Articles | Page 137 of 264

18 Jan 2016

It’s in the Bag a New Approach to Food Storage

Bag meals Delicious entrées in 20 minutes or less Will save you time and money Will save you storage space Will provide you with the best way to baby step your way to building food storage How can bag meals do all that? Because with bag meals, you are storing what you eat and eating what you store!

It s Sunday and you need ricotta for the lasagna. What are you going to do? Turn to page 186 and make some! You come home from your children s soccer game and everybody is starving. You make a chef salad and there s no salad dressing in the fridge. What are you going to do? Turn to page 233 and make some! A hard freeze in California has wiped out the nations lettuce crop. Lettuce is over $5.00 a head! What are you going to do? Learn how to sprout by turning to page 237.

Food Storage It’s in the Bag is a new approach to food storage, and contains other cool stuff your Mamma never taught you will provide you with simple easy to follow recipes and self reliance instruction skills that will assist you in obtaining greater peace of mind today and in the future!

There is a lot to learn in It’s in the Bag a New Approach to Food Storage, and I recommend it. Its not best as a primary resource book. But it does have a lot of really cool ideas. I recommend it.

18 Jan 2016

Food Storage: Seal Mylar Bags with a Food Sealer

The holy grail of food storage is to be able to seal mylar bags with a food sealer, but its hard to get around the fact that no matter the brand, consumer vacuum sealers are not designed to work with mylar bags.

The inside of Mylar bags are smooth, whereas the insides of the plastic bags designed for use with vacuum sealers have ridges that allow air to freely flow out of the bag with the sides pressed together.

Food Storage: Seal Mylar Bags with a Food Sealer — Buy at Amazon

After much research into clamps, homemade vacuum chambers, and lots of trial and error it was discovered that a strip of corrugated plastic called coroplast can be used to create a channel that will allow the vacuum sealer to evacuate the air out of the bag.

Coroplast is most often associated with political yard signs, and is very easy to recycle.

Equipment:

Mylar Bag (I prefer 7 mil one gallon bags)
Foodsaver™ or other consumer vacuum sealer
Strip of coroplast (approximately 1inch x 3 inch) – ensure the corrugated strips run lengthways.
Mylar Impulse sealer or iron and small board as long as the bag is wide.

Procedure:

Fill your Mylar bag with food (or ammo or spare parts). Leave room for the sealer to

Insert the strip of coroplast into the bag, ensuring that one end is past the seals and into the vacuum chamber.

Activate the machine. In the model I have you press down on the lid until a light comes on indicating a good vacuum has been achieved.

The internal sealer is not strong enough to make a reliable seal with a thick Mylar bag. You will need to either use an impulse sealer between the machine and the stored items in the bag, or you can place a board under the bag and seal it with an iron on medium heat.

Note:

Depending on your machine and the bags you use, you may need to experiment with the optimal placement of the coroplast strip. It took some fiddling until I could get a consistent seal.

14 Jan 2016

Street Safety- Use Common Sense

Common sense street safety is not all that common among some. I would hope that readers of this website would be different, however, even if you are different than most and have your street safety handled, the following tips may help you pass on common sense safety tactics to your loved ones:

Stay in well-lighted, busy areas. Avoid walking alone and avoid known trouble spots.
When you carry a purse, hold it close to your body rather than by the handles. Do not wrap purse straps around your wrist, because you can get hurt in a struggle.
Carry only what you need in a purse or wallet, not everything you have.
Avoid using shortcuts through dark alleys, fields, or vacant lots.
If you think you’re being followed, cross the street and change directions a few times. Go quickly to a well-lighted place with lots of people. Do not go home. You don’t want an attacker to know where you live

14 Jan 2016

Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning

Typical books about preserving garden produce nearly always assume that modern “kitchen gardeners” will boil or freeze their vegetables and fruits.

Yet Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning goes back to the future—celebrating traditional but little-known French techniques for storing and preserving edibles in ways that maximize flavor and nutrition.

Translated into English, and with a new foreword by Deborah Madison, Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning deliberately ignores freezing and high-temperature canning in favor of methods that are superior because they are less costly and more energy-efficient.

As Eliot Coleman says in his foreword to the first edition, “Food preservation techniques can be divided into two categories: the modern scientific methods that remove the life from food, and the natural ‘poetic’ methods that maintain or enhance the life in food. The poetic techniques produce… foods that have been celebrated for centuries and are considered gourmet delights today.”

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning offers more than 250 easy and enjoyable recipes featuring locally grown and minimally refined ingredients. It is an essential guide for those who seek healthy food for a healthy world.

I can’t stress how much food production is important for preppers. I don’t care how much you store, you will eventually run out. Being able to produce and store food is vital.

14 Jan 2016

How to Cut Pasta the Easy Way

Kitchen DIY: Easy Way to Cut Pasta — Buy at Amazon

When making homemade pasta you have several options in forming your noodles, but while there are many ways of doing it, I want you to know the easy way to cut pasta.

You can extrude it (like my play dough experiment for next week )
Run it through a dedicated pasta machineCut individual noodles
or as this article demonstrates an Easy Way to Cut Pasta, you can roll the dough and cut noodles very efficiently and quickly.Once you get your dough as thin as you desire, simply roll it into a tube, and using a sharp knife, slice it as thin as you want.

After cutting the dough spirals, simply unroll each spiral into a long noodle, and either dry or cook immediately.

This is a very simple way of cutting pasta noodles, and I hope it makes your life easier.

This used to be something I thought was the realm of the super skilled Italian mother – but after trying it I found that homemade pasta is extremely simple to make, as well as being pretty inexpensive.

Once I found an easy way to cut pasta I was all set to make it all of the time – but then I discovered gnocchi and then all my pasta making stopped.