Tag: Howto

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Get Home Bag

Recently I took some time to rotate a few items in my ‘Get Home Bag’ that I keep in my car.  The seasons were changing here, and they require different items to fill the bags purpose.  As I was changing, I realized I should take a few pictures to post on here (and satisfy the requests of a few friends wanting to know what I have).  With that in mind here’s a basic breakdown of my winter Get Home Bag.

Purpose:

I live a fair distance from my work now (oh how I long to telecommute again!).  Around 25 miles one way, around a lake, across a river, through several places that have limited road options.  How do I know this?  Well, I would say everybody should be very familiar with every alternate route between their home and most common destinations, because you never know when you will need them.  I have needed mine.  Beyond a natural curiosity and desire to optimize my commute, my neighborhood often requires it because it has a population that overwhelms the local road infrastructure on a good day.  Add in an accident, or bad weather and it becomes horrid.  Get worse weather, and you can actually shut down access to our town.  It’s happened before, it will happen again.  Throw in an earthquake, and there will be *no* cars heading home.  Whatever your locally preferred disaster, would you be able to get home to your wonderful food storage?

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Mylar Bag Wrapup – Issues with Mylar Bags

This will wrap up our series on Mylar Bag Food Storage. You can catch the previous posts here: a How-To Pictorial on Storing Food in Mylar Bags and Alternative Ideas for Mylar Bags.

This post will talk about some of the experiences, techniques and tips that readers and others have provided us.

MaKettle10 provides us with this info:

In a study done with mylar bags and mice, it took the mice about 15 seconds to sense the food was there, and get into the bag to start eating it. Good idea you have to put the mylar bags into the big plastic storage bins. I’d never store them in cardboard boxes for extended, long-term storage.

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Making Preparedness a Family Activity

One of the best ways to prepare and to get your family on board with preparing for an emergency is to include them in your preparations. This may seem a daunting task, but as Phil801 has shown us with his eight children, it can be done. Just look at some of his How-To posts to see evidence of them helping out.

For some of us though, we may just be starting out, or we may not have our family on board with what may be for some a significant lifestyle change. Fortunately, the LDS church which has always urged preparedness from its members has had the foresight to put together a series of family friendly preparedness activities which are perfect for those families just starting out.

You can access the activity list and lesson plans here.

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Alternative Storage Techniques using Mylar Bags

We recently covered the step-by-step process of storing food in Mylar Bags and went over some of the advantages of them, key of which is protection from air and moisture. It’s pretty clear that you can store most any dry food in Mylar Bags, but what else can be stored in them? A Mylar Bag is an easily portable, strong, waterproof bag – there are lots of things you can store in them! Here are a few ideas (we welcome any other ideas!):

  • Cough Drops – wintering TEOTWAWKI will probably lead to a cough or two, better be prepared for it! We purchased 20 bags of 50 cough drops each from the dollar store. Each Mylar Bag received 2 big handfuls of drops. The normal shelf life of a Halls cough drop is 2 years. I think I’ve probably at least doubled that by storing them this way.

coughdrops

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Cesta Básica

For several years I lived in the amazing country of Brasil (yes, that’s how to spell it right :) ).

Stack of Cesta Básica's ready be sold
Stack of Cesta Básica's ready to be sold

One of the many things I learned while living there was about a product called the Cesta Básica (Basket of Basics).  This product is the lifeblood of many Brasilian families, making up the core of their grocery shopping.  What it is, is simple.  It is a package containing an assortment of basic food items, designed to meet the basic needs for a given amount of time.  Which products it contains, and how much would vary by store, but largely were the same.  This was an extremely common item for several reasons.  The first of which is the basic brasileiro’s diet, which starts with beans and rice, and almost anything else is extra.  Which type of beans was largely a regional choice as the default, but alternative ‘versions’ of the packages could easily be found if you preferred another regions flavor.

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How To: Adventures in Food Storage with Mylar Bags

There are several options available to us for long term storage of bulk food – 5 gallon buckets, #10 cans and Mylar Bags are some of the most popular. In this post we’ll be going over the advantages and disadvantages of Mylar Bags and how to use a Mylar Bag Sealer. Specifically, we’re going to show how to turn all of this:

2200 pounds of food

Into This:

packaged food

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Family BOB Example: The Lances

A local friend of mine recently posted his notes about creating a set of emergency bags (BOB – 72 Hour Kit) for his family. It’s great to see a friend getting his family so ready, and even better when they can share such excellent information. In his example, I think he does a great job of presenting how he will get his young sons to carry a small part of their own gear, without overtaxing them. I know all younger families like myself worry about how to ‘carry enough’ for the younger children, and this example shows great thought in dealing with that concern. Check out the Lances BOB setup. Several pictures showing all the included gear, in and out of the bags.

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An Easy Breakfast

I thought I’d share a nice and easy way to utilize your whole wheat berries for an on-the-run breakfast.  Of course, I’m talking whole wheat cereal.  Now I remember as a kid hating this stuff, my mom would make it for us kids, and we’d all turn our noses at it, pleading for something sugary.  But we did have to eat it anways, it was what we could afford.

Fast forward to now, after years of living away from home, and getting used to some of my favorite breakfast foods (BACON!), I have realized that I need to eat a little better.  I also know that I need to eat a little cheaper a lot of the time, and using my cheapest food storage is a great way to do that.

One of the biggest problems with a whole wheat cereal is that those berries require a lot of soaking/cooking to get soft enough to eat.  Who really wants to wake up extra early to spend a long time cooking some ‘simple’ breakfast?  Well, it’s easy to avoid that, and it truly is error free.

Just combine 1 part whole wheat berries, and 2 parts boiling water, along with a pinch of salt (kosher of course :) ) to a thermos.  Seal well,

Simple Ingredients, Healthy Food
Simple Ingredients, Healthy Food

then let sit overnight on your counter, ready to grab in the morning rush out the door.  Pour into a bowl at work, and add your favorite flavorings (honey, syrups, berries, raisins, brown sugar, butter, etc).  You get an amazingly cheap, powerfully filling, energy rich breakfast for pennies, and the time it takes to microwave a little bit of water.  And with all the different options for what to add in, you can easily rotate flavors every day with storage foods (or fresh ones from your garden).

Now, how much do you need?  Especially at first, start small.  If you haven’t been eating whole wheat food (maybe this is your first attempt at using your wheat?) then switching too fast is going to make your insides get a cleansing they weren’t ready for.  But a single serving won’t be bad if you are taking it easy.  I find about 1/3 cup of wheat to make a nice serving size for starting out.  That stuff really swells up with the soaking, so that is a good sized adult portion for most folks.  After you have found the flavors you love, it’s easy to adjust to the amount you will eat.

Now, I still crave the usuals (Bacon, Sausage, Eggs, etc.), but for on the go, and at work this is an amazingly simple food, that will keep you full through the day.  Add to that the amazing financial sense of it, and you can’t afford not to try it out.

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Reading Country Code From Barcodes

I love the tips that get passed around online that just make your life work a little easier.  This quick tip was posted to me today.

Example UPC barcode
Example UPC barcode

I’d always known that standard barcodes included country information, but wasnt’ sure how to parse it out, or where the numbers matched up to.  Well, here’s a few quick answers:

Howto Read Country of Origin Codes

Wikipedia’s List of all country GS1 codes

The short of it all is this, the first digits tell you where it’s from.  000 – 139 are US, though most unused still.  Just as a note, older products didn’t have a leading 0, such as the posted example, so assume 0 padding for the full length when calculating.

690 – 695 is China.