Preppy Prepping

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...

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...

 Regardless of how much food you store, it will never be enough. If there really IS a catastrophic emergency in your region of the country, such as inter-state commerce shutting down or the power grid going off-line, or even the failure of our economy, you will be doing extraordinarily well to have stored up enough to provide food for your family for a full year. The real goal of Stores is to provide for your loved ones for long enough to establish a food-collection system for the future. What that means for everyone is a little different. But the most important thing is to have given this whole idea some mind space and thought. This isn’t something that should send you to a mental health specialist or a cardiologist! We have held multiple family meetings to discuss these issues. We included my father-in-law, who now lives near us, and our grown children. We opened the floor to any tangents one of the attendees wanted to head off down. My father-in-law was very concerned about the ...