Month: August 2017

09:04 – It was 61.6F (16.5C) when I took Colin out at 0645, partly cloudy. Colin vomited a couple more times yesterday, but he’s behaving normally otherwise and doesn’t appear to be in any distress. He has his usual amount of energy, which is to say a lot, and constantly wants to play, so I don’t think anything is really wrong with him. As James Herriot used to say, if he couldn’t catch his patients, he knew there was nothing very wrong with them.

Barbara is cleaning house this morning, after which we’ll go back to work on building science kits and getting the downstairs LTS food room cleaned up and organized. We got a lot done on that yesterday. Barbara proclaimed that she was pleased. I’m trying to get similar stuff shelved together. All the oils and fats in one place, all the meats together, all the pasta together, etc.

I was also pleased, because the counts confirmed that we’re in pretty good shape on everything. We have, for example, roughly 340 cans of meat of various sizes and types, totaling about 360 pounds. That’s about 3.6 ounces of meat per day for the 4.5 of us for a year, and doesn’t count what’s in the vertical freezer upstairs. In a long-term power-out emergency, we could of course pressure-can that as well.

We’re also in good shape on oils/fats. Again not counting butter and other oils in the big freezer upstairs, we have about 25 gallons of assorted oils/fats shelved downstairs. Even not counting the fats in canned meats, that’s sufficient lipids for the 4.5 of us for at least a year. We’re in similarly good shape on other categories like rice/flour/pasta, herbs/spices, cooking/baking essentials, canned powdered eggs/butter/cheese, etc. The only thing we’re short on at this point is vegetables.

The only exception I’m making to keeping like with like is our stock of #10 cans of LTS food from the LDS Home Storage Center and miscellaneous stuff from Augason Farms. There are roughly 240 cans (40 cases) of that, kept together in or near the LTS food room closet.

And I uncovered a science experiment at the back of the storage shelves. It’s a box of UHT half-and-half creamer packages that has a best-by date four years ago. When Barbara picked it up, she said, “EWWWW!” and carried it over to the trash can to discard. I rescued it and took it upstairs, because I intend to try it. If it sniff-tests okay, I’ll taste it, but my guess is that it’ll fail the sniff test.

08:56 – It was 69.9F (21C) when I took Colin out at 0630, mostly cloudy and muggy. Barbara is heading for the gym and supermarket this morning, after which she’ll be working in the garden and perhaps doing some work on science kits.

I asked Barbara to pick me up a couple of bags of frozen French fries because I want to do some dehydration experiments on them. She’s going to get me a bag of the thicker, crinkle-cut fries and another of the thin, shoestring fries so that I can compare the dehydration properties of each. My guess is that the shoestring fries will dehydrate better, simply because they have a larger surface area to volume ratio, but we’ll see. I will, of course, weigh the specimens before dehydrating them and then after different drying periods to calculate the percentage moisture and moisture loss of each.

We were just discussing this morning that we’re both very glad that Sparta is outside the path of totality for the eclipse. It’s going to be a real mess in that path across rural and small-town America. These areas simply aren’t capable of dealing with a massive influx of people. Gas stations will run out of fuel, supermarkets and restaurants will run out of food, Roach Motels will be charging $1,000 per night, emergency and medical services will be swamped, and so on. Even the roads aren’t designed to support the volume they may see. Dealing with even minor breakdowns and flat tires will be frustrating and time-consuming. EMS in many areas will be slow to respond because they’ll be in such high demand. Rural emergency rooms will be packed. Tempers will fray. Fist fights and worse will be frequent. We’re well out of it.

I write often about long-term food storage, but I got an interesting email yesterday that makes it clear I need to mention short-term food storage. This woman is in her late 30’s and is preparing only for herself and her daughter, age 15. She has several months’ worth of LTS food. Everything except meats, which presents a problem for her.

They’d like to buy a supply of Keystone Meats 28-ounce cans and put them on the shelf. They’ve already ordered small numbers of the various Keystone Meats, and like all of them. The problem is, she’s looking at the possibility of a long-term emergency where refrigeration is not available, and a 28-ounce can is too much for the two of them to eat at one sitting.

So their LTS pantry currently has maybe a 3-month supply of 12.5-ounce cans of Costco chicken, and not much other meat. Freeze-dried meats are out of the question cost-wise. Neither of them particularly likes canned tuna or salmon, and both of them despise Spam. They both like chicken, but not every day. She’d like to store a lot more variety in her canned meats. So what are the alternatives?

First, she can actively search out smaller cans of different meats. Keystone does sell all of their meats in smaller (14.5-ounce) cans, but the cost per ounce is much higher, and those smaller cans can be difficult to find. Costco used to carry 12-ounce cans of Harvest Creek Pulled Pork, but no longer does so. (We just moved the last cans of that pulled pork from the deep pantry up to the kitchen. They have a best-by date of 6/27/17.) Costco does offer 12-ounce cans of roast beast for about $3.50 per can. It’s not Barbara’s favorite, but she will eat it. She’s not a big beef eater anyway. I think it’s pretty good, about equivalent to Keystone beef chunks. There are also alternatives like DAK canned hams that might be worth taste-testing.

Second, she can pressure-can meats herself, as several of the Prepper Girls do. After the upfront cost of a decent pressure canner and related supplies, it’ll cost her about $0.75 to put up a one-pint (one pound) jar of whatever meats she wants to store. And, of course, the cost of the meat itself, but she can buy that in bulk when it’s on sale. It’s a lot of time, work, and fuel, but depending on what meats she decides to pressure-can, it’ll probably be about break-even cost-wise compared to buying commercially-canned meats. And it’s perfectly safe if she follows USDA recommendations.

I’ll call home pressure-canning MTS, medium-term storage, if only because some vendors of canning jars and lids have made some disturbing statements about how long their products will maintain a safe seal. At one point, some vendors were saying only one year, but I believe they’ve upped that to 18 months now. Still, in the past we all assumed that pressure-canned foods would remain safe for many year or even decades, so these new recommendations are disturbing. I’m not sure what’s changed to cause the dramatic reduction in rated shelf life. Perhaps the shift away from BPA?

Third, just because you don’t have refrigeration doesn’t mean you can’t preserve meats from day to day. For thousands of years, people have used pottage to do just that, particularly during the winter months. A pot of a meat dish kept on low heat remains good for a long, long time. Back the middle ages, people kept pottage going for literally months on end, adding things to the pot every day–from a scoop of grain or beans to some chunks of rabbit or squirrel or quail or whatever meat they could get–and eating their meals from it.

We could do exactly that here if it ever became necessary. Our propane supply is large enough to keep the smallest burner on our cooktop running 24/7 on low for many years. If we were heating with our wood stove in a long-term emergency, we could also use that. Or, in the winter, of course, we’d have outdoors refrigeration.

But summer or winter, there’s an easier solution based on modern technology: the vacuum bottle. We keep two or three of these wide-mouth vacuum bottles on hand, and they’re capable of keep hot foods hot overnight. So, for example, we might make up a pot of beef with barley soup or beef stew or whatever. After the meal, we’d transfer the leftovers, still hot, into one or more of these Thermos bottles, where they’d still be perfectly safe to eat 24 hours later. Or we could simply transfer the hot Dutch oven to one of our large coolers, which would keep the food hot enough to prevent microorganisms from growing in it.

She also ended her message by commenting on a question I’ve raised more than once: why do people listen to me? Her answer was, “Because you obviously know what you’re talking about. You don’t pretend to know about things you don’t know, you admit it when you’re wrong and you’re not trying to sell me anything. This is the only prepping web site I’ve seen like that.”

While I appreciate the sentiment, I’m still in the same boat as everyone else: I don’t know what I don’t know. And even more worrying is the things I think I know that I turn out to be wrong about. Still, I just realized that as of this year I’ve been a prepper for 55 years, ever since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, so I’ve had time to figure a lot of stuff out by actual experience.

08:57 – It was 65.3F (18.5C) when I took Colin out at 0650, clear and sunny.

While Barbara was down in Winston yesterday, I spent some time working downstairs in the food storage areas. I found the four #10 cans of Augason Powdered Whole Eggs I’d ordered a couple of months ago, and moved them into the freezer, where they joined seven other cans of eggs. That’s roughly equivalent to 65 dozen fresh eggs. Not that we’ll be eating scrambled eggs or anything, but over the course of a year that gives us a couple eggs a day for making up pancakes or whatever.

The remainder of the freezer space is filled with vitamins and other mostly OTC drugs, which leaves the refrigerator. I’m currently moving a couple hundred 28-ounce cans of Keystone Meats and 12.5-ounce cans of Costco chicken into the refrigerator, which’ll extend their real-world shelf lives by a factor of at least four. I’d like to get us eventually up to one can of meat per day for a year. That won’t all fit in the refrigerator, obviously, but the more we can fit in there, the better. Eventually, I want to start pressure-canning meats, like the sausage Barbara gets at Costco. I may even try pressure-canning bacon.

Any space left in the refrigerator for now will be filled with #10 cans of Augason powdered cheese and butter, 15-ounce jars of Bertolli Alfredo sauce, and perhaps a few bottles of olive oil. When we’re finished, that refrigerator/freezer will be jam-packed with relatively high-value food.

I’ll keep the oldest stuff on the shelves at room temperature, where we’ll use it first. Room temperature downstairs, particularly in the unfinished area, is noticeably cooler than upstairs. In cold weather, it gets positively chilly down there.

I’m moving most oils/fats, syrups, vinegar, etc. to the upper, less accessible shelves in the unfinished area. Currently, there are seven or eight gallons of pancake syrup, a couple gallons of white vinegar, and about five gallons of vegetable/olive oil on the top shelf. They’ll soon be joined by a dozen 3-pound cans of shortening, a 3-gallon jug of peanut oil, several more gallons of vegetable/olive oil, and a gallon or two of wine vinegar.

Speaking of oils/fats/lipids reminds me of something I’ve meant to mention for a while. The LDS Church LTS recommendation is to store one quart/liter of oils per person per month, or about 2 pounds’ worth. Keep in mind that the current LDS iron-ration recommendations are for a minimal diet to sustain life, so you should consider them an absolute minimum.

The LDS recommendations are particularly light on oils/fats. Overall, the recommended amounts provide about 2,200 calories/day. Carbohydrates and proteins both average about 1,700 calories/pound, give or take. Oils average about 4,000 calories per pound. That means that the LDS recommendations provide a diet in which only about 12% of the calories come from fats. That’s much, much lower than a typical American diet, which yields somewhere in the 25% to 35% range of calories from fats. A diet that’s too low in lipids can have undesirable gastrointestinal and other effects, and should be avoided.

So instead of storing only one quart/liter per person-month, my goal is to store about twice that much, and I recommend that others do the same. Call it two quarts/liters or 4 pounds per person-month. That’s roughly six gallons or 48 pounds per person-year, or 27 gallons/216 pounds for the 4.5 of us.

You can store the bulk of your oils/fats supply as the obvious items: vegetable/olive oil and shortening. But other fatty items like butter, ghee, lard, peanut butter, mayonnaise, and so on also count towards the total.

08:44 – It was 68.0F (20C) when I took Colin out at 0650, overcast and calm. We had another 0.6″ of rain overnight, which takes us to about 4.4″ (11 cm) over the last three days. Things are damp. More work on science kits this morning. Barbara is volunteering at the Friends bookstore this afternoon. She’s also making a quick run down to Winston tomorrow, leaving in the morning and returning in the afternoon. She’ll make a Home Depot run while she’s down there to pick up a few items, including another platform ladder to use downstairs and a gallon of VM&P naphtha, which is excellent fuel for Zippo lighters.

Amongst other things, we got 50 pounds each of sugar and rice repackaged yesterday. We repackaged the sugar into 14 of those 1.75-liter Tropicana orange juice bottles, at just a fraction over 3.5 pounds per bottle. The rice went into a dozen 2-liter soft drink bottles, at 4 pounds per bottle. The little bit remaining in the large bag went into our kitchen storage. We could have repackaged the sugar in 2-liter soft drink bottles. Like rice, sugar is free flowing, so the smaller mouth of the bottle isn’t a problem. But the 2-liter bottles don’t fit well on our kitchen shelves, which is where we keep at least 50 pounds of sugar at all times.

We still have a 50-pound bag of white flour to repackage, which is a pain in the ass because it’s so fluffy. That’ll go into 1-gallon Costco water bottles, at about 7 pounds per bottle.

Barbara was texting back and forth with her friend JoAnne yesterday. They’ve decided to get a Border Collie puppy. Barbara warned her that adopting a BC puppy is kind of like adopting a Tasmanian Devil, so JoAnne is aware of what they’ll be taking on.

We finished The Hollow Crown last night. It was terrible. The production values were excellent, and it had good acting. It was just so politically correct that I consider it unwatchable.

The PC rot in video first became really noticeable 20 years ago or so, and has really accelerated in the last ten. So we’re shifting our TV viewing to older stuff. There are hundreds of series to pick from. Many of those we first watched 25 years ago or more, so they’re now effectively new to us. Many others we never got around to watching back then, so they’re completely new to us. With very few exceptions, anything made in the last 10 or 15 years simply isn’t worth watching. If the price of watching old stuff is that it’s in 4:3 SD instead of 16:9 HD, we don’t care. Lipstick on a pig still leaves it a pig.