Canning and dehydrating

Oh, how I love this time of year! The abundance of affordable fruits and vegetables makes me happy and I'm ready to start canning or dehydrating anything in sight. Are you a canner? If not, find a friend who is and get started. It's a great way of saving money, of controlling what you feed your family and it's fun. If you don't know anybody who cans, find a class at your local Extension office. Canned and dehydrated foods add a large variety to your food pantry.

Canning jars are expensive to purchase at first, but they are well worth the price. If you browse yard sales, thrift stores and online auctions, you will often find canning jars for sale. Make sure they are Ball or Kerr brand, as mayonnaise jars or other glass containers will not withstand the pressure or maintain an airtight seal. When you do find canning jars, run your finger carefully across the rim. It should be smooth, with no knicks or chips. This will affect the airtight seal and may compromise the strength of the glass. Many a jar has broken while boiling in a canner because of a hairline crack in the glass.

Canning is fun, but should also be taken seriously. Make sure you understand what should be canned in a pressure canner and what can be canned in a water bath. Oven canning is not recommended, nor is steamer canning. Educate yourself (even if you are an experienced canner, you may want to look into the Extension courses, they share the latest on food safety information!) and familiarize yourself with requirements, safety issues and recipes for the foods you love. Use recipes from an approved source such as the Extension office or the Ball Blue Book.

Dehydrating is literally taking all the water out of food so you can store it dry. It also greatly reduces volume and weight, but not necessarily flavor. Dehydrated tomatoes, for example, have a wonderful deep tomato flavor, because all the water has evaporated, but all the flavor stays.

Today, I canned peaches that were soaked in a star anise/cinnamon stick syrup (see above), and I dehydrated several pounds of tomato chunks. Fresh from the garden, I washed, chopped and drained red and yellow tomatoes, then laid them on the dehydrator for approx. 9 hours on 135F. Once dried, a handful added to a stew or a soup this winter will be a wonderful reminder of summer.

Another dehydrated staple in my pantry are dehydrated zucchini chunks: they too can be added to winter dishes to add bulk and color. Take advantage of all those gardeners that have zucchini coming out of their ears and crank up the dehydrator, this winter you will be glad you did!

Building your food pantry $5 at a time

I received an email the other day that boasted having a system to build an affordable food pantry, $5 a week at a time. The concept in itself is great: purchase an additional five dollars of food items each week and after 12 months (or a mere $260) you will have enough food to hold you and your significant other over in times of crisis, lay-offs or other equally disastrous times. The article then showed the list of items to purchase: salt, sugar, cans of cream of chicken, mushroom and tomato soup, macaroni, wheat, yeast, tuna, powdered milk, mac&cheese, peanut butter, honey, shortening, aspirin and vitamins. Great list if you like and eat all those products.....but if I were to subsist on cream of mushroom soup, tuna and peanut butter, something else would be in crisis too: I would!

I was floored when I read that list: it read like a random shopping list instead of a well-planned pantry. What's the purpose of buying wheat unless you have a mill (and how are you going to power it?) to grind it and make flour to bake bread or biscuits with. I get the mac&cheese, but what am I doing with the macaroni itself? Boil it in tomato soup? Ewwwwwwwww.........and where are the veggies, where's the fruit? In times of crisis, you need comfort food to keep you going, something sweet, something familiar. The last thing you want to do, when all heck breaks loose, is learning how to feed your family on storage food that you don't use in your day-to-day cooking. You will be hard-pressed to find any canned cream soups in my pantry, or mac&cheese. It is not something I normally eat or use so I don't store it either.

Learn how to make your bread, cream soups and other dishes from scratch, so that you can focus on pantry staples instead of processed foods. Basic items like flour, sugar, salt, yeast, dehydrated milk, oils, pasta, rice, beans, dehydrated or canned fruits and vegetables......there's a myriad of dishes you can prepare with it and it will be a lot cheaper as most of these can be purchased in bulk.

Keep a check on what items you purchase the most, what have become staples on your shopping list? Those are the ones you want to stash away for later use and those will be a comfort when everything around you changes. When you buy, or when these staples are on sale, buy two additional cans, or an extra bag or another pound and put it in your food pantry. As these items are used frequently, you will have no trouble rotating them and using them up before they spoil. By adding on an extra $5 a week, when you have it, can quickly add to the security of knowing that you have enough to keep your head above water.

It's not all doom and gloom....

Just a quick one to encourage you for the day....Life is good!

There was an old man and woman who had been married for over fifty years. Times were very tough and food was scarce. The old woman, driven by hunger, broke into the neighbor's root cellar and stole a jar of peaches. She was caught and brought before the judge.

After the trial was done the judge, showing pity on the old woman, asked how many peaches were in the jar. "Five, your Honor", she said. The judge said: "Then I will give you one day for each peach. You will serve five days in jail".

From the back of the court room her husband shouted:"Your Honor, she also stole a big can of peas!"

LOL - too funny! So in case push comes to shove, leave the peas and go for the peaches :-)

Shine a light............

In February I asked you to find your flashlight. Did you find it? Are the batteries still good? If you don't have a flash light, try to buy one on your next shopping trip: they're easy to find in second-hand stores or dollar stores. The dollar store is usually also the place to buy cheap batteries, so be on the lookout for those!

Power outages are frequent (at least in this part of the country). Having flashlights, and knowing where they are, is key to your safety during those times. A large variety of options are available nowadays, both battery-free, and with batteries. You can have squeeze flashlights (no batteries, the light is manually activated by squeezing the handle) or crank flashlights (you turn a crank for 30 seconds that will activate the light for up to five minutes). These are great if you don't want to invest in spare batteries or want to make sure you always have a working flashlight.

You may also want to invest in one of those headbands with LED lights. They allow you to have both of your hands available (it's easier to cook in the dark if you have a light shining from your head than holding a flash light in one and stirring with the other!).

I keep one flash light by the bed, one in the kitchen and one in each room of the house, usually in the top drawer. Each room usually has a drawer of some sort. Don't forget to place one in the bathrooms and more importantly, one in whichever room your breaker panel is at.

Candles and oil lamps are good to have for long term darkness, but open flames are NOT encouraged, it's way too dangerous. Make sure you understand how oil lamps work, and have abundant tea light candles that can be burnt in small holders. Long tapered candles will easily fall over or spill wax. By all means, do not leave any candles unattended!

What to shut off and where

....first, shut off the panic button.....

Things are moving QUICK! Droughts, food shortages, lay-offs, hot weather conditions....you name it, it's happening. Should it worry us? No. Worrying will do us no good. Instead, accept the responsibility and
take inventory of what you've done so far to prepare. If you:

1. Have some food and water stored
2. Have some cash at hand
3. Have several ways of cooking food and keeping warm
4. Found and/or updated your emergency kit
5. Have gas in your car so you can get to a safe place

...or can at least say yes to at least three of these, you're way ahead of many others! I'm proud of you!

Now, in case you have to leave the house, either because of severe weather conditions, natural disasters or for whatever other reason .....you may be requested or instructed to shut off the utilities to your house in order to prevent larger disasters or accidents.

Now is the time to take fifteen minutes to find the main turnoffs for gas, electricity and water. Don't turn them off, just make sure that you know where they are, and that you have the tools to do it.

1. Power

This one is probably the easiest one to find and will not require going outside. The electricity circuit box is usually a grey metal panel box mounted inbetween two studs. Here's a video:
http://emd.wa.gov/preparedness/videos/video_turning_off_electricity.shtml Turn off the individual breakers first, before shutting off the main breaker, and turn on the main one before turning on all the individual ones.

2. Propane or natural gas

If you smell gas or hear it escape, turn it off as soon as you can. And for Pete's sake, don't smoke!:-)

Here's a video on how to shut off propane tanks: http://emd.wa.gov/preparedness/videos/video_shutting_off_propane_gas.shtml

To shut off the meters on natural gas, check with your gas company. There are a variety of gas meters, and each will have a slightly different shut-off procedures. Here's the one for Intermountain Gas in Idaho:

http://www.intgas.com/safety/shutoffmeter.html

Don't actually shut the gas off when you're out there trying to figure it out: a professional will have to come and turn it back on. Besides a possible fee, you don't want to risk being without gas for the next several days!

3. Water

Locate the shut-off valve for the water line that enters your house. This might be in a crawl space, in the basement or near the foundation of the house, but you want to know where it is!

Here's a picture of what some of the valves look like: http://www.tvwd.org/resources--outreach/shut-off-your-water.aspx

Have you found all three? Wonderful!! Make sure the rest of the household also knows where to find these and how to turn them off in case of emergency. If you need certain tools to turn the utilities off, you may consider keeping a separate set just for that purpose, so that in a case of emergency you don't have to scramble desperately trying to find the toolbox. Nothing so unnerving as having water coming up to your ankles and you without remembering where you left those darn pliers! So be kind to yourself and keep a spare set!

You may also want to write down the instructions, and draw a map and mark where the different shut-off valves are, and keep them with the set of tools. This will also make it easier on emergency personnel in case they have to shut off the utilities while you're not home.