Preppy Prepping

In my continued search for high protein foods to add to my Stores, I ran across another unique piece of information. A common pond plant, known as duckweed, is currently being researched and is quickly moving into the position of our newest “superfood”. It’s packed with protein, far more by volume than almost ANY other protein source, doubles in volume every 24 hours (making it very plentiful), and can be eaten fresh alone, added to other foods such as salads or sandwiches, or dried and made into a powder to be sprinkled on eggs or any other food to add extra protein. It also can be fed to ducks, as it’s name suggests. I was fascinated! Since we have a backyard pond, I did more research. Turns out, it won’t work on our pond, which has a waterfall. It doesn’t like moving water. But it will grow in any nutrient-rich standing water. It reproduces asexually, like cloning, so it typically doesn’t seed. Some studies seem to indicate that, while it dies off at first frost, some particles drop...

All of us are interested in projects we can accomplish for free. One of the best things you can do for your family is to begin composting. Instead of throwing out vegetable peels and scraps, add them to your compost pile. Over time, these scraps will break down and provide lovely organic fertilizer for your gardens. It will cost you nothing, as opposed to store-bought fertilizer, and will decrease trash going to the landfill. What can you compost? No meat and no dairy. But any vegetable or fruit scraps and egg shells can all go in your pile. Think potato, squash, and carrot peels, onion skins, the ends of your celery bunches, pineapple cores, crown (spiky parts on top), and rind, apple cores (unless you save them to make vinegar), orange and grapefruit peels, old salad, and nearly anything you’re putting down the disposal or throwing in the trash except . . . meat and dairy. You can also add grass clippings, leaves, and anything that will decay over time. I started composting a long ti...

Because we live in the South, where we are happy if we have 1 day of Winter, we do not have a fireplace. We know lots of people who do, but many more that don’t. If you’re one of the lucky families that has a fireplace, you probably have firewood stored up somehow or have a reliable source. If you have a fireplace, but it has fallen into disrepair or you just don’t use it, now is the time to call a chimney sweep. Get that thing up and running; at the very least, get it to where it CAN be used. You have a cooking source and a heating source already in your home. You’re lucky. When my mother was growing up in the frozen north of Alberta, Canada, they used coal oil lamps for light and a single wood-burning stove for heat. They had a huge old farmhouse kitchen that housed their big cast-iron cook stove. This was the only heat source in the house. After chores were finished for the day and dinner had been consumed (in the kitchen), evening life for the family all took place in the one heate...

Our Grandmothers used them and some of our mothers, as well. However, many people today only own electric kitchen utensils. Gone are the hand-cranked mixers and hand mills for grinding grain into flour. Some families may not even own a hand crank can opener. If the power grid goes down, hand-operated utensils will be essential, so it’s time to take stock of the non-electric kitchen utensils you may need. Let’s start with the 3 mentioned above. I have 3 or 4 manual can openers. I have so many because only one really works. I need to throw out the others and make more space in my drawer. If you have a trusted manual can opener, buy one more. Can openers are difficult to sharpen and really do dull over time. How fast they become useless depends on how much they are used. In any case, have a spare! You don’t want to end up having to use a knife to cut into cans. I recently purchased a “retro” hand mixer. It has a wheel with a handle attached and two beaters that turn when the wheel is rota...

I’m constantly finding out new things from my research,  which I mostly do during the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. For instance, I printed out directions for making a home still (not QUITE as easy as my sons claim), reviewed ways to store meat by salting, which my father’s family in Canada lived off when he was growing up, but is nearly impossible in the South, and stay current on new techniques and ideas from farm blogs and some small-time preppers, like me. One of the blogs I was reading recently mentioned something I had not considered, but is worth pursuing. While at the grocery store, pick up a couple of extra cans of, and watch for good sales on, canned meals that already have meat added. For instance, pork and beans (the better brands contain hunks of ham and ham fat) and canned chili with hamburger meat. While the ratio of meat to fillers may be small, having some cans of these foods will allow you to serve your family a meal containing meat without having to bre...

If there ever IS a catastrophic emergency, fast food will be non-existent. You need to know how to cook nutritious, easy meals for your family. In addition to beans and rice, homemade pasta, and sprouts, an easy meal to make is soup. You can make tomato, vegetable, chicken, ham, mushroom, split pea, potato, squash, pumpkin, beet, lentil, cauliflower, roasted red pepper, carrot . . . and any number of other types. I’ve started making a list of meals that I can stash away so I don’t have to spend time thinking about meal options if and when the time comes. Each day of the week, we will have a different dinner meal. For instance, every Monday, we will have a bean meal. Tuesday will be a rice meal. Wednesday, pasta, etc. . . Thursdays will be soup day. In this list, I’m separating out potential non-meat meals by each of the categories listed above. My goal is to have 12 options in each category so we have 12 weeks of different meals, despite repeating categories on a weekly basis. Essentia...

Syrup - perhaps the easiest thing in the world to make from scratch. When I was growing up, I had no idea there was such a thing as syrup in a bottle. I don’t think my mother EVER bought any, yet pancakes were our weekly after-church on Sunday brunch. We ate them weekly, but never had anything other than hot, from the pot, homemade yummy syrup. Mostly, my mother made maple syrup using maple extract added to boiling sugar water. But she also made a variety of fruit syrups. One of the things I discovered while living in England was amazing, tropical fruit juices, like the ones I have been able to buy during my trips to Hawaii. Shortly after our arrival in England and our move into our leased house, an American friend working with my husband had to return home for a family emergency. When she came back to England, she brought with her a large bag of pancake mix. I hadn’t seen this product anywhere in England, even though the store where we mostly shopped was the English Walmart. Our way o...

Have you ever considered that, one day, you might find it necessary to evacuate your area. We live in a relatively safe area of the country where the need to evacuate from floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, or tornadoes is pretty non-existent. But we also live near several nuclear facilities. In the past, our city has hosted evacuees from coastal areas numerous times, including Hurricane Katrina. Shelters have overflowed and many evacuees simply can’t afford hotel rooms, even if any were available. It begs the question, if my family was forced to evacuate, what would we do? After Hurricane Katrina, my family discussed this very issue in detail. There are several concerns that have to be addressed if an evacuation order is issued for your area. First and foremost, how do you go about gathering your family? This was a huge question, since my husband worked at one of those nuclear facilities, a 55-minute drive from our home. We discussed in detail (and never fully resolved, unfortunately) a ra...

As I’ve previously mentioned, my husband and I moved our family to England several years ago for a short stay. His job assigned him to a project in northern England and provided a furnished home for us for about 3 months. While it was very short, it afforded my children an opportunity to live in a different country and culture without having the handicap of a foreign language (or so we thought. Turns out, English is NOT what we speak. We speak American, which is absolutely not what “they” speak.) We learned many, many things while there, but a couple of the things that changed my life forever are detailed below. First off, they don’t perk or drip their coffee. They refer to both coffee and tea as “a brew”, and both are prepared in relatively the same way - good old boiling water. Every kitchen, and even every hotel room, is equipped with an electric kettle, but not the kind I grew up around. These are cordless kettles. You plug a base into an outlet, remove the insulated kettle, fill i...