09:32 – We made up a small batch of bread dough at 3:00 p.m. yesterday. It rose overnight to about twice its initial size and is baking right now. The recipe is easy enough: three cups of white flour (actually, 420 grams because I use mass instead of volume measure), a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of yeast, and 1.5 cups of water. That’s sufficient to make one standard loaf of about one pound.
You can just run the numbers for whatever your target is. For example, if you want to be able to bake one of these loaves every day for a year, you’ll need about 350 pounds of flour, plus the requisite amounts of salt, yeast (or another leavening agent), and water. That loaf/day will provide about 1,700 calories/day toward your total needs, along with a significant amount of (incomplete) protein. One loaf/day would be a reasonable amount if you’re feeding four to six people. More people than that, if you’re also storing a lot of pasta, rice, potatoes, etc., and less than that if you’re depending heavily on bread, pancakes, and similar foods.
That 350 pounds of white flour is seven 50-pound bags, which you can repackage in a bunch of 2-liter soda bottles or roughly 70 one-gallon foil-laminate Mylar bags. If it were me, I’d go with mostly or all bread flour rather than all-purpose flour, because bread flour has more protein (gluten), and can be used for just about anything. As to the yeast, we keep several kilos of SAF instant yeast on hand in 1-pound foil packages, which we store in the freezer, but there are alternatives if you don’t want to store that much. Obviously, you can keep a batch of sourdough starter. We don’t do that because Barbara and I don’t particularly like the flavor of sourdough bread, although we could start a batch of sourdough starter if we ran short of yeast. You can also substitute baking powder, or baking soda with an acid like vinegar to leaven the bread.
Well, I took apart the one brake on the one car, and it’s fine. Didn’t take too long and the only problem was that a gust of wind blew the water from the sprinkler into my toolbox so I needed to dump it and let everything dry. Damned global warming. Is there no mischief it cannot perpetrate?
Then I got started on the radiator for my van, but didn’t get more than about 30 seconds into the task before determining that the new radiator in the box doesn’t match the old one in the van. Back to the store, and then order the correct one because of course they don’t have that one in stock.
My wife is taking the girls* to a park or lake just to get them out of the house before school starts. I’ll spend the rest of the day taking care of chores and seeing if I can write while it’s quiet.
* Just the one is ours, but our daughter’s best friend’s mother is crazy, in the “danger to others” sense. She’s convinced there’s a huge conspiracy to “get” her and throw her in jail, and her husband is masterminding it all. Once in a while she’ll flip out and, for instance, grab at the steering wheel while someone else is driving. Because she has to get away from “the police” who are following them. Last year she frequently wouldn’t let her daughter eat for more than a day at a time because “the police” had followed her husband’s directions and poisoned all the food in the house so the daughter would die and the mother would be put in jail. You’d think this would a prime candidate for forcible confinement because she is, you know, a danger to others, but evidence suggests that you would be wrong. Anyway, the girl spends a lot of with us.
“…and her husband is masterminding it all.”
Is her husband, i.e., the girl’s dad, still living with them?
“You’d think this would a prime candidate for forcible confinement because she is, you know, a danger to others…”
Gee whiz, going by this criteria, we’d have to lock up the President! And Cankles!
“Anyway, the girl spends a lot of with us.”
These sorts of informal arrangements used to be the common way a community dealt with these issues.
My mother fled her home to live with a friend’s family, who raised her as their own. There was never any legal or formal element to it. Sometimes personalities just don’t work together, sometimes, there are other more sinister things.
Hopefully she can maintain the distance needed to stay safe, and won’t end up getting sucked in to something dangerous. The news is full of people who just went back one too many times.
And good on you for helping.
nick
“And good on you for helping.”
Haht of gold, that guy. Soft as a sneaker-full of baby chit.
Except for my immediate family and probably pregnant women, I could torture to death any adult on the planet and not lose sleep over it. (Nothing personal, anyone reading this.) Children, though, are innocents and if they’re screwed up it’s almost certainly their parents’ fault, and they don’t deserve the bucket of shit that sometimes lands on them.
And thanks heaps for the visual, OFD. The only thing that would have made it better would be if I were eating guacamole when I read it.
I’m pacing myself while mowing the lawn this afternoon. My first rest and rehydrate break is just about over.
“Children, though, are innocents and if they’re screwed up it’s almost certainly their parents’ fault, and they don’t deserve the bucket of shit that sometimes lands on them.”
Agreed, for the most paht.
Then there’s kids like this:
http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/9200000/The-Omen-WallPaper-the-omen-9279625-1024-768.jpg
And this:
http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Lod-of-the-Flies-lord-of-the-flies-526119_196_220.jpg
There’s another take on Lord of the Flies: the boys were dropped into a non-survival situation, but they managed to survive. Was it nicey-nice, living up to all of the expectations of high society? No, of course not. The situation did not allow for nicey-nice.
I’m done with mowing the lawn for today. I’ll do some more tomorrow. I’m on my second rehydrating break then I’m hopping in the shower.
RIP Martin Milner. I loved Adam-12.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3225563/Adam-12-Route-66-star-Martin-Milner-dies-age-83.html
This just in:
“Seagate drives at risk of data theft over hidden ‘root’ account (ZD)
A public vulnerability disclosure warns that an attacker could remotely download files from an affected hard drive, thanks to the hard-coded default password.
By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day | September 7, 2015 — 11:41 GMT (04:41 PDT) |
A number of Seagate hard drives are vulnerable to data theft, thanks to an undocumented, in-built user account that could give an attacker remote access to the device.
“Seagate wireless hard-drives provides undocumented Telnet services accessible by using the default credentials of ‘root’ as username and the default password,” said a public advisory posted Tuesday.
The vulnerability is just one of many flaws in three wireless hard drives manufactured by the company, the advisory said.
Other flaws included in the advisory allow an attacker to “directly download files from anywhere on the file system.”
Seagate Wireless Plus Mobile Storage, Seagate Wireless Mobile Storage, and the company’s LaCie Fuel hard drives are said to be affected by the flaw.
The flaws, discovered by researchers at security firm Tangible Security, are said to date back as early as October 2014, affecting firmware versions 2.2.0.005 and 2.3.0.014.
The flaws are fixable if affected devices are updated to the latest firmware. But the hard drive manufacturer didn’t escape a jab from respected security researcher Kenn White, who criticized the company in a tweet on Sunday.
“People don’t expect DOD-level security but, Seagate, please stop adding hidden hardcoded root logins to hard drives,” White wrote.
Seagate did not respond to comment at the time of writing.”
For the bread, did you use regular or instant yeast?
The no-knead bread recipe apparently came from the NYT in 2006. This page has the recipe and a video: http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread
Mine is going into the oven in about an hour and a half. Also making my dad’s famous lemon BBQ chicken and fresh corn on the cob.
We be havin’ BBQ chicken, homemade tomato sauce, corn on the cob, a salad, and biscuits. Strawberry ice cream later.
90+ down in the Queen City of Burlap, slightly less here but we got our lake breeze; nice now but works a bit differently in February as it howls across two feet of lake ice.
Sitting by the association pool, watching the kids play. Had homemade pulled pork sandwich, and potato chips. Sun finally broke thru some local overcast, but a cooling breeze started up. Pretty much perfect summer day.
Nick
Store up the good memories while we can. Could be the end of a golden age.
These are The Good Old Days…
….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDJ_Mz8ftqI
In fact, the Great Depression COMBINED with BOTH world wars will seem like the good ol’ days.
Instapundit had a link to top selling cookbooks on Amazon. I followed it and looked there and in some of the subtopics in cookbooks. In the Canning and Preserving section, they had as one of the best sellers “The Prepper’s Cookbook: 300 Recipes to Turn Your Emergency Food into Nutritious, Delicious, Life-Saving Meals ” by Tess Pennington. OGH has read her prepping book and despite all the great reviews on Amazon, it’s apparently full of homeopathic/herbal chicken ship.
The cooking book has a section on canning and preserving (46 pages) and about 200 pages of recipes. Much of the first part of the book (the how to build a pantry section and some of canning) is available to browse on Amazon. One bad typo: she talks about using mylar bags to backstop food-grade plastic containers and refers to them as 5-mililiter bags. (p 35) That’s a damn small bag. She does advocate using whole wheat flour instead of white AP, but IIRC whole wheat is not really shelf stable due to the fats in the flour.
OFD wrote:
“We be havin’ BBQ chicken, homemade tomato sauce, corn on the cob, a salad, and biscuits. Strawberry ice cream later. ”
I’m not busy today, care to invite me over?
Well, Gaydar is a myth, so they say…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-08/your-gaydar-is-way-off-because-it-is-not-real-study-finds/6756892
My sister says she doesn’t have Gaydar, her son in law says he does (he used to be a cop and sometimes staked out gay beats and told them to piss off…)
“I’m not busy today, care to invite me over? :-)”
Oh man, bummer; I didn’t see your post until just now! Too late! Next time, fo sher.
“Well, Gaydar is a myth, so they say…”
All it is is sensitivity to the signs, the signals, peeps give off, whether for this or other stuff. I’ve failed to ID gay guys several times, and it wouldn’t even have occurred to me then. Even less so with gay women. I just don’t give a chit.
Store up the good memories while we can. Could be the end of a golden age.
I like what Pournelle puts on his website:
““Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
“This is known as ‘bad luck’.”
– Robert A. Heinlein”
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/deterrence-in-the-age-of-the-deal/
True, very true. A saying in the engineering industry is that the backs of the inventors and entrepreneurs are often filled with arrows.
Also, a revisit to the Harrison Bergeron story is always good.
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”
@Dave, sorry you live where lawn is natural. I don’t, and have been lawn free for 37 years. Never fight nature.
I don’t really mind mowing all that much but am thinking seriously of eliminating most of the back yard/lawn in favor of raised beds and containers. Ditto for the latter along our gravel driveway, which gets the most sun of anyplace here. And another shed for the garden and yard tools, since Mrs. OFD commandeered the one shed that’s been here for her jewelry studio.
T-storm just rolled through with a momentary deluge; we could use a few hours of hard soaking rain this week. It’s been close to 90 all week and humid, but no rain. While the leaves are turning orange and red…
A wonderful day with the kids, and even a pretty good bedtime. Any parent of young ones will second the appeal of a good bedtime.
So I’ve been watching the Wartime Farm series that I linked to. I’m through ep. 4. There is also a Victorian Farm series by the same people that I’ve watched 1 ep. so far.
It’s not really prepping, and a lot short on technical detail, but it is an eye opener. It’s farming only 70 years ago, certainly not 1890’s level, and it’s almost impossible to consider jumping back to that level, as many preppers think they will. There is an incredible array of technology in use, due to labor shortages (and unless you are thinking of yourself as “warlord” post-SHTF you will be short of labor) and NONE of that technology is readily available now. There were very specialized machines, and techniques, many new, but also many re-learned. Making clay roof tiles locally involved a machine and some really specialized knowledge of how to build a kiln onsite, and how to run it properly, to say nothing of all the equipment for planting and harvesting. I’m learning a lot about the period, and some general stuff, like why a silo is called a silo (because you make and store silage in it.)
The political situation is revealing too. The rationing in steadily decreasing allotments. The state taking control of food production and distribution. Evacuees and dissenters sent from the cities to the farms. Massive and sinister bureaus determining if you were doing a good enough job; who could and did seize farms, turn you out on the street, tell you what to do and how much to sell exclusively to them, send refugees to be billeted on your property. The culture of scarcity and state control that formed the basis of modern england. It’s all there in the videos, if you look.
Worth the time and better than most episodic tv.
nick
(they’re british country folk, so don’t expect eye candy, *cough*Robert*cough*)
I like lawns, they look really nice, but keeping clover and weeds out is a royal PITA.
England was in pretty sorry shape back then and facing probable invasion from the Germans, so their government went into survival mode. And it was miserable for them for many years after the end of that war. Between the two world wars they never recovered the past “glory” of the British Empire and lost multiple generations of their best and brightest young men.
Now we have the Murkan Empire.
“Seagate drives at risk of data theft over hidden ‘root’ account (ZD)
I only buy WD rotating drives and Intel SSDs. However, I suspect that they have their own problems also. That is why IPv6 scares the you know what out of me because there is no NAT utility (that I know of).