Preppers’ PING!!
“Copy canning” will get you out to 30 or even 60 days.
Just buy an extra of whatever you’re buying to eat anyway, preferably on sale.
I always stock up on tp and paper towels when there is a really good sale and for TP nothing beats the scott 1000 rolls.
Tp never goes bad and you can always use it, also it is a good barter item in a pinch of the cheeks.
Paper towels can be used to supplement a first aid kit as well as you can put them over the other bandages to mop up blood in severe injuries, plus if you are carefull you can reuse them. Plus a well folded paper towel can be used in leu of a sanitary napkin as well, I have done this before and it better to use than TP which can work but is horrible in that it disintegrates.
Another good item is soap, either liquid or bar hand soap, or laundry soap. Stores really well and if you get enough of it you can also use it for bartering later.
Female Hygene products such as pads are another one you can use for other purposes like first aid plus are great barter items as well.
Any paper item is great to prep as they are fairly versitile and can be stored and rotated better than canned food.
I read the article, and will make these comments...
Use by dates...if canned goods, these can be generally ignored. Most canned goods will last and remain a healthy food well beyond the ‘expiration’ dates.
Cooking Oils...the only oil any of us should use for cooking is coconut oil. We have expeller pressed, naturally refined coconut oil that does not smell or taste like coconut. Coconut oil is made up almost entirely of medium chain saturated fats that cannot spoil if kept at ambient temperatures...coconut oil will still be edible long after any of us reading this are gone. It is healthy and should be a part of our diets. We are on our way to having several hundred pounds stowed away for when we can’t get it anymore.
Baking Staples...whole wheat flour will eventually turn rancid if it still has the germ in it. It keeps longer refrigerated or in the freezer. Most healthy flour is from sprouted spelt. We have access to organic sprouted spelt flour from an Amish mill. Baking soda will keep a long time if kept air tight, away from moisture. Arm & Hammer Baking Soda is Aluminum free, btw. Baking powder has an age limit that can be extended by keeping it in the freezer. We buy pure Mexican vanilla by the quart at very reasonable prices and have it stored.
Condiments...Grow your own horseradish and grind it as you need it. Turn fresh cabbage into sauerkraut. As the article says, buy whole peppercorns and grind as you need them. We buy RealSalt in 25 lb bags and have it stored.
Vegetables...grow your own as much as possible. A ‘root cellar’ will keep potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips, onions, garlic for months. Remember that sweet onions will not store well. Can your fresh tomatoes from your garden that exceed what you eat.
Meat and Fish...Freezing is a good option. So is canning. Make jerky out of beef or venison. Depending on where you live, remember that venison, rabbit, squirrel, geese etc are available if you hunt. Go fishing.
WE MUST NOT FORGET that if we are going to depending on electricity for water, refrigeration, heating (running the fans on the gas furnace) etc, we must become grid independent. There are various options for this, and is subject for another thread.
In closing, we are in the country, we have a well, and we have gas from a well for which we have mineral rights. This is our holeup place, our ‘bugout’ location. We are not threatened by earthquake or flood, and our location is defensible. We have a garden, and plenty of room for expansion. We have three horses that keep the garden in fertilizer. We have a prolific peach tree. We have cherry, apple and pear trees, and we are setting out raspberry and blueberry bushes. We grow asparagus, and once started, it keeps coming year after year.
There are some things we are stocking, like the coconut oil and a few other things that we will use for barter. Staples can be used for barter, never ammunition (my not so humble opinion).
We recycle all grease and fat from cooking. We make soap out of it. The soap is used for everything - in the shower, in the laundry, etc. Which reminds me, I need to get another hundred pounds of lye (sodium hydroxide).
We use hydrogen peroxide for many things, both health and household uses. We buy 50% food grade by the gallon, and we have this stocked too. We avoid chlorine bleach for health reasons.
Get aluminium foil, people!
Infinitely useful. Never degrades.
Buy an extra roll every time you go to the store. I have 20 rolls in the garage, figure adding at least another 10 or more.
Ditto for toilet paper. If you have room, and less than 6
month’s supply, you are a darn fool.
Unless you like dental pain, fill a 5 gallon bucket with toothbrushes, dental floss and toothpaste; along with several of the filling / crown repair dental epoxy packages and a couple tubes of ambesol.
I have spoken, ignore me at your own peril. /grin
Once had several cases of USN ‘C’rations, that were 30 years old. They tasted fine. Some items were better than others,like the meatballs were terrible but the canned salsbury steak was good....[ the Chesterfeild cigaretes were awful]. However I’ve eaten canned goods from the market that were 2 years old that had turned into bland tasteless goo.
Rancid oil, just bad taste/smell or can it make you ill?
for cost reason i did not keep air on all the time. what i found that goes bad quickly in heat is lemon juice yeast parmasean cheese.
also salad dressing not too good shortly after expiration.
the part about pickles surprised me
The Five Healthiest Backyard Weeds
Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience’s Bad Medicine Columnist
Date: 31 July 2011
http://www.livescience.com/15322-healthiest-backyard-weeds.html
Do you have the summer gardening blues? Has the heat wave turned your cucumbers vines into rope and left your tomatoes as brown as the cracked dirt they’re growing in?
Fear not. You likely have weeds in your garden or in your neighborhood that are striving in the heat and are actually far more healthful than almost anything you can grow or buy.
Far from famine food, these so-called weeds can be delicious if prepared properly. And they are absolutely free.
Just a few words of caution: Be sure to identify the weed properly. (The ones described here are easy to spot.) Avoid harvesting from anyplace you suspect pollution — such as from vehicle exhaust, lawn pesticide or doggy business. And remember that edible does not mean allergen-free.
Got your garden gloves? Ok, here we go.
Dandelion:
Dandelion is one of the healthiest and most versatile vegetables on the planet. The entire plant is edible. The leaves are like vitamin pills, containing generous amounts of vitamins A, C and K — far more than those garden tomatoes, in fact — along with calcium, iron, manganese, and potassium.
The leaves are most tender, and tastiest, when they are young. This happens in the spring but also all summer along as the plant tries to rebound after being cut or pulled. You can add them to soup in great abundance. Or you can prepare them Italian style by sautéing with a little olive oil, salt, garlic and some hot red pepper.
You can eat the bright, open flower heads in a lightly fried batter. You can also make a simple wine with the flowers by fermenting them with raisins and yeast. If you are slightly adventurous, you can roast the dandelion root, grind it, and brew it like coffee. It’s an acquired taste. You might want to have some sugar on hand.
Purslane:
If you’ve ever lived in the city, you have seen good ol’ Portulaca olearacea, or common purslane. The stuff grows in cracks in the sidewalk. Aside from being surprisingly tasty for a crack dweller, purslane tops the list of plants with omega-3 fatty acids, the type of healthy fat found in salmon. [7 Perfect Survival Foods]
If you dislike the bitter taste of dandelion greens, you still might like the lemony taste of purslane. The stems, leaves and flowers are all edible; and they can be eaten raw on salads — as they are prepared worldwide — or lightly sautéed.
You should keep a few things in mind, though, before your harvest. Watch out for spurge, a similar-looking sidewalk-crack dweller. Spurge is much thinner than purslane, and it contains a milky sap, so you can easily differentiate it. Also, your mother might have warned you about eating things off the sidewalk; so instead, look for purslane growing in your garden, or consider transplanting it to your garden from a sidewalk.
Also, note the some folks incorrectly call purslane “pigweed,” but that’s a different weed — edible but not as tasty.
Purslane:
If you’ve ever lived in the city, you have seen good ol’ Portulaca olearacea, or common purslane. The stuff grows in cracks in the sidewalk. Aside from being surprisingly tasty for a crack dweller, purslane tops the list of plants with omega-3 fatty acids, the type of healthy fat found in salmon. [7 Perfect Survival Foods]
If you dislike the bitter taste of dandelion greens, you still might like the lemony taste of purslane. The stems, leaves and flowers are all edible; and they can be eaten raw on salads — as they are prepared worldwide — or lightly sautéed.
You should keep a few things in mind, though, before your harvest. Watch out for spurge, a similar-looking sidewalk-crack dweller. Spurge is much thinner than purslane, and it contains a milky sap, so you can easily differentiate it. Also, your mother might have warned you about eating things off the sidewalk; so instead, look for purslane growing in your garden, or consider transplanting it to your garden from a sidewalk.
Also, note the some folks incorrectly call purslane “pigweed,” but that’s a different weed — edible but not as tasty.
Plantain
Plantain, like dandelion, is a healthy, hardy weed as ubiquitous in the city as broken glass. You know what it looks like, but you might not have known the name.
Part of the confusion is that plantain shares its name with something utterly different, the banana-like plantain, whose etymology is a mix of Spanish and native Caribbean. The so-called weed plantain, or Plantago major, was cultivated in pre-Columbus Europe; and indeed Native Americans called it “the white man’s footprint,” because it seemed to follow European settlers.
Plantain has a nutritional profile similar to dandelion — that is, loaded with iron and other important vitamins and minerals. The leaves are tastiest when small and tender, usually in the spring but whenever new shoots appear after being cut back by a lawnmower. Bigger leaves are edible but bitter and fibrous. [World’s Plants Growing Less Thanks to Warming]
The shoots of the broadleaf plantain, when green and tender and no longer than about four inches, can be described as a poor-man’s fiddlehead, with a nutty, asparagus-like taste. Pan-fry in olive oil for just a few seconds to bring out this taste. The longer, browner shoots are also tasty prepared the same way, but the inner stem is too fibrous. You’ll need to place the shoot in your mouth, clench with your teeth, and quickly pull out the stem. What you’re eating are the plantain seeds.
The leaves of the equally ubiquitous narrow-leaf plantain, or Plantago lanceolata, also are edible when young. The shoot is “edible” only with quotation marks. You can eat the seeds should you have the patience to collect hundreds of plants for the handful of seeds you’d harvest. With time being money, it’s likely not worth it.
Stinging Nettles
It sounds like a cruel joke, but stinging nettles — should you be able to handle them without getting a painful rash from the tiny, acid-filled needles — are delicious cooked or prepared as a tea.
You may have brushed by these in the woods or even in your garden, not knowing what hit you, having been trained all your life to identify poison ivy and nothing else. The tiny needles fortunately fall off when steamed or boiled. The trick is merely using garden gloves to get the nettles into a bag. [Video – Watch Gorillas Process and Eat Stinging Nettles]
Nettles tastes a little like spinach, only more flavorful and more healthful. They are loaded with essential minerals you won’t find together outside a multivitamin bottle, and these include iodine, magnesium, potassium, phosphorous, silica and sulfur. Nettles also have more protein than most plants.
Like all weeds, nettles are free. But you get even more of a bargain if you boil them. You can eat the leaves and then drink the water as tea, with or without sugar, hot or cold. If you are adventurous — or, well, just plain cheap — you can collect entire plants to dry in your basement. The needles will eventually fall off, and you can save the dried leaves for tea all winter long.
Go to the link to see pics of these weed/herbs...
http://www.livescience.com/15322-healthiest-backyard-weeds.html