09:54 – Barbara is off to the gym and bank. Later today we’ll be doing more kit stuff. We’re down to half a dozen forensic kits in stock, so building more of those will be first priority. That means we need to make up chemical bags for them, which means I need to make up several of the chemicals and get them bottled first.
Email from Jen, who decided to take advantage of the Augason Farms Labor Day sale to stock up on more powdered eggs. She ordered another dozen #10 cans, about 72 dozen worth, to add to the 30+ cans she already had in their pantry. That gives her something like 250 dozen worth. As Jen said, at about $3/dozen, the powdered whole eggs are three times the price of fresh, but they don’t keep chickens and she has no intention of doing so. A lot of people store powdered eggs only for baking purposes, but Jen has scrambled eggs on their LTS breakfast menu. She’s tried making scrambled eggs from the powder, and says it works just fine. None of them could tell much if any difference between scrambled eggs from fresh and from powder. With more than 40 cans in stock, they’ll be able to have scrambled eggs once or twice a week for the six of them for a year, and still have plenty for baking. It’ll make a nice break from pancakes and oatmeal.
Speaking of baking, Jen said they had one #10 can of baking powder in their LTS pantry, but she decided to back that up using my method of storing the ingredients separately. So she added a 13-pound bag of baking soda from Sam’s and a 5-pound container of citric acid she ordered on Amazon. Both of those ingredients have essentially unlimited shelf lives, while baking powder, once opened, can have a shelf life of only six months to a year, or even less. The problem is that any moisture, even atmospheric water vapor, reacts with the baking powder to activate it and render it useless. One can instead mix the baking soda and citric acid to make up baking powder on-the-fly, either single- or double-acting depending on the proportions you use.
I’ve started re-reading Eric Flint’s 1632 (Ring of Fire) series, which I last read probably 12 or 15 years ago. It’s about a contemporary small West Virginia town that is physically and temporally displaced from 2000 West Virginia to 1632 central Germany, plopped down right in the middle of the 30 Years War. It wasn’t written as a PA/prepper series, but that’s what it is. The first volume is free for the download on Amazon.com. I think the series is up to 16 or 17 titles now. I have the first half dozen already, and may grab the others eventually.
.