I came across a thread in one survival-prep forum recently where someone posted the suggestion that instead of buying allegedly more-expensive oxygen absorbers, why not buy iron oxide hand warmers, they said, since the hand warmers were cheaper and readily available in sporting goods stores and, they said, had the same active ingredients as food-grade oxygen absorbers? Well, that’s all fine and good if the hand warmers are cheaper and if they’re food-grade, but is cheaper necessarily what you want when it comes to food storage?
I’ve tried probably eight or nine different brands of food dehydrators over the years, and the only one I’ve tried that I would recommend to other people (disclaimer: I haven’t tried an Excalibur) is the one manufactured by Nesco, which has an internal fan for air circulation and helps food dry in half the time compared to dehydrators without fans. I like the Nescos so much that I’ve bought a dozen of them over the past several years just so I’ll have plenty of extra food preparation tools if I need them. (Shameless plug: You can usually get a Nesco on eBay for around $30 (plus shipping) if you pick your auctions smartly.)
Now, I could buy a Ronco or other model without an internal fan that would in fact use less electricity during the drying process…but if it takes the dehydrator twice as long to adequately dry food, am I really saving any money? I think it’s more than worth a few extra pennies of electricity to have dehydrators with fans so that I know my food will dry quickly and uniformly…and in the end, I have the security of knowing that I have plenty of food if I need it. (If you’re so worried about a dehydrator with a fan using more electricity than a dehydrator without a fan, maybe you should unplug the appliance in your house that uses the most electricity — your refrigerator!)
Which brings me back to the point about getting what you pay for.
In 1996, I bought my very first car, a 1984 Toyota Corolla. (Yes, a Toyota. The brakes worked on this particular vehicle…but nothing else did.) The car had about 162,000 miles on it, and the dealer was asking only $850 for it. The only warranty it came with was for me not to let the door hit me on the way out of the so-called dealership. More than $1,000 and 1,300 miles later, the car wouldn’t budge out of my mom’s driveway. Well, that’s not quite true…I could drive it three or four miles before the engine would overheat and I’d have to put more (and more…and more…and more) water in the radiator after it cooled down…and watch the water go right through the radiator to the pavement because the bottom of the radiator was rusted out.
I’d spent close to $2,000 and now had nothing to show for it. I was not a happy camper. But at least I could catch a ride on good days and hope I didn’t have to walk very far the rest of the time.
Which brings me back to my first point.
It’s one thing to shell out a couple thousand bucks on a piece-o’-junk car and have the thing eventually stop running altogether and then chalk up the experience to a lesson learned the hard way. But it’s a whole different story when your life depends on something.
And you can’t live without food.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that hand warmers technically do have the same oxygen-absorbing properties as, well, oxygen absorbers. I haven’t been able to try to vacuum-seal a jar yet with hand warmers because (at least according to the sporting goods clerk at Wally World) they are a seasonal camping-accessory item and won’t be available until later in the year. But do I really want something to heat up my food items as they are undergoing vacuum-sealing, and risk denaturing the vitamin content of the food that my life could depend on if TSHTF? Or would you rather use tried-and-true methods and materials that have been proven time and time again to work, so you don’t have to worry?
I’m not telling you not to buy that 1984 Toyota. I’m just asking you if it will get you where you need to go when you need it to get you there. If you’re buying cheaper food storage tools that you can’t be sure will do what you need them to do — keep your food fresh and safe until you eat it — are you willing to risk your health and maybe your life just to save a few bucks?
Showing posts with label food emergency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food emergency. Show all posts
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Oh, carrots are divine, you get a dozen for a dime, it’s maaaaaagic!
Some of you may have caught the Bugs Bunny reference in the title above, which seems appropriate given that I’m about to try my hand at dehydrating carrots. And I’m not imagining it will be too hard, as the only extra step between dehydrating carrots and spinach will be the dicing of the crinkle-cut frozen carrots I just bought at Wal-Mart. For just under $6, I picked up a Mainstays brand food chopper (pretty low capacity — maybe 2 cups?) that I will use to dice the carrots so the bits to be dehydrated will be as small as possible — exactly what you want, as small pieces dehydrate much faster. (Editor's note: No dicing of the carrots was necessary to speed up the dehydration process--which I discovered after my initial posting this article. Just thaw the frozen carrots, spread them out on your dehydrator's trays, and in several hours you'll have perfectly dehydrated carrots!)
Someone pointed out to me that frozen vegetables are already blanched before they are frozen, so that step is already take care of compared to fresh-packaged vegetables, and the frozen veggies are ready to be cooked and eaten…or dehydrated, as the case may be.
The price on the 1-pound package of crinkle-cut sliced carrots at Wal-Mart was 98 cents. Checking a couple different websites to see the going price for bulk dehydrated carrots, at a reconstitution ratio of about 1 pound of dehydrated carrots equal to 2 pounds of cooked carrots, pricewise I’ll be doubling my money by doing this myself instead of ordering an already-dehydrated bulk lot of carrots — one particular site I’ve ordered other items from is selling 20-pound lots of dehydrated carrots for about $3.95 per pound (which would be about $1.97 per pound for the equivalent volume of non-dehydrated carrots, twice the price of my package of carrots from Wally World). As I mentioned earlier, in most cases it will be cheaper to dehydrate fruits and vegetables yourself instead of buying pre-dehydrated products, with the caveats that high-sugar foods (especially tomatoes, apples and bananas) might be a bit trickier and stickier since their sugars will caramelize and get gooey and make it hard for you to remove them from your dehydrator trays. But obviously this isn’t a problem with carrots, so never mind.
I’d also like to reiterate the point I’ve made before that the food items I’m dehydrating for my long-term storage are either huge in nutrition, huge in flavor or both. Carrots (and spinach as well) are loaded with beta carotene, which our bodies turn into Vitamin A. Carrots don’t necessarily pack the flavor punch that other vegetables do, but they will add a huge nutritional punch to your food — 1/2 cup of dehydrated carrots (equal to 1 cup of cooked carrots) will give you about 130 percent of your daily recommended Vitamin A. Like Bugs said, it’s maaaaaagic!
I’ll post an update as soon as I get my first couple batches of carrots done.
UPDATE 5-17-10–I’ve gotten off to a later start than expected with the carrots, but the first thing I’ll say is that I’m amazed at the amount of shrinkage in volume once the carrots are dehydrated — but this is a very good thing, as it will give you more carats of carrots per quart! It looks like I’m averaging 8 pounds of pre-dehydrated carrots per one-quart mason jar AFTER dehydration–I’d estimate it’s about an 8-to-1 shrinkage in volume, similar to what I’ve encountered with tomatoes. I didn’t realize how much water was in carrots! But having said that, assuming reconstitution will work on the same water-to-carrot ratio of about 8-to-1, I’ll be able to fit the dry equivalent of 96 pounds of carrots per 12-jar case!
Someone pointed out to me that frozen vegetables are already blanched before they are frozen, so that step is already take care of compared to fresh-packaged vegetables, and the frozen veggies are ready to be cooked and eaten…or dehydrated, as the case may be.
The price on the 1-pound package of crinkle-cut sliced carrots at Wal-Mart was 98 cents. Checking a couple different websites to see the going price for bulk dehydrated carrots, at a reconstitution ratio of about 1 pound of dehydrated carrots equal to 2 pounds of cooked carrots, pricewise I’ll be doubling my money by doing this myself instead of ordering an already-dehydrated bulk lot of carrots — one particular site I’ve ordered other items from is selling 20-pound lots of dehydrated carrots for about $3.95 per pound (which would be about $1.97 per pound for the equivalent volume of non-dehydrated carrots, twice the price of my package of carrots from Wally World). As I mentioned earlier, in most cases it will be cheaper to dehydrate fruits and vegetables yourself instead of buying pre-dehydrated products, with the caveats that high-sugar foods (especially tomatoes, apples and bananas) might be a bit trickier and stickier since their sugars will caramelize and get gooey and make it hard for you to remove them from your dehydrator trays. But obviously this isn’t a problem with carrots, so never mind.
I’d also like to reiterate the point I’ve made before that the food items I’m dehydrating for my long-term storage are either huge in nutrition, huge in flavor or both. Carrots (and spinach as well) are loaded with beta carotene, which our bodies turn into Vitamin A. Carrots don’t necessarily pack the flavor punch that other vegetables do, but they will add a huge nutritional punch to your food — 1/2 cup of dehydrated carrots (equal to 1 cup of cooked carrots) will give you about 130 percent of your daily recommended Vitamin A. Like Bugs said, it’s maaaaaagic!
I’ll post an update as soon as I get my first couple batches of carrots done.
UPDATE 5-17-10–I’ve gotten off to a later start than expected with the carrots, but the first thing I’ll say is that I’m amazed at the amount of shrinkage in volume once the carrots are dehydrated — but this is a very good thing, as it will give you more carats of carrots per quart! It looks like I’m averaging 8 pounds of pre-dehydrated carrots per one-quart mason jar AFTER dehydration–I’d estimate it’s about an 8-to-1 shrinkage in volume, similar to what I’ve encountered with tomatoes. I didn’t realize how much water was in carrots! But having said that, assuming reconstitution will work on the same water-to-carrot ratio of about 8-to-1, I’ll be able to fit the dry equivalent of 96 pounds of carrots per 12-jar case!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Nine meals from anarchy, Part 4: Start slow if you must, but get started!
I’d say there are two basic rules when it comes to stocking up on food for the long-term: First, stock up what you normally eat anyway. And second, get started!
But how many of us do neither?
I’ll admit, it took me about two years to really wrap my mind around the idea of “food storage” — after all, with so-called “just in time” inventory in grocery stores arriving, well, just in time on a regular basis, what’s the big deal? Food will always be on the grocery shelves when we need it, right?
Let’s recap a video from a few days ago:
http://www.youtube.com/v/gWnV1kQM0z4
On the spectrum of disasters, 30 inches of snow really is a cakewalk compared to a Category-4 hurricane like Katrina — at least with the so-called “Snowpocalypse,” people more or less knew it was coming, and they had a bit of time to prepare for it (although whether they actually did so is a different matter altogether). Yet in both cases, before and during the storms, preparation either becomes just an afterthought, or it leaves you like a deer in the headlights, overwhelmed and paralyzed by fear.
Time to take baby steps. Then more baby steps. And more baby steps. And then pretty soon you’ll be miles closer to where you want to be.
But get started now.
The first thing to do, obviously, is to look at what you normally eat and just buy more of it and use less of it each time you go to the grocery store. It’s the same way with budgeting money — the way you build up a surplus is to spend less than you earn. But to do that, first you need to know where your money is going. And in the case of food, it’s good to sit down, make a written list of what you normally buy — written lists will help keep you on budget and on track — and then build up your pantry from there.
It’s a lot cheaper to eat at home than to eat every meal at a restaurant. So why do so many of us think that the “best” way to build up our food storage surplus is to buy prepackaged dehydrated or freeze-dried foods from various companies we’ve read about online rather than preparing our own food storage as much as possible? I’ve perused dozens of sites selling dehydrated or freeze-dried foods for long-term storage — but on a per-serving basis, many of these items being sold through such companies costs just as much, if not more, than what you’d pay for a meal at a decent sit-down restaurant. And just like a lot of “normal” prepackaged foods, a lot of the dehydrated and freeze-dried items I’ve seen listed for sale have all the same drawbacks as the normal American diet — too much salt, too little fiber, not enough vitamin content. Why would I pay a lot of money for those things if I can make them myself for a lot less money? The flip side of the coin, however, is that by not “eating out” via prepackaged food storage items, we can get a lot more for our money and we can tailor our food storage to our own tastes, and we can take steps to avoid the extra salt and (some) fat. Fat and protein will be very important if we find ourselves in a more physically demanding environment for an extended period of time, so we want to make sure we have an ample (but balanced) supply of both in what we’re stocking up on. But by taking control of our food, we can control what goes into our food storage.
Driving a sports car that gets 15 miles to the gallon is great if you can afford to fill up twice as often than if you get 30 mpg. But more often than not, you’re going to want good gas mileage. And how many of us have money to burn anyway? So also with your food storage: You want to get the greatest “mileage” for your food storage dollars. Fat, protein and carbohydrates are the building blocks of our diets. And even though beans and rice has gotten a bad rap at times because, well, it’s “just beans and rice,” the combination of the two is one of the most complete meals in the world. You get all three major nutritional building blocks in this simplest of meals.
That’s like saying that Steak’n Shake must be just like Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse because they both have “Steak” in their name.
And so it is with beans and rice–your food storage can be really cheap but really good. Googling beans and rice recipes brings up more than 1.3 million results, enough recipes to last you at least a few weeks.
We frequently eat the same type of bread when we make all kinds of different sandwiches–pastrami, peanut butter, ham salad, grilled cheese–so what’s unusual about the thought of making hundreds of different beans-and-rice dishes out of, well, beans and rice? What kind of beans do you want? Pintos? Light red? Great Northern? Lentils? Split peas? Garbanzos? Black beans? Do you want white rice, basmati, brown rice, parboiled rice, medium grain, long grain?
I remember being amazed as a kid when I heard a commercial that said I could have a Wendy’s hamburger 255 different ways. Did I want ketchup? Mustard? Pickle? Mayo? Mustard and pickle? Cheese only? Tomato, ketchup and mayo? Onion? Everything except ketchup? Plain? Only tomato? It’s the same hamburger. But I could eat a hamburger a day for 255 days and not have it made the same way twice. So why can’t we do the same thing with rice and beans?
What it all boils down to is how long you want to be able to eat with the limited money you have, and starting now to stock up you beans, rice, veggies, spices and everything else that will make your food storage anything but boring. I’ll post photos and more tomorrow to show you how you can get started making your own food really cheap and making it just the way you want it.
But how many of us do neither?
I’ll admit, it took me about two years to really wrap my mind around the idea of “food storage” — after all, with so-called “just in time” inventory in grocery stores arriving, well, just in time on a regular basis, what’s the big deal? Food will always be on the grocery shelves when we need it, right?
Let’s recap a video from a few days ago:
http://www.youtube.com/v/gWnV1kQM0z4
On the spectrum of disasters, 30 inches of snow really is a cakewalk compared to a Category-4 hurricane like Katrina — at least with the so-called “Snowpocalypse,” people more or less knew it was coming, and they had a bit of time to prepare for it (although whether they actually did so is a different matter altogether). Yet in both cases, before and during the storms, preparation either becomes just an afterthought, or it leaves you like a deer in the headlights, overwhelmed and paralyzed by fear.
Time to take baby steps. Then more baby steps. And more baby steps. And then pretty soon you’ll be miles closer to where you want to be.
But get started now.
The first thing to do, obviously, is to look at what you normally eat and just buy more of it and use less of it each time you go to the grocery store. It’s the same way with budgeting money — the way you build up a surplus is to spend less than you earn. But to do that, first you need to know where your money is going. And in the case of food, it’s good to sit down, make a written list of what you normally buy — written lists will help keep you on budget and on track — and then build up your pantry from there.
Cheaper is better
It’s a lot cheaper to eat at home than to eat every meal at a restaurant. So why do so many of us think that the “best” way to build up our food storage surplus is to buy prepackaged dehydrated or freeze-dried foods from various companies we’ve read about online rather than preparing our own food storage as much as possible? I’ve perused dozens of sites selling dehydrated or freeze-dried foods for long-term storage — but on a per-serving basis, many of these items being sold through such companies costs just as much, if not more, than what you’d pay for a meal at a decent sit-down restaurant. And just like a lot of “normal” prepackaged foods, a lot of the dehydrated and freeze-dried items I’ve seen listed for sale have all the same drawbacks as the normal American diet — too much salt, too little fiber, not enough vitamin content. Why would I pay a lot of money for those things if I can make them myself for a lot less money? The flip side of the coin, however, is that by not “eating out” via prepackaged food storage items, we can get a lot more for our money and we can tailor our food storage to our own tastes, and we can take steps to avoid the extra salt and (some) fat. Fat and protein will be very important if we find ourselves in a more physically demanding environment for an extended period of time, so we want to make sure we have an ample (but balanced) supply of both in what we’re stocking up on. But by taking control of our food, we can control what goes into our food storage.
Four pounds of spinach, after dehydration, courtesy of my Nesco dehydrator–fits nicely in a 1-quart mason jar:
Getting started
Driving a sports car that gets 15 miles to the gallon is great if you can afford to fill up twice as often than if you get 30 mpg. But more often than not, you’re going to want good gas mileage. And how many of us have money to burn anyway? So also with your food storage: You want to get the greatest “mileage” for your food storage dollars. Fat, protein and carbohydrates are the building blocks of our diets. And even though beans and rice has gotten a bad rap at times because, well, it’s “just beans and rice,” the combination of the two is one of the most complete meals in the world. You get all three major nutritional building blocks in this simplest of meals.
You’ve got to be kidding…
Even casual car buffs know that there’s a HUGE difference between an Edsel and a Lamborghini. But they’re both cars, so what does it matter?That’s like saying that Steak’n Shake must be just like Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse because they both have “Steak” in their name.
And so it is with beans and rice–your food storage can be really cheap but really good. Googling beans and rice recipes brings up more than 1.3 million results, enough recipes to last you at least a few weeks.
We frequently eat the same type of bread when we make all kinds of different sandwiches–pastrami, peanut butter, ham salad, grilled cheese–so what’s unusual about the thought of making hundreds of different beans-and-rice dishes out of, well, beans and rice? What kind of beans do you want? Pintos? Light red? Great Northern? Lentils? Split peas? Garbanzos? Black beans? Do you want white rice, basmati, brown rice, parboiled rice, medium grain, long grain?
I remember being amazed as a kid when I heard a commercial that said I could have a Wendy’s hamburger 255 different ways. Did I want ketchup? Mustard? Pickle? Mayo? Mustard and pickle? Cheese only? Tomato, ketchup and mayo? Onion? Everything except ketchup? Plain? Only tomato? It’s the same hamburger. But I could eat a hamburger a day for 255 days and not have it made the same way twice. So why can’t we do the same thing with rice and beans?
What it all boils down to is how long you want to be able to eat with the limited money you have, and starting now to stock up you beans, rice, veggies, spices and everything else that will make your food storage anything but boring. I’ll post photos and more tomorrow to show you how you can get started making your own food really cheap and making it just the way you want it.
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