Our currant bushes finally put on enough currants this year that the kids couldn’t keep up with eating them all, so we had currants left to make some currant jelly.
This is super easy jelly to make and one of my favorite flavors because it’s a nice combination of tart and sweet. Here’s what you’ll need:
Continue reading “Super Easy Currant Jelly”
Great Powdered Milk Taste Test and Review
This post is cross posted from my blog.
Ever wanted to find a powdered milk that tastes good? You’re not alone. So just in case you don’t want to go through the expense and hassle of trying out every kind of powdered milk you can find, read on. I did it for you.
After a comment about the flavor of powdered milk on another post, I hatched a plan to have folks try a bunch of different kinds of powdered milks to maybe find one that tasted good so this reader and anyone else who wants to know (including me) will know which brands would be best to buy because you know powdered milk is not cheap. I had some super help with this milk experiment from Emergency Essentials, Grandma’s Country Foods, Walton Feed, Blue Chip Group (now Augason Farms), and Honeyville Grain who all donated some of their milk for the review. Thank you to all of you–we couldn’t have done it without you! Continue reading “Great Powdered Milk Taste Test and Review”
Got Old Oil in Your Food Storage in Utah or Southern Idaho?
Want to donate some to a study on food storage oils at BYU? I love food storage experiments, so you know I’m letting them have some of my old stuff. If you’d like to help out the oil study, see the details here. They are looking for vegetable oils that have been in food storage 6 months to 5 years. Right now my oldest oil in storage is only 2 1/2 years old. Bummer. I’ve had older stuff before I would have loved to donate. Anyway, contact Ann Saunders at BYU if you’ve got some old oil they can experiment on. :)
Making Canned Milk Products from Powdered Milk
When I started storing food, I thought it would be a good idea to store forms of canned milk like evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk. I bought quite a few cans and have used most of them over the years. However, I only have two recipes I regularly make that call for evaporated milk, and one that calls for sweetened condensed milk, so I did not use every can I purchased before they expired. Continue reading “Making Canned Milk Products from Powdered Milk”
Preparedness Stocking Stuffer Swap
You all know Christmas is coming. If your house is anything like mine, you’ve got stockings to fill, and usually Santa is a little more sparse on the grown-ups stockings. Do you stuff your own? Use a sticky note to remind your Santa not to forget the stocking? End up with stuff in there that you really don’t want or need? Of course I’ve never had any of those happen, I’m just asking ;)
Anyway, this year, I thought I’d have a little stocking stuffer fun, so I am hosting a preparedness stocking stuffer swap over at my blog. If you are interested in giving and receiving some fun preparedness/self reliance related stocking stuffers this year, please join in the fun. Here’s the basics: I will assign each participant a new friend for whom they will prepare and ship a stocking full of prep related goodies. And another new friend will be shipping goodies to you. How fun is that? And if your Santa is really on the ball and already stuffs your stocking, you can just call it a preparedness gift exchange. :)
Country Living Mill Group Buy
You all know why you need a wheat grinder. There’s only so much you can do with all the wheat in your long term storage if you can’t grind it into flour. So just in time for the holidays we’ve got a special buy on the Country Living Grain Mill. This is a hand crank grain mill that is built in the USA of industrial grade components and has a lifetime warranty. It is relatively easy to crank as far as hand grain mills go. My small kids can grind flour with it. You can check out my full review, and see videos of the mill in action on my blog post here. Continue reading “Country Living Mill Group Buy”
Living History to Learn Skills
(This is a cross post from my blog: Adventures in Self Reliance)
I read a post at Preparedness Pro recently about the importance of learning skills. Acquiring useful skills is actually something I’ve thought about a lot in case you couldn’t tell by all the crazy stuff I share with you that I’ve been doing. I believe that having a quiver full of skills and things you’ve actually tried is way better than having a library of books about self sufficiency. Now don’t get me wrong, your resource books are very important. It’s just that having experience with something, even if it didn’t go so well, gives you so much more to work with. Continue reading “Living History to Learn Skills”
Growing and Harvesting Dry Beans
One of my garden experiments this year was growing dry beans. Most of the “survival seed” packs have a variety of beans in them. I had five different kinds of dry bean seeds in addition to my usual favorite green bean varieties, so had plenty of beans growing in the garden this year. The dry bean varieties I planted were Calypso, Jacob’s Gold Cattle Bean, Jacob’s Cattle Bean, Black Valentine, and Mayflower. I also planted Blue Lake Bush Beans and Royalty Purple Pod Beans just for eating. Continue reading “Growing and Harvesting Dry Beans”
Dehydrating Peppers
Harvest season is upon us here in Utah, so I’ve been pretty busy preserving the harvest. This year I grew pepper plants from seed and have LOTS of peppers in my garden. Some are hot and some are mild. This is a good thing if you like peppers a lot, but I do not. Thankfully my husband does, but even a pepper lover like him can only eat so many peppers. So what do we do with all those peppers? We eat a few, put a few in salsa, and save the rest for later by dehydrating them.
Making Better Char Cloth
When starting a flint and steel or striker type of fire, char cloth makes all the difference in being able to actually get the fire started or just making a bunch of sparks that never catch anything on fire. Char cloth (sometimes also called charred cloth) is one of those amazing mountain man items that is still very useful today. Char cloth is pieces of blackened fabric that easily catch a spark and burn similarly to the way steel wool burns–no big flame, but a nice ember burn that doesn’t blow out once it’s lit. The spark lights the char cloth and the char cloth is used to light the other tinder. I’ve been wanting to add char cloth to my fire kits and having used all my char cloth made by others, I decided to make a batch of my own.
I had some basic directions to go off of, but had never made it myself, so here’s how the first round went. I got some 100% cotton fabric–I used jersey fabric (an old T shirt) and cut it into approximately 2″ squares. Mine was kind of a natural color, but you could probably use any color you have, just avoid screen-printed designs, etc. I cut the ribbing off from the neck and sleeve ends as well as the seams. You just want the fabric.
Next, I got a metal can–I used an old cookie tin. I punched a vent hole in the can lid with a hammer and nail. You can use whatever metal can you have–I’ve seen it done with smaller tins as well as cleaned out food cans with foil for a lid.
I put the cut up fabric squares in the tin, put the lid on, and put the can on my grill on low and let it cook. You definitely want to do this outside–burning fabric doesn’t smell all that good. My instructions said to cook it until it stopped smoking. I had the tin fairly full, and cooked it close to 3 hours before I decided to turn it off. It never smoked a lot. When it cooled, I opened the can and only the bottom 3-4 layers were black, the rest of the fabric was brown.
I turned the pile over and put it back on the grill on Medium this time and cooked it another close to 3 hours. This time it was all black when it was finished. However, it didn’t catch a spark very well. I could light it with a flame, or an occasional large spark, but it was very frustrating to work with. Nothing like the char cloth I’d had before that a friend of ours made from terry cloth (old towel).
So I put it back on the grill again, this time I only filled the can about 1/3 full and cooked it on high another 3 hours or so. Now it was a little more fragile and easy to tear (as char cloth generally is), but it still didn’t catch spark well. I had no more ideas to make it better, so I decided to start over.
The second and far better batch of char cloth I made started with 100% cotton monk’s cloth I got at Walmart. Notice the loose weave and air holes. Those made a huge difference. I cut it a little smaller this time–about 1 1/2 inch square as 2″ was a little larger than necessary. There is some shrinkage as it cooks, but not that much. I wanted to see if it would work straight from the store without washing the fabric first, so I only cut 5 squares of it.
I put it in a smaller tin which also got the hammer/nail air vent in the lid.
Feeling like I’d spent enough of my grill gas on this project, I opted to do this round real mountain man style and build a fire and toss the tin in the fire. I pretty well buried it–it’s in there somewhere.
It did not cook long in the fire–maybe 15 minutes (of course it was in a smaller tin than the first round, but I’m guessing even a large tin wouldn’t take 9 hours in the fire). I couldn’t tell when it stopped smoking since it was in a fire with all the rest of the smoke, so I just guessed at when to pull it out. It wouldn’t matter if it stayed in there until the fire burned out as long as no sparks got in the airhole and caught all the fabric on fire in the meantime.
I fished it out, let it cool, and opened it to nicely blackened monk’s cloth.
This second round of char cloth lights up with minimal spark from a firestarter or flint/steel. It is more fragile than the jersey char cloth, but works much better. I’ll have to post on flint/steel firestarting another time :)
So, to recap, to make better char cloth, start with a 100% cotton fabric with texture and a fairly loose weave. Use a fire pit if you can to save on gas. Cooking on higher heat and cooking a smaller batch help speed up cooking time. Happy firestarting!
Gardening in Beds
I’m a relatively new bed gardener (just got ours built last year), but have already found that there are many benefits to laying out a garden in beds rather than rows.
First is the increased production in less space. Beans don’t need 18 inches between rows like the seed packet says. That 18 inches is for you to walk between rows. Continue reading “Gardening in Beds”
Survival Seeds in a Can-9 Years Later
I, like some of you, have in the past purchased canned or packed “survival seeds” that are advertised as if they can be saved and planted when disaster hits. Mine came from Nitro Pak Preparedness Center and were packed for 2000 (yep, that’s 9 years ago). We didn’t get into the Y2K scare, so it’s really just coincidence that that is the year they were packed for, but I’m guessing I’m not the only one that has a can or two of these seeds sitting on the food room shelf waiting to plant them until I “need” them. They are non-hybrid seeds, meaning they produce seed that will grow the same plant it came from when it is planted, so you are supposed to be able to harvest your seeds and grow more food next year with it.