that she’s started calling her Kindle Fire my Kindle Fire. Not good. So, once this HD7 shows up, her Kindle Fire goes back to being her Kindle Fire and I’ll have my own.
I’m curious as to what you think about using dry ice put in containers of stored foodstuffs to displace the oxygen, and then sealed as opposed to oxygen absorbers. Obviously this won’t work in all cases, but for those that would, it seems it would be less expensive .
Dry ice works fine. Just add a bit of the food to cover the bottom of the 2L bottle, drop a small chunk of dry ice in, and then fill the container with food. Screw the cap on but not quite tight to allow the carbon dioxide gas to escape, or the bottle will explode. Carbon dioxide is denser than air, and will displace all of the air in the bottle. Once that’s happened, screw the cap on tight and you’re good to go.
A 300cc oxygen absorber is sufficient for a 2L bottle. (They’re rated in terms of how much actual oxygen they can absorb. Air is about 20% oxygen, so a 2L bottle of air contains about 400cc of oxygen when it’s empty. With food filling the bottle, there’ll be much less than 2L of air to remove the oxygen from, so 300cc of absorbing capacity is more than sufficient.)
Oxygen absorbers are pretty inexpensive. I buy them from the LDS online store. A pack of 100 300cc absorbers costs, IIRC, $15 including shipping. That’s sufficient for 100 2L bottles or one-gallon foil-laminate Mylar bags, and the absorbers are a lot easier (and safer) to use than dry ice.
Some sources recommend putting the bottles in the freezer for a week or two to kill insect eggs.
One of the local stations carries the “Dr. Oz” show. He came into town and did some localized promos which had him rushing around the station giving health tips to the 6 PM news team. In one, a female anchor was putting on lipstick. He cautioned her that lipstick had lots of germs on it, and she should put it in the freezer at night to kill the germs. To borrow a line: “What a maroon!”
His TV show is not much better when I have seen it, with all kinds of woo-woo therapies touted.
Yeah, the guy has an excellent education. Too bad none of it took.
Thanks for the heads up (Fire HD7), it was on our list to get.
I grabbed the 10 pound box of Quaker Oats right as Barbara was picking up two large boxes of cereal.
Why not buy this Augason Farms Emergency Food Quick Rolled Oats, 10 lb?
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Augason-Farms-Emergency-Food-Quick-Rolled-Oats-10-lb/22001479
The Augason Farms oats are fine, and $1.50/pound are considerably cheaper than similar #10 cans from other “long-term” food companies. But they’re more expensive per pound than the quick or regular oats from the LDS Home Storage Centers.
I bought these at $0.83/pound because I want to play around with them. For serious long-term storage, I’d buy the LDS stuff, at $2.95 per #10 can (2.8 pounds, $1.05/pound) for the regular oats or $2.95 per #10 can (2.4 pounds, $1.23 per pound) for the quick oats. For serious long-term storage, I’d pack them with oxygen absorbers in 2L bottles or 7-mil foil-laminate Mylar bags. Either that, or just buy the LDS #10 cans.
First, I have to convince Barbara that it’s possible to make a fair variety of good-tasting foods with them. This obviously will involve me blowing my men-can’t-cook cover.
In high school Chemistry, the thing my teacher spent the most time beating into our heads was do not under any circumstances taste anything in the lab. Then at some point someone told me cooking nothing more than applied Chemistry. Obvious conclusion: I should never eat anything I cook.
On a more serious note, the most important thing to know about cooking is there are really two types of cooking. There is cooking and there is baking. Two different sets of rules apply. In cooking, the recipe is really just a suggestion. If you want to add something else to a cooking recipe, go ahead and try it. If you are baking, the recipe is not a suggestion. Some baking recipes are so serious as to specify ingredients by weight, not volume. If you want to change a baking recipe, just don’t do it.
Talking about chemistry labs…
Years ago a picture was posted here of an attractive young lady working in a lab without wearing the proper safety gear. I think it may have originated at Nick Scipio’s site, but haven’t been able to find it.
Anyone have a copy?
I would suggest Barbara dislikes the texture of oatmeal, not the taste.
How about some Haggis. That should convince her.
She was wearing safety glasses, if this is the one you mean.
http://www.nickscipio.com/pod/2011/03/31/she-blinded-me-with-science/
Haggis? I’m Scots, but she’s not. She probably vomit just from reading what’s in it.
Yes, that’s the one. Not sure if she’s wearing appropriate footwear; if she’s not that’s a major safety violation.
Same here. If I didn’t know what was being served up to me I might enjoy it.
I’m not really in to offal, but I like kidney (as in S&K pie) and liver. Oxtail and Kangaroo tail soup are okay too. I wouldn’t eat brains under any circumstances.
The whole shebang of lab violations:
http://imgur.com/a/PjMac/sarah_de_herdt__blinding_with_science
Umm, haggis is delicious.
I’m not sure what she would object to, all those things are edible separately.
My short stay in Scotland was quite nice as far as breakfast went. You have to love anyone who has 10 kinds of meat available at breakfast (well, counting blood sausage as meat.)
nick
Wow, she’s very fit. Who says all the effort to get women into STEM education didn’t pay off?
Any idea it’s not just props?
nick
She is, IIRC, a serious athlete. She’s Belgian.
I believe there’s a link in the comments to a whole series of images of her.
I’m not happy with the imgur pixs: it clearly shows she’s not wearing appropriate footwear – a major safety violation.
“Haggis is a savoury pudding containing sheep’s pluck (heart, liver and lungs); minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, traditionally encased in the animal’s stomach.”
I’ll pass on the heart, lungs and stomach. The rest looks okay.
@Miles, you are missing out! I understand not wanting to eat brains or nervous system tissue, but the rest?
Beef liver, chicken liver, chicken heart, beef heart, deer heart, beef tongue, are all very common foods on their own. Sheep versions can’t be that different. I’ve eaten duck lungs and they were delicious battered, deep fried, and served with sesame and a sweet sauce. What about pate’?
You don’t eat the stomach, but it is a critical ingredient in other traditional foods.
Poor people the world over eat the same parts, just prepared differently 🙂
nick
BTW, there is a vegetarian haggis in a can available here in the States. Haven’t tried it though. I eat normal canned haggis sliced and seared then served with eggs for breakfast. Yum.
“If there is any real difference between Republicans and Democrats, it is only in the sense that there are different types of cancer.”
There it is. And:
“What will become of this escalating putsch to demonize and eradicate the merest suggestion that it’s OK to be white and male? Maybe it’ll be irreversibly successful and white dudes will be the global serf class of the next thousand years. Or maybe it’ll all backfire. If you push people into a corner long enough, they start to get a little defensive. If you herd them together into a group and keep spitting on them, they might start thinking as a group. Ironically, this relentless effort to deny white males any positive group identity may be the very thing that creates it. And for better or worse, that’s when the real fireworks would begin.”
No chit, homes.
http://takimag.com/article/conveniently_latino_jim_goad/print
“Proof: The World is Actively Preparing to Ditch the Dollar”
http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/proof-world-actively-preparing-ditch-dollar/
“Collapse of our current financial system is clearly coming. The question is, how bad will it get for those of us trapped in the United States, trapped holding only Dollars? Holter says, “My hope is that is doesn’t get this bad, but my suspicion is that it will get worse, where you have no access to ATM’s, credit is completely shut off, we may have power, water, electricity supply problems. What I’m going to tell you is, if you know how to, or can learn how to live like Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone, we may go through a period of time where that’s the case. I hope I’m wrong, I fear that I’m right.””
I do suspect that the world is actively trying to move to a new reserve currency. FATCA appears to be just about the last straw for several countries. But, I believe that the event will be dystopian, not apocalyptic. There will come a day when the US Treasury puts tbills up for sale and there is no buyer other than the Federal Reserve. That could be a tough day as the value of the dollar drops like a rock. However, I believe this day to be 10 to 20 years off. If the world succeeds in moving to a new reserve currency then that day will certainly move forward.
Of course, my caveat is that dystopian events can convert themselves into apocalyptic events depending on people’s reaction to the subsequent events (unemployment, bank failures, infrastructure failures, etc).
Hey Bob, my wife and daughter have been binge watching a show on Netflix for the last several days. It is called Star-Crossed and is about a bunch of teen alien kids being integrated into US society ten years after their spaceship crashed in Louisiana. It is set in 2024 and there are thousands of the aliens in a government run camp called the District. I did not like the one episode that I saw but the wife and daughter like it a lot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-Crossed_%28TV_series%29
nick says on 20 April 2015 at 17:35
…You don’t eat the stomach,
Why ever not? Tripe is a respected food, and cooking a ground-up savoury sausage in a tripe lining is perfectly respectable, as is eating the tripe. Anoint it with the water of life, and serve it sizzling à la suzette. Serve with mashed tatties and neeps (potatoes and Swedes), or basically any mashed vegetable to hand – carrots, parsnips, turnips, Jerusalem artichokes, beets, mangels, pumpkin, squash, and lightly steamed greens (say spinach, chard, celeriac is both green and mash, broccoli or Brussels sprouts or cabbage) go well as well. Yummie!
I will admit this is the only way I eat lungs, though, and even here I prefer to slash them and rinse them before grinding them (slash, rinse, mince in that order). I’m perfectly happy to use the method for preparing dog-food or cat-food, though. There’s no reason why you can’t prepare at home what the big pet-food manufacturers put in cans.
I didn’t realize that Mexico had spaceships.
@Don, I meant that you don’t eat the stomach part of the haggis, you only use it as a container for cooking.
Menudo (mexican tripe soup) is considered a hangover cure, and the “lunch truck” style food preparers do a booming business on Saturday and Sunday morning around here, and in former parts of the US like Southern Cali. I can’t recall ever actually eating it myself.
Holy cow the financial markets have completely come unglued. Nothing makes sense anymore. Bad news=stocks up! Euro at parity w/ dollar AND NO ONE IS EVEN COMMENTING OUT LOUD. Greece seizing money from local .gov, having already used all the cash from pension funds and state reserves, and now people are saying “bah, let them leave.” Should have left when they still had some money left. Euro banks PAYING each other to borrow, paying people to take out mortgages. Yet, US stocks=UP! US sending warships to interdict IRAN, stocks=UP! Nuke deal with the crazy mullahs=stocks UP. One morning soon, a couple of guys will wake up and say “hmm, I think we’ve squeezed every dollar out of the market that we can, let’s get out.” And that will be that.
nick
We’re just watching everything unfold. The world hasn’t had real money for a long time. It’s all just accounting entries now, and those can be juggled for only so long before it becomes clear to everyone that the merry-go-round is collapsing. Margaret Thatcher summed it up pretty well: eventually, they run out of other people’s money. That’s what we’re watching happen right now.
I’m afraid that it’s going to come down to the US and Canada being the only first-world countries remaining. If the UK had been smart, they’d have allied themselves in all respects with the US and Canada, and distanced themselves as much as possible from Europe. NAFTA should have been the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, and included only the US and our brothers/cousins in Canada and the UK. Certainly not Mexico, which is foreign in every respect. But it’s too late for that now. I wish Australia and New Zealand well, but they’re too distant from the US and too close to and interdependent with China, which is going down the tubes.
I think there are a lot of countries which would like to see the US Dollar no longer be the worlds reserve currency. However, I think there is one big thing keeping that from happening. There is not really a currency ready to take it’s place. Given the turmoil in Greece, I don’t think anyone really wants to switch from US $ to the Euro right now. The Chinese would like their currency to be the new world reserve currency, but their economy is a bigger house of cards than the our economy is.
Euro at parity w/ dollar AND NO ONE IS EVEN COMMENTING OUT LOUD
I hope it stays that way as I have a trip to Germany in about 8 weeks. Holding off on purchasing my train tickets as long as I can.
Bob, I’d disagree with “Australia and New Zealand … too distant from the US and too close to and interdependent with China”. Fact is, we (Australia) are not much closer to China geographically, and a lot further economically, than is the USA. NZ is even further in both senses. Our economic independence is dearly bought, since it is at the cost of closer relationships with the world’s Muslim nations, but it is real. What a lot of the world doesn’t realise is how close the relationship is between the Commonwealth nations – Canada in the Northern hemisphere, and Australia and New Zealand in the South, occasionally the United Kingdom. We have a more-or-less invisible agricultural labour-pooling arrangement, where big-crop heavy-equipment operators swap with the Northern and Southern seasons. It’s also pretty invisible to our political lords and masters, who have forgotten that real productivity comes from real products in rural areas, rather than service industries in urban metroplexes. However, those who produce primary wealth with primary industries know it’s happening. Someone will start the year in Northern Queensland, driving harvesting machinery, move South with the season, cross the Tasman to New Zealand after Christmas, then cross the Pacific and spend the Northern season harvesting in North America and Canada. Others. Shearing contracting teams will move from New Zealand to Australia and follow the seasons there. A few of them will cross the Pacific and work in North America during the Southern Hemisphere off-season. They are young men, they work hard fourteen hours a day and more during the harvest, they stack away savings, they aim to buy their own land. Where that is, what country they settle in, is determined by where and with whom they fall in love. Sometimes they have a girl at home, sometimes they took on the work to forget a girl, and are ready to find another wherever she may be. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, maybe Scotland or Wales or England, rarely the Scandinavian nations or the Low Countries, even the USA (particularly the prairie states) – it’s not impossible that four generations of a single family would have made their homes in four different countries. If ever push came to shove again, if the city-based politicians sought to overcome the country-based people on an issue of Commonwealth relations, I’d be extremely interested to see the results.
So called organ meat is all about how it’s prepared. My Italian grandmother made a red sauce that had chicken hearts and gizzards (giblets, no liver however). There were only a few in it so you could just pick around them if you wanted and the main flavor came from imported dried porcini mushrooms. She also made pickled tongue. Very popular item at Basque restaurants around here. Boiled, skinned, sliced thin and marinated in oil, vinegar, garlic and parsley, served cold as part of the salad course. Not all Italians are familiar with it as it’s a northern thing. They only people I know that don’t like it are the ones that won’t try it.
Menudo OTH just doesn’t do it for me. Tripe and okra no matter how much chili is put on it are just too disgusting.