The Back Forty: Easy Homemade Mayo: Mess or Success

The Back Forty: Easy Homemade Mayo: Mess or Success: Once upon a time... What do olive oil, egg, lemon, vinegar, and salt grow up to be? If you do it right, it makes great mayo! If you don't,...

Good News - Thriving in the World - Solar Power - SHTF

 I just watched an amazing video about successful social change, without bureaucracy and corporations.  Necessity is the mother of all.  Peace 

Rural Women Solar Engineers

Cooking at Home - Easy Recipes - How to Cook a Roast Dinner - Easy Gravy - Easy Soup - Frugal Living-

An oven roast meal is the easiest to make.  Use an oven to cook larger meals and/or larger cuts of meat.  Put the meat in a pot or pan and sprinkle with salt and pepper; cover with lid.   

With a dry cloth, rub dirt off potatoes (rinse them if you can spare the water) and stab them twice with a knife. Put the roast in the middle of the oven surrounded by the potatoes making sure they aren’t touching each other.  Turn the oven to 350F, no need to preheat it.  Cook the potatoes until a fork goes in the flesh easily, and the meat until the juices run clear when poked with a fork. Watch out for the steam when you open the pot lid!

Transfer the meat to plate.  Let it cool a bit before you cut it.  While it is cooling, put the pot on a burner turned to medium.  Scrap the bottom of the pot with the bottom of a fork to blend the drippings. Put two tablespoons of cornstarch in a cup of cold water, mix well and add to the drippings, mix together well and bring to a boil.  This is gravy!  If it is too thin add more cornstarch solution, if too thick just add water.

Put frozen vegetables in a pot will a lid, sprinkle with salt, cover and cook over medium.  Watch them carefully, stir them often, they will cook very quickly.  Cook the vegetables at the same time as the gravy so everything will be ready at the right time.

Most fresh vegetables are easily cooked in a frying pan.  Put a cast iron pan or stainless steel wok on the burner, turn the temperature to high, add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil or butter.  When the oil is hot, before it smokes, add food cut in bite size pieces.  Stir vigorously with a fork, then turn temperature down to medium.  Sprinkle with salt and sugar, then stir with fork to blend.  Turn off heat and eat. 

Turn the vegetables and gravy off. Cut the roast.  The fibers in meat can be long and hard to chew, but if we cut the fibers short the meat is easier to chew.  If there are strings on the roast your cuts will be parallel.  Without strings, remember the fat will be on the outside edge of each slice.  A pork chop or steak is a slice of meat cut against the grain. 

When the meal is over, put the bone from the roast in the gravy pot and put in the fridge, this will become soup the next day.  Fill the pot with water to cover bone, with the bone, to three quarters full, add three good pinches of salt and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to low and slowly good the bone for three hours or so.  An hour before you are going to eat, take the bone out and let cool.  Add to the broth, either a chopped up potato or two or a half cup of rice, and an onion and some celery chopped up.  Cook for a half hour or until soft, then add a cup of vegetables you have fresh or frozen, and herbs like parsley, and a tablespoon of sugar and soya sauce.  Taste your soup, it will taste bland if it doesn’t have enough salt; you would be surprised how much salt is in soup. 

Easy Salad Recipes - Cooking at Home - Learn to Cook - Frugal Living

Salads are combinations of fresh vegetables cut into small pieces.  It is very convenient to use a little stainless steel grater here to make little bits from the garlic, unpeeled carrots, unpeeled beets, onions, and unpeeled ginger.  Large leafy vegetables are most easily and conveniently cut up with a large pair of scissors, keep them clean and only for cutting vegetables.  Mix and match the ingredients available will make salads seasonal delicacies. 

Choice salad oils are olive, apricot seed, flax seed, hemp seed and/or grape seed combinations.  This component to a healthy diet should not be disregarded there absence in the body is unforgiving.  In much the same way as oil in a car allows it to operate smoothly, so too you should think of salad oil.  Don’t skimp using these oils on salads and cooked vegetables oils.  These oils loose their effectiveness when heated.

Dressing is made from a combination of two tablespoons of healthy salad oils, a half tablespoon of vinegar, a half teaspoon of sugar and salt and pepper to taste. Apple cider, balsamic, wine, and rice vinegars when used as the solo with salad oils bring excellent flavor to any meal. Put ingredients directly on salad greens in the order given.  This is only a base recipe, by adding herbs and spices on hand, use your taste buds to decipher if the flavor will make this salad perfect.

A Mediterranean salad mix includes every kind of peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, parsley and onions.  The dressing is one part balsamic vinegar to four parts salad oils sprinkled with rosemary, oregano, thyme, and/or basil, and salt and sugar to taste. Feta cheese and olives are traditionally used in this combination.

A family favorite is cheeseburger salad.  It is basically all the ingredients of a cheeseburger without the bun.  Using leftover cooked hamburger, cheese, onions, tomatoes, pickles, and lots of lettuce cut into bite size pieces.  The dressing is mayo, mustard, ketchup and relish to taste.

Mayonnaise is easily made if you have an electric blender.  In a very clean blender jar whip one fresh egg add a teaspoon each of sugar, apple cider vinegar and dry mustard powder.  Then blend on a lower setting while pouring one cup of salad oil slowly through the hole in the lid.  Don’t over blend the mayo; once you see the right consistency turn the blender off and stop adding the oil.  Transfer to a sterilized jar and store in the fridge.   Mark the date on the jar and use within a week. Keep mayonnaise in the refrigerator.

Chicken salad is chicken, onions and parsley cut into small bits and mayo mixed with a teaspoon of dry mustard and salt and pepper to taste, served over salad greens.  Fish salad is made exactly the same way, although dill is an excellent addition to this recipe. 

Egg salad is boiled eggs, onions, parsley, carrot and/or celery and pickles cut into small bits and mayo mixed with a teaspoon of dry mustard and salt and pepper to taste served with lettuce on bread as a sandwich. 

To boil eggs will a pot half full with cold water put it on the burner.  Add eggs to fill the pot, put on a tight lid and turn the burner on high.  Once the water is boiling turn it off, leaving the pot on the burner.  After three minutes, carefully drain the hot water from the pot.  Put the pot in the sink on the faucet to pour cold water on them to cool them down.  If the egg isn’t cooled fast enough the yolk edge will darken, this does not however affect its edibility.  Peel an egg by tapping the bottom and top to crack the shell, peel and rinse.  Older eggs are easiest to peel.

A coleslaw salad can include cabbage, carrots, beets, onions and/or garlic grated or chopped up fine.  The creamy dressing is three parts mayo with one part salad oil with salt, celery seed, pepper and sugar to taste.  Process large quantities of the the veggies and freeze them, so it is a fast thaw and serve salad.  Post about freezing vegetables here.

The tangy dressing is three parts salad oil, one part vinegar with salt and sugar to taste.  The tangy dressing works well with bean salad.  Combine cooked and cooled beans, with chopped onion and/or parsley and cucumbers.  Soak mixture in tangy dressing overnight in the fridge.

Two myths that keep the world poor - SHTF - Frugal Living - Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva | November 2005 issue

 From rock singer Bob Geldof to UK politician Gordon Brown, the world suddenly seems to be full of high-profile people with their own plans to end poverty. Jeffrey Sachs, however, is not a simply a do-gooder but one of the world’s leading economists, head of the Earth Institute and in charge of a UN panel set up to promote rapid development. So when he launched his book The End of Poverty, people everywhere took notice. Time magazine even made it into a cover story.

But, there is a problem with Sachs’ how-to-end poverty prescriptions. He simply doesn’t understand where poverty comes from. He seems to view it as the original sin. “A few generations ago, almost everybody was poor,” he writes, then adding: “The Industrial Revolution led to new riches, but much of the world was left far behind.”

This is a totally false history of poverty. The poor are not those who have been “left behind”; they are the ones who have been robbed. The wealth accumulated by Europe and North America are largely based on riches taken from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Without the destruction of India’s rich textile industry, without the takeover of the spice trade, without the genocide of the native American tribes, without African slavery, the Industrial Revolution would not have resulted in new riches for Europe or North America. It was this violent takeover of Third World resources and markets that created wealth in the North and poverty in the South.

Two of the great economic myths of our time allow people to deny this intimate link, and spread misconceptions about what poverty is.
First, the destruction of nature and of people’s ability to look after themselves are blamed not on industrial growth and economic colonialism, but on poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction. The disease is then offered as a cure: further economic growth is supposed to solve the very problems of poverty and ecological decline that it gave rise to in the first place. This is the message at the heart of Sachs’ analysis.

Cooking at Home - Easy Recipes - How to Cook Steak - How to Cook Hamburgers -Beginners Cooking - Frugal Living

The reason we don’t eat at home is we don’t know how to cook.  Homecooking is a lost art, with an unfair stigma, mainly because it doesn’t produce money but it can quickly turn your life around.  It drastically reduces packaging and the pollution that creates, it vitalizes and heals your body, nurtures your loved ones, conserves money and enables you gain control of the security of your food in these uncertain times.

Steaks, chops, boneless chicken pieces and bacon are easy to cook in a frying pan.  Turn the burner on high to get your frying pan hot before adding your meat.  Meat closest to a bone will always take longest to cook, so put it in the center on the pan.  Make a cut into the fat on steak and chops to keep the meat from curling.  Continue on high for a few minutes until you hear the fat spatter.  Then turn temperature down to medium for a few minutes.  When you see blood on the top of the meat, turn it over for a few more minutes.  Sprinkle with parsley or savory and salt and pepper to taste. 

 

You will know when meat is done when you press it with the bottom of a fork and the juices come out clear.  Roasted birds are done when the cooked leg pulls away from the body and the juices run clear.  The meat of cooked hamburger, pork or chicken should not be pink, not even at the bone.

Hamburgers are made by forming plain ground beef into patties.  They are cooked in a frying pan the same way.  Burgers are only ready to flip when the bottom is firm enough to turn over without loosing the shape of the burger.  Remember, once the meat has cooked, use a clean flipper or fork other than the one you used for the raw meat.

Cooking Secrets - Frugal Living - Survival Homestead - Cooking at Home

A small sharp knife like a paring knife or steak knife makes preparing foods easier.  Some knives are made with a “permanently sharp” serrated edge and others come with a sharpener.  A knife must be sharp to be effective, it should easily slice a carrot.  A dull knife is dangerous, frustrating and requires much more effort to use.  A good knife will hold its sharp edge for a long time and hold its blade tight in the handle.  The blade should not easily bow or be too heavy as to become tiresome for the user. 

Cheap pots and pans are hard to cook with and difficult if not impossible to clean.  To use anything else is a waste of your time and money in the long run.  It is important to cook only with 10/18 stainless steel or cast iron pots with tight fitting lids.   Try to buy also 10/18 flatware, as these forks and spoons don’t easily bend and will, like the pots last a lifetime.  A tablespoon is the large spoon and the teaspoon is the small one.  Use only cast iron frying pans or a good stainless steel wok for frying.  Buy them used if you can find them.

A grater is very helpful in quickly cutting fruits and vegetables into small bits.  Try and find a good used stainless steel grater the new ones are cheap and bend too easily.  The tools you use should be as pleasurable as toys to use. 

Stove and oven temperatures vary from unit to unit.  For this reason, the temperatures here are only guidelines.  You only need to preheat an oven for baked goods.  Don’t

get burned from the steam or heat while taking off pot lids or the opening oven door.  Always use an oven mitt or a folded towel to protect your hand from getting burned on hot pot. 

Burning the skin is a hazard in the kitchen, from steam, hot pans or spattering fat.  Don’t leave the kitchen unattended while cooking at high temperatures.  Always turn pot and pan handles in, so they can’t get knocked off the stove.  Keep a box of baking soda by the stove to douse a fire if necessary. 

Be mindful of the temperature under the pots to ensure you don’t burn what you are cooking.  When food boils too hot it will bubble out of the pot.  If the oil spatters out of the pan the temperature is too high, turn it down.  Burning food renders it unpalatable.  If what you are cooking starts to stick and burn on the bottom take it from the heat and remove as much of the food as possible, without disturbing the burned bottom.  If, on the other hand if you have left a pot on a high temperature and smoke is coming from it, remove the pot from the burner, open the kitchen windows, don’t take off the lid and don’t eat it.  Not only can burned food ruin a meal, but burnt on food can wreck even the best pots.

On the stove top most food is cooked by adding it to a hot pan or a pot of boiling water.  After adding the food wait a minute, then turn down the burner to one quarter heat.  Covering pots and pans with lids will help food cook faster using less energy.  Don’t use a lid when cooking in a lot of oil or when frying breaded items.  A sprinkle of salt in a pot of water will help water boil faster, enhance flavors, and help vegetables retain green color when cooking. 

Funny thing about being able to boil water, efficiently, for cooking.  Once a pot is boiling, it with continue that boil even on the lowest burner setting.  Knowing this, if you add pasta to boiling salted water just removed from the burner and stir, then return to the same burner on low, the pot will not boil over.  Add eggs to cold water, heat to a boil in a covered pot then turn burner off and let the eggs gently poach in the hot water. 

Always have all ingredients cut before turning on a burner to cook.  The smaller the pieces, the faster they cook, the sooner you eat.  Cut food by pressing a sharp knife through it on a hard surface like cutting board.  Respect the damage the blade could do to your flesh, if cut you would be well advised to disinfect the cut immediately with tea tree essential oil.

Plan the next day’s meals before you go to bed.  Assess which resources are on hand for the recipes you like and your time available for preparation.  Take any meat you need out of the freezer to thaw.  Don’t be afraid to partially prepare for the next meal ahead of time.  Cook

extra meat or eggs the day before to have the ingredients ready for your meal. 

  

Time your activities to make the most of your resources.  I bake and make soup during the winter months when doing so helps heat the house.  In the summer heat, I roast meat and vegetables in the oven late at night to use the food cold in sandwiches and salads the next day.  Scheduling the main meal at noon is most effective as it allows the cook day to best utilize the day.

You can’t just turn on a burner and eat.  Cooking is a process an ever changing ongoing activity.  You have to know how to acquire, select and store ingredients.  A necessity as well are the proper tools and the know how to   use them to ease with preparation and cleanup.  Once you know the nature of your ingredients and the tricks of your equipment, cooking is more a pleasure than a chore. Keep following this blog for all the details.

2012 Event - Food Shortage - SHTF - Surviving the Future - Hope

  It is no secret I am anticipating an event.

I am a farmer, gardener and forager in the most abundant place on earth, please hear my words, there will not be enough food next winter.  The unprecedented weather activity this year will create havoc with food production.  Frost, flood and fire take time to recover from.

Last year, the vine which usually gives over 800 pounds of grapes, gave none - why?  The fruit did not ripen.  Some fruit  did not produce because a late frost killed the tender buds.  Most crops here were a write off and I have only filled the top of my fridge's freezer with food. Normally we go through a x-large freezer during the winter.

 All my turkey flock is gone after 10 years, the last one 2 to bears. The bears, which are now 2 year old cubs and their mom (400 pounds at least), have demolished much of the orchard. The snakes and weasels have been getting my chicks and eggs.

We got 50 turkey chicks year but they all died one at time over a month period.  Because of this the breeder no longer supplies them rendering them extinct.  The replacement breed chick costs $10 each chick.  Chicken chicks are $5 each.  Ten years ago, they sold for $1.

There were over 594 earthquakes (over 4) this month.  I have been following this daily for years, and I can tell you the number is on the rise like never before.  Magnetic shift, jet stream split, EMPs, GMOs, . . . .And let's not get started about how the infrastructure of this modern world is collapsing . . .

The only way to prepare for the future is to start preparing for the future.  Survival starts in your kitchen and yard.  It is not a worry, it is to be free of worry.  Keep following this blog, and my friends blogs listed to the right on this page, to learn how.

 Do not be afraid of the future. 

There is nothing to fear. 

Living as freely as nature intended is immeasurably satisfying. 

The world is still trying to be a wonderful place,

 are you doing your part? 

Jet Stream - Wacky Weather

150-mph Jet Stream a Key Factor in Wednesday's Tornado Outbreak

Heather Buchman
AccuWeather
Fri, 29 Apr 2011 06:24 CDT

© National Weather Service Forecast Office
This image shows tornado reports from Wednesday's outbreak. There were more than 160 reports of tornadoes, most of which were in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.

A 150-mph jet stream was one of the key players in why Wednesday's historical tornado outbreak in the South was so devastating. The persistent presence of a strong jet stream over the South is the main culprit in why this April has been such a terrible month for tornadoes.

Eggs - How to Boil an Egg - Pickled Eggs - Survival Homestead - SHTF - Raising Chickens

Egg salad is boiled eggs, onions, parsley, carrot and/or celery and pickles cut into small bits and mayo mixed with a teaspoon of dry mustard and salt and pepper to taste served with lettuce on bread as a sandwich. 

To boil eggs will a pot half full with cold water put it on the burner.  Add eggs to fill the pot, put on a tight lid and turn the burner on high.  Once the water is boiling turn it off, leaving the pot on the burner.   

After about 3  minutes, carefully drain the hot water from the pot.  Put the pot in the sink on the faucet to pour cold water on them to cool them down. 

   

If the egg isn’t cooled fast enough the yolk edge will darken, this does not however affect its edibility.  Peel an egg by tapping the bottom and top to crack the shell, peel and rinse.  

Pickled Eggs

 

Usually, this time of year, we have eaten all the dill pickles and pickled hot peppers.  Since I use excellent organic apple cider vinegar for these and hated to throw it out when the pickles were gone.  This vinegar is excellent to add to soups and salads.  But we really keep the jars of vinegar in the fridge to pickle our eggs. 

Bring the eggs to the boil and cool.  Peel the egg trying to keep the egg attractive with the yolk inside.  

My eggs are so super that the yolks are huge making this almost impossible.  I am sure I could pickle them, but they make the vinegar clouding and unappealing, so I make egg salad with the duds.

Well enough bragging back to the pickled eggs. . . 

Peel them and fill the pickle jars with as many as you can, without packing them so tightly the vinegar can't engulf all the eggs.  We love the spicy hot pepper eggs out of hand.  The dill pickle eggs are excellent in salads, especially potato salad.  Could it be any simpler?

Never reuse the vinegar after eggs!

 

  It is unbelievably easy to raise chickens and have fresh eggs everyday. 

You could say if you had ten hens you could expect five eggs per day. A red dot on the yolk is natural if you have a rooster.  A green tinge to the yolk is also natural if the hens have eaten a lot of greens.   

Washing eggs destroys the natural bacteria boundary that makes eggs safe to eat and these should be consumer right away.  You can tell how fresh a cooked egg is by the size of the air pocket space.  The larger the space the older the egg and the easier it is to peel.  (So how old your store bought eggs are!)

 

Feed chickens a mixture of following in their feed dish:  kitchen/garden scraps, wheat, oats, rolled corn, apple cider vinegar, yoghurt, molasses, kelp, nettles, egg shells, oatmeal, dried peas, lentils, flaxseed, hemp seed, brewer’s yeast, mustard seed, broccoli seed, radish seed, millet, sunflower seeds, cooked egg, dill, chia seed, amaranth seed, kale, some weeds and most weed seeds, green tea and sprouted grain.  They also like worms, bugs and fish.  Do not feed birds potato peelings, coffee, meat fat, rice and uncooked egg shells from unknown source.

About these eggs:   The smallest one is a large from the store, the medium one is an average size for my girls, and the largest one turned out to be a triple yolker!

For more details on raising chickens on this blog 

use the search engine at the right!

Peace

Easy Bread Recipe - No Knead Bread - Wheatfree Bread - Frugal Kitchen - Saving Money - Sustainable Living

What is the first step in sustainable living?  

Rules for 

Happy Sustainable Frugal Living

1.  Reduce or eliminate the use of money. 

2.  Changes must not diminish the quality or pleasure of your life.

Some people think, "oh I am poor now so I must eat cheap food".  This is could not be further from the truth.  In fact, the time of crisis is when you should feed your body the best nutrition you can find.  People who don't end up paying the price with suffering and medical bills in the end. 

It is necessary to remove unnecessary expenses from your budget. But don't be caught up in the bondage of frugality. It is great to get dish soap for a dollar a bottle, but not if you don't like how it works. Worst if you have lots of soap but nothing to eat.

What do you spend money on everyday to sustain yourself and what can you do to reduce that cost?  

Lets start with bread.  

The ingredients of bread are yeast, water, salt and flour. I have been using an easy, no knead bread recipe .  

Homemade Bread Made Easy

No Knead Bread

In a big pot put 1 1/2 cup hot tap water and 3/4 tablespoon of yeast.  Add 3 1/2 cups of flour, a cup at a time and stir well between additions.  Stir in a teaspoon of salt.  Let sit covered for 3 hours.  Then turn oven on to 350 degrees.  Rub oil on your pans and your hands.  Cut the dough in half with a knife and form 2 loaves.  Do not knead the dough.  Let bread sit in a warm spot to rise for 20 minutes.  Then into oven for about 1/2 hour until golden brown.

Recently I read a post where a woman shows how to make a sourdough starter without commercial yeast.  Here is the link to her post, sourdough starter without yeast.  She shows you how to pull the wild yeast right from the air!  That's right, free food!  Check out the rest of her blog it is filled with wonderful easy inexpensive tricks and ideas for saving money.  

Here is a link for the wheat free sourdough bread recipe version.

The solution is not in the money world. The secret is in the natural world. Be available for what is available without money.  It has always been here for us, existing without our participation. Take your rightful place on the planet, take her hand, she is here to freely provide for your needs.

Looking for more ways to have a more  sustainable life?  Use the search engine to the left and keep posted.  

Peace

Tomatoes - Easy Salsa Recipe - Easy Spaghetti Sauce Recipe -SHTF - Growing Tomatoes - Preserving Tomatoes - Survival Homestead - Always Having Tomatoes

Homestead Secret:  Store tomatoes in a cast iron or metal pot and they will stay fresh and firm much longer.

Easy Salsa Recipe

Best Recipe for Salsa

No Cooking Required

Salsa is made with tomatoes, hot peppers, onions, parsley, cilantro, with salt and sugar to taste.  Cut everything up fine, a food processor works well here.  To freeze this recipe, make sure to put it first in a sieve to remove the moisture and enhance the final texture. Super easy and delicious!

Easy Tomato Sauce Recipe

Best Recipe for Spaghetti Sauce

Tomato sauce is an excellent dish for using dried herbs as spices.  Put ¼ cup of olive oil in bottom of large pot and cook at medium high heat.  Add tomatoes and/or onions, celery, zucchini, peppers, and a tablespoon of sugar, a sprinkle of salt, and if lucky a few bay leaves.  Stir vigorously.  When vegetables are warm, put lid on pot and turn down to one quarter heat.  Simmer until all vegetables are soft then remove lid.   

Continue to cook until desired texture is achieved, the longer the thicker the sauce.  When the sauce is ready add oregano and/or parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and basil then salt to taste.  Some years there weren’t enough tomatoes to make enough sauce for the winter.  No one noticed a different when some tomatoes were with plums, apples and pears.  

Tomato sauce freezes well,   Let cool to room temperature, spoon into freezer bags and freeze.  Score the bags for so smaller portions can be used for omelets and soups.  Lay bags flat in freezer to save space. 

 

Cooking Tip:  As the sauce reduces the saltiness becomes more intense, so don't adjust the salt until the end.  Do not put the hot sauce in the fridge to cool, the flavor sours (in a bad way) when you do.  (This is true for soups and leftovers too.) 

Growing Tomatoes is Easy

A family will easily use the tomatoes plants from three or four plants per person.   

Buy your first plants. When planting bury three quarters of the plant underground.  Put egg shells, banana peels, coffee grinds, and fish fertilizer in with the plant

 

The spot should not get any shade during the day. Plant just before the full moon in June. If planted in pots, one tomato plant per pot.  

Tomatoes need an even amount of water on a regular basis, more rigidly than any other food plant.  Production can be ruined if this plant is repeatedly allowed to dry out before watering.   

Tomato plants, the stems and leaves, are poisonous! 

Green tomatoes are excellent eating however.  Slice them, dip them in flour, fry them over medium heat in olive oil until brown.  Then sprinkle with salt, pepper and sugar and serve, awesome!

It takes 3 months growing for tomatoes to grow ripe enough to eat.  In the fall before the frost pick all the tomatoes, ripe or not, and bring them in the house.  Over the next six weeks as the tomatoes will ripen you will be able to utilize them.

Seed can be collected from the ripest tomatoes.  Put the pulp of your best tomato in water for three days, stir daily, drain, and dry to save.  It never hurts to slightly bury one of your best tomatoes in the garden to see if it will sprout in spring.  

Want to know about another vegetable? 

Use the search engine to the right.

Peace

How to Eat More Vegetables - Easy Recipes - Preserving Food - Cooking at Home - SHTF - Survival Homestead

Many fresh food items you buy can be easily prepared and frozen for convenient use later.  Ideally, you want preserve the ingredients for your diet when they are plentiful and least expensive.  Most vegetables are fruits are plentiful and least expensive in the fall, with tropical in season in the spring. 

Only freeze fresh food without blemishes.  Old vegetables are not to be frozen for later use.
 

For all freezing use small “freezer bags” or plastic containers and push all out the air before sealing.  Frozen food should be consumed within the year.  The result is a freezer full of little bags of semi-prepared vegetables, which are easy and convenient to use in cooking through the winter when no vegetables are in season.

Peas, berries, and nuts and can be frozen whole. Peppers and mushrooms only need slicing to freeze well. Tomatoes can be frozen whole, add them to soups or thaw them in a strainer to use as fresh.  Bananas should be frozen in their skins, just peel and use frozen for smoothies.

 













Beet greens, chard, parsley, spinach, and most leafy culinary herbs and greens can be preserved by chopping dry leaves into bits, spread loosely on a cookie sheet and put in the freezer.  When they are frozen transfer the loose flakes to an airtight freezer bag for use in soups and seasoning.

Vegetables like garlic, onions, carrots, cucumbers, cabbage, squash, turnip and ginger freeze best when grated in a food processor. I make a coleslaw mixture with cabbage, onion and celery seed, eat now or freeze for later.

Once grated, half fill the bag.  Press the food down to the bottom as you press out all the air and seal.  Once the bag is sealed, grab it from the bottom and gently shake so the bits spread out evenly to the top, Score with your fingers if necessary to make “weak spots” where pieces can be easily removed when frozen. The idea is to  fill the bag like a pancake so you can break off pieces as you need them.  

Frozen properly, the food pieces will be loose and making it easy to add them while cooking. As long as you cut them into small pieces, to be added to recipes on demand, the texture and flavor is excellent. 

I add them to soup, stirfries, or just in a pan with some butter (I love turnips and greens this way).  It is like having the prep work done so meals can be made in a hurry. A little chicken stock (which you make by boiling a chicken in a big pot, like in the picture below, and then just freezing the liquid) and a few handfuls of these veggies and beans or rice or pasta make a soup in less than 20 minutes. 

The reason we don’t eat at home is we don’t know how to cook.  Homecooking is a lost art, with an unfair stigma, mainly because it doesn’t produce money but it can quickly turn your life around.  It drastically reduces packaging and the pollution that creates, it vitalizes and heals your body, nurtures your loved ones, conserves money and enables you gain control of the security of your food in these uncertain times.

More recipes and tips on sustainable food to follow.

Benefits to Cooking at Home - SHTF - How to Surivive the Future - Natural Health Care - How to Maintain Health

The sole purpose of your body is to maintain health.  The modern store bought diet and the use of chemicals to heal and clean, have disrupted the body’s natural responses and healing abilities.  Allergies, irrational cravings, lethargic ambition, and raging anger and debilitating malaise are signals of contamination.  When we keep our bodies away from the diet we were designed, for we can only run on reserves for so long then deterioration setting us up for chronic illnesses and unable to ward off future health problems.

It is imperative for vitality and longevity to consume foods as fresh and natural as possible.  By gorging on fresh organically produced food preserved when it is naturally ripe, we can match our diet the seasonal nutritional needs of our bodies.  By eating for health and avoiding chemicals we can build strong bodies and ward off deterioration.

Fermented foods, like vinegar, pickles and yogurt are very important to health and must be included daily to a human diet to keep invasive bacteria at bay.  Nuts and seeds are vital to obtain optimum nutrition and they are essential to rid the body of parasites. 

 

Essential oils are also extremely effective to overcome negative bacteria, parasites and viruses.  Derived from nature plant based remedies work as ideal nourishment to restore and maintain a healthy body.

Invisibly we are a cosmos of bacteria, virus and parasite all competing for the resources in our bodies.  They can help heal or kill us, some work as our allies and some not.  Sickness is not so much precluded because by foreign invaders ones as it is the lack of effectiveness of native force.  It is in your favour to create the conditions to allow those who work for good benefit to prosper and overpower the others.  Don’t sit passively as invasive forces slowly break you down.

No matter what happened in the world today, every person needed to eat.  The next few posts will be a crash course in where to begin to always be able to have food to eat.

Annual Care of Raspberry Canes - Flowers of Spring in Canada

The pictures on this garden blog are enough for a visit, but I draw your attention here today for her excellent tutorial on maintaining raspberry canes.

My Green Thumb: My First Hit of Spring!:

How to Cook - Vegetables - Fresh Food Storeage - SHTF - Survival Homestead - Learn to Cook -

The reason we don’t eat at home is we don’t know how to cook.  Homecooking is a lost art, with an unfair stigma, mainly because it doesn’t produce money but it can quickly turn your life around.  It drastically reduces packaging and the pollution that creates, it vitalizes and heals your body, nurtures your loved ones, conserves money and enables you gain control of the security of your food in these uncertain times.

Fresh herbs and salad greens, celery, beets, chard, herbs, broccoli, cabbages, carrots and turnip must be stored in the refrigerator to preserve freshness.

1. remove immediately from any plastic bags

2. cut off tops from root vegetables

2. don't wash, store dry as possible (clean prior to use)

3. line the crisper drawer with newspaper or paper towel

4. store them in fridge for 3 or 4 days

For optimum nutrition, always use your vegetables when they are freshest.  That broccoli might look fresh sitting in your crisper for a week, but the unseen qualities for health diminish over time.  The best broccoli is the one you picked and ate while walking in the garden!  Storing and preserving food ensures continued nutrition during the winter when fresh food just is not available locally.  They really are only fresh for eating for only a few days after purchase.  Knowing in advance how to preserve for another time can be very prudent.

Store potatoes, onions, oranges, bananas, cucumbers, avacodos, apples, tomatoes, squash and garlic in a cool dry spot in the kitchen. Baskets or cardboard boxes are perfect for this.  Don't store them together in the same container. Food that is not in perfect condition will not keep long and should be used right away.  Otherwise, these vegetables can keep up to a few months.

Tip:  Keep apples separate from everything else in a cool room like the porch, they put off a gas which causes fast ripening.

Additional foods that can be stored in a dark, cool cupboard without refrigeration, this includes ketchup, mustard, dry grains and flours, sugar and honey, spices, salt, vinegars, dried foods, canned food, nuts and seeds, and cooking oils.

Always store open pickles, dressings, eggs, cheese, yeast, dairy products, meats and leftovers in the fridge.