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Category: prepping

Sat. July 3, 2021 – no title for you!

Still forecast to be hot and humid with possibility of rain… and yesterday was hot and humid, but sunny too. There was a little overcast, but no rain.

I did some kid chauffeuring, got one quick in person estate sale in on the way home from that, cut my deadbeat neighbor’s grass because I couldn’t look at it any longer, fed kids, ate, and just lived my life.

I did sort through a bin full of medical supplies, and organize them. I still don’t have a good system for storing stuff I’m unlikely to need, but if I do, I’ll need it in a hurry. A lot of my medical stuff is really just to have a deep larder if things go very pear shaped, and as such doesn’t need to be ready to hand, but does need to be safe. As I was sorting this bin I was thinking about just HOW pear shaped things would need to get for some of it to make sense. And then I saw the article about Venezuela knocking 6 zeros off its currency, and I remembered that we got through the very unlikely pandemic without much disruption because I’d taken the chance of a pandemic seriously and prepared for it.

We have been lucky that drug supply lines weren’t more seriously disrupted, and that we didn’t see widespread shortages of critical meds in the US (there were shortages, and some suppliers had to look outside their normal vendors). I don’t want to depend on luck. So I stack stuff that I’m unlikely to need, and that I fervently hope I’ll NEVER use. There’s plenty in the stacks that I do use and that does get rotated too. And as has been pointed out here and elsewhere, wound care, and caring for the sick, will eat through supplies like Rosanne Barr at the Shakee’s pizza buffet. There are alternatives to toilet paper, there are fewer alternatives to meds and medical supplies.

Don’t forget simple soap and AB ointment. They are both cheap and both are literal lifesavers.

Hygiene and cleanliness are topics for whole books, but the short version is – a stitch in time saves nine. Don’t let infection get started, and you won’t be wishing you’d bought some fish meds… or that all the Drs didn’t die off in the first wave of the zombie plague. Ditto for keeping moist areas of the body clean and dry. Kilts were good for that at least, but I don’t see them coming into fashion here… and clean hands will prevent a whole host of ills.

With that cheery thought, I’m off to do more stuff around the house. ‘Cuz it ain’t gonna do itself…

n

(stack something)

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Thur. July 1, 2021 – more running around today

Still rain in the forecast, and heat, although not as much. It wasn’t actually unpleasant yesterday, although it was wet. There was a lot of regional rain, and areas of town that didn’t get any. As I was driving across town it would go from downpour to dry and back again. The bayous are filling up though.\

Today I’ve got another Dr appointment for oldest, a vet appointment for the pup, and youngest is having a play date and sleepover at a friend’s house. I’m chauffeur dad today.

Yesterday I took the kids to the doc for camp physicals. Freaking GS form was just bizarre. There was a whole section of body parts and the doc was supposed to select “satisfactory” or “not satisfactory”. No other explanation. Heart, lungs, teeth, genitalia. F me. Genitalia, not satisfactory. WTeverlovingF? Why is that an option, what does GS’ing gain from the exam and paper record, and WTF is the criteria? We got neither the exam nor a comment for that section, just a vague line drawn next to the body part in the listing. People want too damn much information that they have no business even asking for. ONE line would be sufficient– “In my professional opinion, after examining the child, I find her healthy enough to participate in GS camp activities, with the following exceptions or modifications….” That is all GS needs to know.

It’s probably too late, but take control the amount of information you reveal to third parties. Have a set of answers you can use if you like, possibly transposing digits “by accident” or shifting dates or other numbers by some set amount. Start pushing back, ask if the info is ‘requested’ or ‘required’ and push for privacy and retention policies. Refuse to answer questions that aren’t relevant.

Yeah, I know, there is a certain amount of irony in me saying that… given the nature of blogging. Still, Nick is a subset of me, and I do try to obfuscate and especially to not “out” people who are unaware of what I do here, like my siblings. The resulting prose can sometimes be very awkward, and unnatural, and I try hard to smooth it out, usually with only limited success.

Anyway, with that said…

Dinner last night was home made fried chicken and southern fried veg– green tomatoes and onion rings. Youngest child wanted to make fried chicken and even though it makes a mess and the whole house smells like fried food for 3 days, it was a lot of fun. Green tomatoes were fresh from the garden, and were delicious. I used a batter mix, cast iron “chicken fryer”, and peanut oil. Biscuits were from a tube, for time and simplicity’s sake. Good stuff. Older child thinks she’ll be able to learn cooking “just before she needs it”. Yeah, good luck with that. Like gardening, it’s both simple and hard. Unless you count the soup kitchen, post SHTF you’ll be doing your own cooking. If you don’t already have some knowledge and skills, it’s time to start practicing. There has been much discussion here about the subject, the keywords are on the right… or ask in a comment.

Maybe you can survive on re-hydrated Mountain House, or microwave popcorn alone, but most of us will need more than that. Either way, stack what you need, don’t forget the tools, and practice the skills.

nick

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Wed. June 30, 2021 – summer is flying by

Hot and humid, chance of rain. We did get rain yesterday, and sun, and heat (but not terrible heat). Today should be more of the same.

Spent the day mostly indoors, doing a bunch of stuff I’ve put off too long. Paid my toll invoices for driving around without toll tags in my new truck. Put the toll tag in the truck. Did a bunch of other paperwork stuff. Played with the puppy.

Today should be a bit more active. I have to do an auction pickup, and take both kids for their Girl Scout Camp physicals. I’ve got other auction stuff to do too. I was sorting through some stuff to sell in one of the local auctions last night. She’s got a guy who buys all of one particular item that she lists, and I’ve got a bunch of them. She’s waved me off on general items since she has a huge listing backlog, but maybe I can squeeze a dozen of these in. While going through that box of stuff, I might also have found a really good score. I’ll share with the guy who gave me the box though, I’d feel bad taking it all, it’s that good a score, and there were other things in the box that should bring good money on their own.

Part of the fun of thrifting/estate/garage/yard sale hunting is the treasure hunt aspect. You literally don’t know what you will find, and sometimes you do find the treasure.

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Got my FCC license for GMRS about 10 hours after I applied. It’s a “pay the fee and get the license” application, and the license covers your whole family. The FCC isn’t issuing actual hard copies anymore, they just send a link to a pdf. I guess there is very little intrinsic value in the paper, that would make it worth forging. In any case, I’m current for GMRS again. FWIW, I got a new license rather than renew my lapsed one. There were two additional hoops to jump through and a huge fee ($210) to bring my old one current, so I just got a new one ($70 for 5 years) instead.

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There are a lot of people that would make arguments against paying for the GMRS license, working from at least 3 different points of view. Don’t care. I don’t want to give them (.gov) that handle to use against me.

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There are a lot of lists out there. My radio stuff puts me on one or more. My CERT training put me on another. My previous work clients put me on yet more lists. I’m a blogger, which probably puts me on a list. I am on lists with HPD and our Constable’s office, and the associated alumni groups. Purchasing certain items with background checks put me on a list. Visa and Mastercard probably maintain lists based on my purchase history. Amazon certainly does, and likely collaborates with .gov by compiling and selling lists. My school district has me on at least 4 lists. I’ve been to China twice so I’m on lists there, and I’m certain the US State Dept. has me on lists because of my travel to the middle east and the middle kingdom. I’m on a list in Canada, I had a work permit there for several years. I was working on a project subject to ITAR and had to go through that paperwork – that’s another list. At one point in my miss-spent youth, I’m sure I was on some other agencies’ lists as a “known associate”. There may even be criminal enterprises that have me on a list, if they do that sort of thing.

Don’t let the fact that you’ll end up on a list keep you from doing something. There are lots of us on lists, and the more there are, the more noise there is to get lost in. Use the lists to your advantage. I have access to more training activities now that I’m on a vetted list with HPD and the Constable’s Office. The CERT training is very broad based, and definitely worth trading for a spot on a list. So is ham radio. Medical training likewise.

If everyone’s the ‘biggest risk to the US’ then no one is.

Of course, be aware of when you really DON’T want to be on the list, and try to conduct at least part of your life so you don’t get on lists. Especially when it comes to stacking, you don’t want to be on the list of resources to be plundered. And since local is the new hotness, be very careful about getting on your neighbors’ lists… and consider making a few of your own.

You can think of the lists while you’re stacking.

nick

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Tues. June 29, 2021 – reduce, re-use, recycle…

Hot and humid, with rain in the forecast for the next few days, possibly followed by a hurricane. Hooray. Rained all day yesterday, off and on, but mostly on. Grass did not get cut.

Did office and auction things all day.

Grabbed the younger child to help with dinner, and we made pork roast, smashed cauliflower baked with cheese, and baked carrots with brown sugar and marshmallows. And crescent rolls from a tube. Along the way we talked about cookbooks, measuring, spent time with proper knife handling, and worked the math so that everything was ready at the same time. And it was all delicious. She was very proud of herself, and I was too.

I mentioned that I would have some observations about traveling last week, but that would be original content, and this post is recycling what I wrote in a comment at Bayou Renaissance Man. It was half about wuflu, and half about what comes next. That’s the part I’m recycling because, I needed to get to bed.

I asked the commentors there —

If you* haven’t made changes in your life because of the last 15 months, WHY NOT? What does your pantry look like? Your medicine chest? What about your gun cabinet? Have you evaluated the sources of information you expose yourself to and then made conscious choices about which are reliable? What about the people you share your precious and fleeting life with?

If you believe the lockdowns were political and coercive in nature with no medical benefits, how has that changed YOUR LIFE? What are you doing with that information?

If nothing has changed for you, if your estimation of what the next couple of years hold for all of us hasn’t changed, you are going to be just grist for the mill. If all you’ve done is mutter and wear your mask under your nose in protest, you are so far behind the curve you might not be able to catch up, but I think you should try.

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Prep so that the restrictions, shortages, and price fluctuations have less effect on you. Order your life so that you aren’t dependent on .gov, or your single source of income. Reduce your dependence on outside income period. Build relationships that will sustain you and limit the ones that will drain you. Reduce the number of ‘handles’ your enemies or just those who would manipulate you, have to pull on. Stop wasting time and energy on things that don’t improve your ability to get thru the hard times that are already here, and will continue to get worse.

Looking backwards, past the point where it provides you with guidance to move forward (ie. learning from mistakes), is not a survival trait. Focus on getting thru what’s coming.

* general ‘you’
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And that’s it boys and girls, moms and dads, children of all ages. Learn some lessons from this past year, and ACT. Even if it doesn’t get worse, but only stays exactly the same, you should be doing some stuff differently than you were. Hopefully, you have some stacks of stuff, some skills, and some friends. If not, get going. If so, keep going. Stack it high.

nick

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Mon. June 28, 2021 – if you don’t practice it, you will never learn

Hot and humid, possible rain, and surely some sun. Or some variation on the theme. If you guys are getting tired of the repetition, imagine me living with it 🙂

Yesterday was mixed rain and sun, with plenty of humidity and heat. I did get a bit of work done outside anyway, namely most of the grass cutting.

A quick look at the garden had more tomatoes ripening, lots of green still on the vines. The potted lime has 5 nice fruits on it. The blueberries are still ripening, with at least another half cup of berries ready soon. I harvested the one tennis ball sized onion out of what I planted last year. The grape vines died back almost to the root stock, but one is sending out new growth. It’s about 3-4 feet so far. I need to prune out all the dead grapevine sometime in the future. The herbs are flourishing.

It didn’t take too long to harvest the few things, and pull a couple of weeds.

Really I spent most of the day catching up on my online reading. There is plenty going on in the world and little good in the news. There is continued progress in the new race to space, and that is good, but it’s not something I follow. Of course the news is rarely full of ‘good’ news. Even accounting for that bias, there is a lot of stuff going on. For example, someone in south Chicago shooting up a car in traffic with a full auto rifle and a 100 round Beta magazine, in broad daylight. That is an escalation in the security situation in the city. Likewise, there was yet another daytime shooting in NYFC Times Square.

Nationally, we’ve now got the sitting President telling us rifles aren’t enough to keep the FedGov from killing us, we’ll need F-15s and nukes. It was bad enough when some nobody jerkoff from Cali said almost the exact thing, but now it’s the President? The president who seems more bizarre every day? Who does some sort of scary whisper voice during press conferences and talks about getting in trouble if he doesn’t do what ‘they’ say? THAT president? The same president who’s own party doesn’t trust him with nuclear launch codes?

Nationally, in big cities, and locally we have bad things getting worse. Yeah, doom and gloom. The end is nigh-er… but. Can you make the case it’s not?

And if not, then I hope you’re stacking it high.

nick

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Wed. June 16, 2021 – already running out of week

Maybe a bit cooler, what with the rain and thunderstorms and all… yesterday was hot and muggy, and bright sun until afternoon. The sky got a bit overcast, and by 5:30 the storm was rolling in. Temps dropped into the low 70s and the wind was whipping around. Parts of town got hammered, but here at the house we only got about a quarter inch by the gauge. Seemed like more.

Spent the day doing paper work. Finished late last night. Now it’s off to the CPA for tax filing. I also caught up on some other stuff I’d let slide, like renewing some memberships, canceling one of our TiVo boxes, messing around with the linux NVR, and filing paper. Threw a bunch out too.

Of course I took a break to play with the puppy, and the kids gave him a bath. He didn’t care for that much… but it sure gave him the zoomies, just like our other little guy.

There are more and more articles about inflation, and high prices, every day now. We’ve talked before about how quickly Venezuela went from “we might have a problem in a while” to “we are having a problem” to “tasty zebra, tasty rat.” Basically two years, and at no point was there a clear break with the past, so that you could say, “holy cow, it’s time to act.” We’ve also talked about why some people think that couldn’t happen with the US. Assertions don’t make reality though. What would you do differently if you KNEW we were in the first upward part of that curve? How much of that can you do without irrevocable changes? Think hard about doing it. In two years, runaway inflation can take it all, all your retirement savings, all the kids’ college money, all your savings, all of it. I don’t have a crystal ball, but no one else does either, and I don’t want to find myself saying “man, I wish I had just covered that bet, at least a little”.

Gold, durable goods, affordable everyday luxury items. Guns, ammo. Staples, especially ones that people don’t normally have in the cabinet, anything you need for yourself. Food. Repair and maintenance items. First aid and drugs. Those are all traditional good performers in an inflationary time.

Stack it high.

nick

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Sat. June 12, 2021 – non-prepping hobby day! Meatspace baby

Hot and humid but should be clear. Yesterday the humidity was lower than “dripping” so it was nice in the shade. Plenty of breeze too. Today should be similar. Still, it was over 80F when I went to bed.

Did some errands. Picked up some stuff. Did some work for my only remaining client. Petted his dogs. Played with mine. Had chinese food for dinner courtesy of FIL, and will go out for dinner tonight.

This morning I’m going to my non-prepping hobby meeting. It is nice to be getting together again to celebrate our shared interests. I should also see some of my ham lunch guys there too, and learn the fate of our in person lunch meeting. We might finally get that back up too.

Things around here aren’t ever going back to “normal” but they are getting closer. Lots of masks on people still, and I usually wear one when around crowds indoors, but plenty of people without masks too. And I’ll probably just wear a ‘medical’ mask at my meeting, and will remove it at some point, when we’re not shouting in each other’s faces.

I admit I won’t feel comfortable in a shoulder to shoulder crowd for a while. Of course I’m never really comfortable in that kind of situation anyway.

Still looking for a getaway spot. Still priced out of the market. Looks like my next door neighbor sold his house though. The sketchy renters will hopefully be the last for a while. That makes the house across the street, and the house next door into wild cards if things get sporty. I will just hope for the best, and keep my eyes open.

I got another 6 blueberries today with a whole bunch still on the bushes. Baby steps. If only the peach would start to produce. The apple needs to grow in a couple more years but it is growing well this year. At some point I will have to pull out the dead lemon, orange and grapefruit, but it’s really far down my list at this point. They look like alien sculptures after all the pruning I’ve done over the years.

Tomato plants are still huge tropical jungles of foliage, but they are not producing as much fruit this week as last. It is finally too hot. New grape vine died, and the old died back almost to the rootstock. While it is recovering, it hasn’t been very vigorous this year either. Herbs are going gangbusters, far more than we need or could use. Funny, I just realized I didn’t plant any peppers this year. I think this is the first year I haven’t since I started the garden experiments. Ebb and flow.

Well, I’m off to see some people and share a common interest, in person.

Stack your reference library, and your apocalypse library too. They are not the same thing. Stack all the things!

nick

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Fri. June 11, 2021 – a third of the way thru June already…

Hot and humid with very little chance of rain. Yesterday was hot, humid, sunny, and generally a nice day, with some overcast in various parts of town. That is one of the features of Houston weather, lots of variation depending on location. Some is consistent enough I call it a micro-climate, although the pros would likely take issue with that. Since the pros can make stuff up without ever paying the consequence for being wrong, I don’t particularly care what they would say in this case.

It’s funny that the same thing can be said about economists and financial pundits. Even investment advisors and financial pros always have a good reason why they didn’t get it right. And yet we LIKE the idea of hidden knowledge and revealed secrets. We keep going back to them for more. It must be part of our genetic and memetic heritage, although I can’t see a benefit to it. At least with everyone but the weathermen, you can simply say “their goals may not be our goals” and that offers possible explanations for why they are wrong so often.

Anyway, keep in mind that if 80% of everything is cr@p, (and I believe that is a pretty good estimate, if possibly low), that includes any predictions about the future, or explanations about the present.

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I spent yesterday running errands and avoiding my MIL. Took eldest child and puppy to see my gun store buddy. A puppy brightens everyone’s day right? The mom and pop stores should be raking in the dough in the current climate, and yet they are mostly in jeopardy of going out of business. Two gun stores in one day, and the differences were pretty dramatic. If you have inventory, you have sales and income. If you don’t, you don’t. Having other income (from a range, gunsmithing, transfers) can help, but it is only part of the equation. Stores without stuff to sell don’t last long. And that might be the biggest irony and disaster to come out of this past year- the destruction of the mom and pop gun store by extreme demand for guns.

Today I’ve got some pickups if I can fit them in, household stuff again. Then I’ve got a site visit at my client’s house. There are a couple of questions that need answers that I just can’t remember even knowing, and that I can answer by going and looking. So I’m going. Sometimes you just have to be there.

The pot roast in the slow cooker was a success. The only side was a loaf of shelf stable sourdough bread, and the veg and gravy from the pot. Every ounce of 3 pounds of meat got eaten, and even most of the veg disappeared. For seasoning, the CrockPot ™ seasoning mix single use pouch is nice and savory without being particularly overwhelming. It’s one of my ‘goto’ meals when I know I won’t be home to make dinner, and I’m not sure when exactly dinner will be.

Stews and one pot meals are great to use up food that might be getting a bit older. In this case it was some potatoes, turnips, and carrots that had been around for just a bit long. On a plate, by themselves, they might not have been really nice (although very nice compared to Little House on the Prairie at the end of a long winter) but in a pot with 6 hours to stew and blend, they were awesome and indistinguishable from fresh.

This is one of the keys to economical cooking and meal planning, and a skill that you might have to learn or re-learn with hard times on the way. Use what you have, in a way that plays to its strengths. If you have more bread than you expected, make french toast, Texas Toast, or bread pudding. If you have extra milk, use it in a dish that calls for a lot of milk. Too many veg? Make a chutney or salsa. The goal is to get the best use possible out of what you have, and avoid wasting any of it. In an economy based on abundance, you can get exactly what you want. In an economy based on scarcity, you take what you can get, and if you are smart, creative, or prepared, you make the best of it. Most people lived this way throughout most of history, we can do it too. Old recipe books can be a big help. Any recipe book sold by Williams Sonoma probably won’t be.

Of course, one of the ways to mitigate scarcity is to have big stacks of stuff, so don’t stop stacking…

nick

(it pays to know what to do with it, and to have practiced too…)

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Thur. June 10, 2021 – wouldn’t it be nice to get something done?

Hot and humid. Yep, we’re in that part of the year. This opening paragraph will be an almost unbroken litany of hot and humid that will occasionally be broken by severe weather. Somewhere in the low to mid 90s yesterday, and somewhere in the low to mid 90s today. Humidity in the same range, 75 – 90 %RH. We didn’t get rain yesterday, and there isn’t supposed to be any today, which is a nice change.

Can I just say that I don’t like people in my house, or in my kitchen? I don’t like them moving my stuff around. And if they want to cook, they should frakking cook, not just make a mess and then hand ME stuff to cook. It was tasty, but it took 3 times as long as it should have, and wasn’t what I’d have chosen, given that we ate the same dish just a few days ago. Of course that was a prepared meal from costco and I just had to heat it in the microwave and make some rice to go with it.

I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective. Daughter one did get to spend the day in the kitchen with grandma. Of course because g-ma likes the idea of doing these things more than the actuality of doing them, there was more frustration and yelling than I would have liked. The kicker for me though, this was a recipe from a magazine she’s made once before, not some family treasure. There are family treasures, but I guess we won’t get to learn them…

Puppy was very entertaining. He is learning to play with toys and it’s as cute as it sounds. Got outside in time more than once, so progress is being made with housebreaking too. He goes in for shots and initial checkup this morning.

After that, I have things to pick up. I’ve got the one item from last week, and some hobby and household stuff from this week. There were a lot of things I didn’t bid on this week and a couple I’m still watching. There is a 300w Jackery “generator” and a similar setup at 600w from another company. I’ll never consider a battery and inverter to be a “generator” no matter how it’s packaged. Handy, no doubt about that, but it’s not generating energy. It does look like a good solution for someone that doesn’t want to or can’t ‘roll their own’, and it’s cheaper than the GoalZero. If it goes cheap enough, maybe I’ll win the bid. If not, the inverter and batteries in the garage will have to do.

I will suggest that you get something to turn battery power into 120v, even if it’s just a relatively cheap inverter with alligator clips to attach to your car battery. I’ve got a small one in each vehicle, and several in the stacks. There might come a day when being able to plug in some device becomes critical. And if nothing else, it’s another tool in your box.

With that, I’ve got kids to feed, and doggies to take to the vet, and I better get started with my day.

Stack something!

nick

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Sun. June 6, 2021 – more rain? yeah, probably.

We did have most of the day without rain yesterday, then in the late afternoon, something blew in. 30-40 MPH gusts, heavy rain squalls, temperature drop, the whole deal. And it passed just as quickly. Today the national forecast looks a lot like yesterday’s did, so I expect similar. We’ll see 😉

Did my errands. Didn’t do much around the house. Got a bunch of stuff for the household. I guess the canning jars qualify as preps, although I currently have more than I’m using. If things got bad, that wouldn’t be true. They were in very short supply after the lockdown started. It’s a traditional prepping item (along with the infrastructure and the rings/lids) and I’ve got more than I need. Right now the only thing I’m canning is bacon fat, and I just put it in the jar, seal it, and freeze the whole thing. I’m generating more than I use, and it seems very wasteful to just throw it out. It’s about $7 a pound in the store, and I’m recovering part of the cost of the bacon, so it’s a win-win.

Some of the old recipes start out “melt 5 pounds of fat…” so I may use it yet.

I like collecting and reading old recipe books. My “go to” book is an older Joy of Cooking, and I’ve talked about recipe books several times, so I won’t repeat that part. I’ll just add that I’ve picked up a couple more old books, and I am a sucker for the ‘Church Lady’ books, or the ‘Woman’s Service Organization’ books*. If there is anything at all special about them, I’ll grab it and read through it. Lately I’ve picked up some from very rural Texas in the mid ’50s, and New Orleans, and other parts of Louisiana, from the same time frame. I really like the recipes because they tend to use canned ingredients (good for preppers), are often fairly simple, and they don’t require a lot of specialized equipment or a lot of time. The service organization books are often very funny too, as a ‘slice of life’ from the time and place. One I remember in particular called a punch that was essentially 100 proof rum with a bit of fruit juice, “a great punch for the ladies”. One book has a section of “men’s” recipes and they are VERY loose compared to the ladies’ directions. Several are on the order of “do some general thing, and when done, do something else” which the lady editors gently mock in the commentary and introductions…good fun!

I find it interesting to see that the older books use a lot of different flavors compared to modern cooking, use a lot of gelatin (which led me to consider that I don’t have a single gelatin mold, and my mom had several), and use canned ingredients. They also have recipes for local favorites, using local veg and fruit in season, and wild game in the area. If you want to cook squirrel, the book from the First Church of Bugtussel Ladies Auxiliary probably has a couple of recipes to choose from. If you need five different ways to make a cake without xxx or yyy or zzz, times were tough, and there is probably a good recipe for each. If you need to make anything for 25-50 people for a church social (or a disaster kitchen) some of the books are right there with (presumably) tasty choices.

Right now, we can go to allrecipes.com or some other site, and get several choices, some even based on what food you have available for a dish, but that might not always be true. I also find the constant nagging about health and lifestyle to be tedious in any modern book or recipe site (add salt if you wish, substitute real butter if you want a richer flavor, etc….) and I LIKE the personality of the old books. Those books are filled with the recipes that were the best that Momma Jones knew, the ones all the other ladies asked for, and they were proven crowd pleasers. They are also a window into the past, and a link to the land and the area. Pick one up next time you see one, or get out the one from your church or civic association, (or your parent’s anyway.) Read through it. Try a recipe.

Add it to the pile of knowledge, and stuff. Keep stacking.

nick

* the absolute BEST ones have little slips of paper sticking out to mark someone’s favorites, and food stains on the pages. Those books got USED, and someone LOVED those recipes.

(and just for completeness, I’ll add RBT’s wisdom, ALWAYS use the newest canning guide, the same way and for the same reasons you’d use a newer First Aid book.)

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