Amazing wheat...

Unlike many I am blessed with a wife who believes in prepping wholeheartedly.  When I arrived home after a long hard day at work for the most evil of evils, I was greeted at the door by a wonderful smell, although I could no place it.  As I entered the kitchen I saw my lovely wife busy with a knife smashing and chopping cloves of garlic.  She quickly dumped the tiny fragments of the seasoning into the crock pot full of refried beans and motioned me over while holding a spoon so sample what she called and often calls her cooking, the concoction. 

After having me sample the tasty beans she asked me what it needed, I mentioned that it could use a tiny bit of salt and she quickly added a couple dashes of salt and dipped the large wooden spoon back into the bubbling culinary mass, a sampled a taste.  She then with a big grin offered me the spoon and the beans were perfect.

The boys at this point were somehow pried away from their computer games and stalked around the kitchen, with the old beagle Pookie and the new beagle puppy Lucy in tow.  Literally Lucy jaws locked tight on my middle sons shorts growling and tugging at some unknown offence that the shorts had given.  The pack of boys and dogs hid just around the corner of the kitchen waiting for their moment to sample the beans.

My curiosity just a little peaked I asked her how come we had to add salt to the beans, since most canned beans have far to much salt in them, and we do have several dozen cans of refried beans in the pantry.  My soul mate then smiled slyly and said, "These beans are from scratch, I did not think they would be done so soon but I started soaking them this morning with the crock pot on warm".  At this point she motioned to a tray of yummy white disks on top of the microwave, all of slightly irregular shape and thickness, and said, "There are home made tortillas too!"

We have tried to make tortillas from scratch before and have failed several times, but this time as we all scarfed down with great abandoned, it was obvious that this time it was a total success.  She said that she had used the bread machine to knead the dough.  She had to make more tortillas since I ate all that she had left for our daughter, none went to waste.

She wants to plant some of the pinto beans in our kiddie pool planters to see if we can get them to grow.  I think we should sprout them first and maybe try a little green house action to get them started.  All in all it was a super test of survival cooking, although she used Crisco not lard for the both the beans and tortillas, and storing oils is very hard. 

She used flour, salt, Crisco, pinto beans, onion, garlic, (and we added cheese). 

Lessons learned:  We need a good wheat grinder, more salt, some way to store oils.

Death of a four footed friend

Monday one of our family members lost her battle for life.  She had been with us 8 years and we will miss her greatly.

Sierra Rhodesian Ridgeback 2002-2010

Family...

I am very lucky that my spouse (the boss) supports me 100% in our prep work.  I think that it would be very hard if not impossible to move forward with prep work without that support.  My children (all adults now) also are very supportive of our work and often inspire me and keep me going.  For example my youngest really wants to try making hardtack out of some of our stored flour.

My oldest sister has a blog of her own and she works hard on her prep work in spite of her recent financial issues.  My other sister has an amazing retreat where she, her husband and their young children have been living for the last few years.

I am lucky to be surrounded by such supportive people.

Food, food and more food...

As you may have heard the DOW did a record dip of over 900 points in just a few min.  I happened to be watching the news at the time.  It was scary to watch lucky for us it was a typo by some trader but if the system is that weak what happens when it is not a typo?

It just proves to me that nothing will be as valuable as food if some bad thing does happen.  Water is more important but easier to get here in Virginia.  But food is worth more than all the gold in the world if you need it.  I am thinking I will increase my supply up to 3 years for 5 or 6 people.  Most of it will be bulk food such as rice, beans and sugar.  On that note we put 50 lbs of rice and 50 lbs of flower into plastic buckets yesterday.  It was pretty easy and we did not spill much.  This food will be used as quickly as possible since we did not do any prep on the buckets, they are just buckets of flower and rice.  The Boss is going to start baking more bread and other flower stuff.

 

I am now looking out for bags of beans and I think I will buy more 5gal buckets.  Just FYI 50 lbs of flower just fits in two five gallon buckets and 50lbs of rice fills about one and a half buckets.  I think I also need sprouting seeds.  I have always liked sprouts but hesitated to eat them due to the greenie attachment of sprouting.

Physical Fitness

My boys have started a business, it is landscaping.  Unfortunately they can not drive so I have to haul them around to each of their clients (two now) where they mow and clean up yards.  I also to keep from being bored to death help mow for free (such a deal for them).  So I have been sweating my butt off helping them with their venture into capitalism.  So far it has cost me a bundle as I have gotten them new equipment and hauled them around.  But it is cheaper than a Gym and a better workout.

Food food and more food, according to many people and I happen to agree, you can never have to much food stored up.  The lack of food has been the biggest reason for mass death forever.

Making Fire

Fire and the skills to make it are essensial.  The boys and I attempted to make fire using various techniqies.  We had fire steel strikers, steel wool and a nine volt battery.  We were able to make fire with all these but the number one item that makes fire instantly was a simple cotton ball drenched in petrolium jelly.  We found that using the cotton ball method is easy and quick.  After practicing for several hours using various techiquies we are now pretty confident in our skills to make fire.  Soon we will try out some standard resipies like Bannock bread.

In Survival Mom's blog yesterday she had some very good points to make.  I have posted them below.

14

Store 14 2-liter bottles filled with clean water. This is enough water for one person for one week. Continue adding water storage as needed for additional family members.

10

Set aside $10 each week to go toward buying junk silver. “Junk silver” is the term used for dimes and quarters dated prior to 1965. These coins don’t have any value for collectors but do contain enough silver to give them intrinsic value.

4
List four simple dinners your family enjoys eating. Stock up on the ingredients you need to make those four dinners, and you’ll be ready to make that meal one night per month for one month.

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Becoming better informed is one of the most important steps you can take toward preparedness and self-reliance. Spend 30 minutes each day researching topics that are highest on your list of priorities, such as gardening, raising livestock, storing fuel, etc. Your priorities will change as you become better informed and better prepared.

1
Take one training class that will help you become better prepared. Check out CERT classes, first aid, wilderness first aid, sewing, master gardening, and CPR. Stocking up on food and supplies is all well and good, but education and knowledge are priceless.

20
If two cans of tuna equals one lunch in your family, stock up on 20 cans of tuna. Those, along with some mayo, pickle relish, and bread will make ten lunches.


15
Schedule a monthly 15-minute fire drill with your family. Explain the procedure before-hand, practice, and then once a month, without any warning, sound the alarm. You can find tips here.

Weekend testing

This weekend we went to a park close to the house that has nice forest coverage.  We had gone there to get some nice green sticks to try cooking Bannock bread on over an open fire.  Our first hurdle was that the forest is full of deer ticks!  It was horrible, they covered our boots and pants.  We had used tick repellent and they were still crawling all over us.  This would be a serious issue in a GOOD situation, and one I had not put much thought into.  So far the only natural repellent I have found uses hard to find ingredients.  I will keep looking.  For now I will stock up on commercial repellent.  In no little way has this pointed out that there are lots of issues out there that you will never think of unless you go out and test ideas.

The second issue was cutting the green branches.  I had my Skeletool CX as our only cutting tool.  Other than the real danger of slicing our bodies it worked poorly at cutting down the saplings we choose.  We need a real cutting tool that is portable and slightly less dangerous to our well being.  Fortunately no one was injured by the process of cutting "walking sticks".  We choose sticks about four feet long and one inch in diameter.  They were easy to find and only took about ten to fifteen minutes to cut down with the leatherman.

We continued the walk and pointed out good places to make camps and how we would construct the shelters, always with the tick problem on our minds.  As far as game to eat we only saw a couple squirrels.  We decided to see if our skills were good enough to hunt one.  Not wanting to kill any squirrels since not one of us was willing to eat one, McDonald's was just to close, less messy, and likely more tasty.  I have never eaten a squirrel.  We set up one of our empty plastic water bottles on a log about 10 yards away and unpacked our wrist rocket style sling shots.  We used steel bearings that are sold as slingshot ammo as our projectiles, these are about the size of a 00 buck pellet.  Only my youngest son was able to even hit the bottle at that range and only after dozen of shots.  We also decided that it is unlikely that the projectile would have killed a squirrel or done it serious damage, not that we could have ever hit one.  We saw no squirrels that close to us and it was mostly luck that the bottle was hit.  Also the pellets did no perceivable damage to the bottle at point blank range and no damage to the log that we set the bottle on.  I do not think slingshot hunting would work.

Lessons learned:  Stock up on insect repellent and learn to make it, Slingshots do not work.  We plan on trying some pump pellet pistols in the future., Find and carry a small saw for cutting small trees.