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Stocking Up 101: Zombiegeddon or not, it’s still the 21st C.

And being that as it may, there’s a cool spreadsheet program to determine where your stores are at today, and what you need to stock up on.

Mwalla.

*hat tip to Shasha at Hen and Harvest who appears to be starting a pantry series. Be sure to bookmark!

Lessons in Food Preservation

or… what not to do!

1. If you are pickling cauliflower in brine left over from a jar of olives, make sure that all the cauliflower is completely submerged. Any tiny bits left poking out of the brine will mold and spoil the whole batch. Bleah.

2. When dehydrating zucchini chips for snacks, season lightly. I mean LIGHTLY. I now have salt chips suitable for a deer lick. Double bleah.

However, I have taken advice from the pros on the salt chips. The best suggestion was to powder them and add to meatloaf mix (leaving out any salt called for in the recipe). Instant Vitamin C!

Onward! I consider this my Crap Quotient. The quicker I make mistakes and learn from them, the quicker I’ll start doing it right.

Food Prices Will Remain High

July 21, 2008 5:58 PM

ABC News’ Charles Herman reports: Don’t expect lower prices in the grocery aisles any time soon.

Food prices are expected to rise 4.5 percent to 5 percent this year and then another 4 percent to 5 percent in 2009, according to a government forecast to be released this week from the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

Egg prices will crack double-digit price increases of at least 13 percent this year. Baked goods and cereals will rise more than 9 percent. And food items, like peanut butter, salad dressing, butter and cooking oils will go up by as much as 12.5 percent, largely due to higher soy prices.

Higher prices for corn and soy and other crops, along with higher energy prices, are to blame.

Time to get the canner and dehydrator going. If you don’t have a garden, patronize your local farmer’s market.

Stocking Up 101: Stuff {Storage, Part II}

Part I can be found here.

Okay, I should be at the farmers market this very moment, but I’m leaving town for a few days tomorrow evening, and I don’t see the point of buying food I don’t have the time, room or means to handle before and during my absence. And my plans to run over to the peach festival and get a bushel or two? Good gawd almighty, what was I thinking?

Oh sure, I could just go for it and hope for the best. But I have a tiny refrigerator (for the purposes of energy conservation — yes, it does make a difference), and I’ve been keeping the air conditioning set at 80-85. Combine those two facts with a mess of ripe produce? You do the math! Besides, I’m working on a big coop order and need to be putting my energy into storing all those dry goods when they get here.

This time next year, I’ll have all this figured out — maybe.

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Stocking Up 101 - Hot Smoking Tomatoes

A couple of summers ago I ended up with a bumper crop of tomatoes. Huge. Enormous. So many I had no idea what to do with them. We ate tomatoes in salads and on sandwiches and cooked dishes in every way I could think of that my very picky family would eat. No, they won’t eat salsa or gazpacho or chutney. I use very little tomato sauce, but I made some and still had tomatoes overflowing my kitchen.

I experimented with roasting some of them, which was good. This was before I got the dehydrator, or some of them would have ended up “sun dried.” Then I had the brainstorm.

Hickory smoke those babies as they were roasting.

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Stocking Up 101: Stuff {Storage, Part I}

Have you ever had a friend so insistent on having their own way, so oblivious to your needs, so craving the spotlight that they would do anything for it?

That’s how stuff is. Stuff takes over, messes things up for everybody but itself, merrily steals time and space while offering little in return except dust mites and mold and clutter.

Stuff is something that’s just gotta go. The thing is, not everything is stuff.. Some things are not just useful, but invaluable, absolutely necessary for our well-being in a post-industrial world. But these necessities can quickly become stuff and deplete our space, as well as our finances and well-being.

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Build a Solar Food Dehydrator

Mother Earth News tells you how.

What do you plan to eat the rest of the year? Will you rely on industrial foods grown by strangers from all over the world and shipped thousands of miles? With increasing interest in healthy eating, sustainable local food supplies and self-reliance, many people are discovering the benefits of a solar food dehydrator.

Read the rest at the link.

Stocking Up 101: Freeze-dried vs. Dehydrated

My cabinets are a mess, but there is some degree of method to my madness.

Okay, so there isn’t, not much, but I figured I’d try to at least claim it. I’m just not a terribly organized person. But I do like my food, and I did grow up in a household of penny pinchers and cheapskates, and I adore catastrophic scenarios and (Hu)man Against Nature scenarios, so I have some idea how it works.

Here’s what I currently have stocked:

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Stocking Up 101

With all the (ahem) cheerful news this spring about prices going up and stocks of available food going down, more and more people are paying attention to stocking up for lean times. I see this as a wise move. It could even be considered an investment: If you pay $2.00 for a loaf of bread today to put into your freezer, and a month from now when you take it out that same loaf costs $2.50, you’ve essentially saved 50 cents. Think how much more valuable that loaf of bread would be if a month or a year from now there was no bread to be had in the local stores. At all.

So what should you store? How much is “enough?”

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