Handy Dandy Ideas For You
11/28/07 - 4th Day - After Breakfast. It is close to mid-morning and I am working down in the root cellar. Down here it has stayed temperature stable at 57 degrees even through the cold spell we had over the weekend. Tracy and Danielle continue canning smoked Turkeys and broth, and it is great to see the fruit of our labors down here in the root cellar. Last night, Danielle intended to make Mackerel Croquettes but learned that Tracy had made cornbread with the last of the readily available corn meal. I told Danielle, "Not to worry, I will make supper from storage". Here is how it went:
Tracy made tortillas from stored flour. Danielle boiled some rice. I went to the root cellar for:
1 jar of beef broth (from January '07 when we canned some roasts)
1 jar of hamburger meat (from the Longhorn steer we butchered in October)
1 jar of green beans (from this summer's garden)
1 jar of diced tomatoes/peppers
Add all but the green beans (these were a side dish) in a pot over the fire. Add 1 can of stored corn and 1 can of stored, sliced potatoes. I added a couple of cups of water because my broth is pretty thick and because the rice would soak up a lot of the water. Season with garlic salt and/or powder, basil (organic, bought and stored from the Amish), onion powder, seasoned salt. Simmer until hot (less than 30 mins.) Serve with heaps of butter and tortillas, with homegrown green beans on the side. Yum.
Ok, once again I mention the joy of this because it never gets old to me. It is always a great joy and supreme pleasure to enjoy a wonderful, fast, tasty meal from our storage and preparations. By the way, this fed our family of 6 with two full quart jars of soup left over! This is why I harp and preach on preparedness, separatism, Agrarianism, etc. We didn't have to run to the market. We ran to the STORE. The word "store" meant "the storage", where food is stored. Only in a system that began to be corrupted did the "market" (where food and goods were traded) turn into a "store", where the family had no storage (or very little), and the food was produced and sold at the corporate "store" for immediate consumption. The "store" as storehouse is a corruption of God's design. The old-timers said things like "I trade with so-and-so", meaning that they did business with them. The market was a place where you traded. You took in fresh eggs and were given market credit for trade in items you needed. Ideally, you would produce and store your own stuff, but if you needed salt and could not produce it, you took in eggs, cream, cheese, etc. and traded for it. Traders became "buyers", buyers became "shoppers", shoppers became "consumers" - and like we said in a recent forum discussion, the word "consumer" (which is what all Amerikan's are called) means "destroyer". When a thing is consumed it is destroyed. The Bible has much to say about the destroyer, so go look it up.
Eggs-ellent
We have had some discussion recently on BiblicalAgrarianism.com on the storage of whole fresh eggs. I mentioned that we store dozens of eggs in "waterglass" which is sodium silicate, a natural substance used for egg storage for a century. You simply put clean, fresh, unwashed farm eggs in a large jar and pour a mixture of 1 part waterglass to 4 parts water (I think that is correct, but do a search on BA to check it out), and store in a cool dark place. Well, we had some discussion about how that would work, and since we had not at that time eaten any of our waterglass stored eggs, I could only speculate based on what I had read. Some articles said that this made eggs "good" for up to a year, but that they really started to degrade in quality after 5-7 months. This would work out fine, because a working homestead should only lose production (due to a molt or a die off) for this short amount of time. A new chick can be brought into production in under a year. Anyway, due to the cold snap we saw a dramatic drop off for a few days in our egg production. We began to give the chickens heated water in the mornings and some egg layer ration and this brought them back on line in a week or so, but for awhile there we were only getting a few eggs a day. So during the Thanksgiving week we had company and Danielle wanted to make her trademark morning egg casserole but we didn't have enough eggs. She sent me down to the root cellar to bring up a jar of about two dozen waterglassed eggs. *We use pickle jars*
The waterglassed eggs were excellent. Out of the two dozen eggs, only about three were not useable. The cassarole was magnificent and tasted great and no one got even the slightest bit sick. Success. You can put close to two dozen eggs in the smaller pickle jars, and up to 3 dozen in the bigger jars. Waterglass is relatively cheap too. We bought ours at Lehman's where it is more expensive than you can find elsewhere, but 1 gallon of waterglass is enough to preserve 50 dozen eggs! If you are an egg producer, you only need to store enough eggs to get you through a bad spell - worst case scenario all your layers go offline or are killed somehow and you have to start over. We generally only lose production for a week or two, sometimes a month or so if there is a molt. We keep our chickens producing through the winter with warm water and egg laying ration. The warm water itself got them from producing about 1 or 2 eggs a day to over 8 eggs a day in only 2-3 days. Yesterday Liviu and I went and bought some egg laying crumbles and added this to their food, and with the warmer temps and sunshine we should be back in full production in a week. According to the magazine articles I read, waterglass can be used on store bought eggs as well, but they will not generally last as long since they have been washed. Ideally you will use clean, but unwashed farm eggs for this process. I also read where larded eggs will last as long as waterglass eggs. I have never tried this, but here is the process and if someone out there uses this process, please feel free to comment and/or correct any errors I make: You can either store the eggs completely submerged in lard (which doesn't sound like a good deal to me... too much wasted lard), or you can coat the eggs in lard. To use the lard coating process, you take the clean but unwashed eggs and check them to make sure they are good eggs, with no cracks or holes. Smear lard all around the shell and coat it well, making sure to cover the whole surface. Then you polish the lard off with a towel. Well coat the egg again, and leave just enough lard on the surface to lightly coat it. Place the egg in an egg carton or crate. Do this to all the eggs you want to preserve, then store them in a cool, dark place... LIKE YOUR ROOT CELLAR! According to what I read, these eggs will be good for 7 months to a year or longer. One of the articles recommended using one egg a month after 5 months to make sure that the eggs have not gone bad. You might run into a bad one, so if you find a bad one then try another. If it is good, then keep them in storage. Use them and begin to replace them at 7 months, marking each carton as you replace it with a new dozen. First in is first out in storage. I think it would be a good practice (and one I will aim at over the next year or so) to keep 10 dozen eggs per family member. This sounds like a good number for storage. You can store less (like we do) if you store powdered eggs or eggs preserved in some other fashion.
Glass Storage Units
Going back to the basics, of courses, means lots of food storage. I just mentioned using pickle jars for storing eggs. We can buy large 1 gallon jars of pickles in glass jars from our local market for less than $7. Believe me, the jars are worth $7 and the pickles are then free, and the children love to snack on them. It would be worth it to me to buy the pickles and feed them to the pigs if the children didn't like them so much. We use the jars for milk processing and for egg storage. Get the glass jars and not the plastic ones.
We also use a lot of 1 gallon wine bottles. We here on the land (virtually all the families I think) like to buy Sangria wine in 1 gallon bottles. You can use this wine for cooking or recipes, but we like to drink it - especially on the Sabbath or when we have guests. Sangria is both tasty, and a cultural thing here in Texas. I keep quite a few bottles in storage, and as we drink them we usually fill them with purified water for storage. All of our water is purified through a Big Berky filter, so it is important that we have a lot stored since it takes awhile for the rainwater from our catchwater to be filtered through the Berky. We have an old chest freezer (unplugged) where Danielle stores our daily use water. Part of her daily work is running rain water through the Berky and storing it in glass bottles in the freezer. I also use these bottles for making wine and other beverages. The fellas sometimes use these bottles of water to haul to the worksite for water throughout the day.
Ok, enough for this day. Love to hear your comments, questions, or corrections.
Your servant in Christ Jesus,
Michael
Tracy made tortillas from stored flour. Danielle boiled some rice. I went to the root cellar for:
1 jar of beef broth (from January '07 when we canned some roasts)
1 jar of hamburger meat (from the Longhorn steer we butchered in October)
1 jar of green beans (from this summer's garden)
1 jar of diced tomatoes/peppers
Add all but the green beans (these were a side dish) in a pot over the fire. Add 1 can of stored corn and 1 can of stored, sliced potatoes. I added a couple of cups of water because my broth is pretty thick and because the rice would soak up a lot of the water. Season with garlic salt and/or powder, basil (organic, bought and stored from the Amish), onion powder, seasoned salt. Simmer until hot (less than 30 mins.) Serve with heaps of butter and tortillas, with homegrown green beans on the side. Yum.
Ok, once again I mention the joy of this because it never gets old to me. It is always a great joy and supreme pleasure to enjoy a wonderful, fast, tasty meal from our storage and preparations. By the way, this fed our family of 6 with two full quart jars of soup left over! This is why I harp and preach on preparedness, separatism, Agrarianism, etc. We didn't have to run to the market. We ran to the STORE. The word "store" meant "the storage", where food is stored. Only in a system that began to be corrupted did the "market" (where food and goods were traded) turn into a "store", where the family had no storage (or very little), and the food was produced and sold at the corporate "store" for immediate consumption. The "store" as storehouse is a corruption of God's design. The old-timers said things like "I trade with so-and-so", meaning that they did business with them. The market was a place where you traded. You took in fresh eggs and were given market credit for trade in items you needed. Ideally, you would produce and store your own stuff, but if you needed salt and could not produce it, you took in eggs, cream, cheese, etc. and traded for it. Traders became "buyers", buyers became "shoppers", shoppers became "consumers" - and like we said in a recent forum discussion, the word "consumer" (which is what all Amerikan's are called) means "destroyer". When a thing is consumed it is destroyed. The Bible has much to say about the destroyer, so go look it up.
Eggs-ellent
We have had some discussion recently on BiblicalAgrarianism.com on the storage of whole fresh eggs. I mentioned that we store dozens of eggs in "waterglass" which is sodium silicate, a natural substance used for egg storage for a century. You simply put clean, fresh, unwashed farm eggs in a large jar and pour a mixture of 1 part waterglass to 4 parts water (I think that is correct, but do a search on BA to check it out), and store in a cool dark place. Well, we had some discussion about how that would work, and since we had not at that time eaten any of our waterglass stored eggs, I could only speculate based on what I had read. Some articles said that this made eggs "good" for up to a year, but that they really started to degrade in quality after 5-7 months. This would work out fine, because a working homestead should only lose production (due to a molt or a die off) for this short amount of time. A new chick can be brought into production in under a year. Anyway, due to the cold snap we saw a dramatic drop off for a few days in our egg production. We began to give the chickens heated water in the mornings and some egg layer ration and this brought them back on line in a week or so, but for awhile there we were only getting a few eggs a day. So during the Thanksgiving week we had company and Danielle wanted to make her trademark morning egg casserole but we didn't have enough eggs. She sent me down to the root cellar to bring up a jar of about two dozen waterglassed eggs. *We use pickle jars*
The waterglassed eggs were excellent. Out of the two dozen eggs, only about three were not useable. The cassarole was magnificent and tasted great and no one got even the slightest bit sick. Success. You can put close to two dozen eggs in the smaller pickle jars, and up to 3 dozen in the bigger jars. Waterglass is relatively cheap too. We bought ours at Lehman's where it is more expensive than you can find elsewhere, but 1 gallon of waterglass is enough to preserve 50 dozen eggs! If you are an egg producer, you only need to store enough eggs to get you through a bad spell - worst case scenario all your layers go offline or are killed somehow and you have to start over. We generally only lose production for a week or two, sometimes a month or so if there is a molt. We keep our chickens producing through the winter with warm water and egg laying ration. The warm water itself got them from producing about 1 or 2 eggs a day to over 8 eggs a day in only 2-3 days. Yesterday Liviu and I went and bought some egg laying crumbles and added this to their food, and with the warmer temps and sunshine we should be back in full production in a week. According to the magazine articles I read, waterglass can be used on store bought eggs as well, but they will not generally last as long since they have been washed. Ideally you will use clean, but unwashed farm eggs for this process. I also read where larded eggs will last as long as waterglass eggs. I have never tried this, but here is the process and if someone out there uses this process, please feel free to comment and/or correct any errors I make: You can either store the eggs completely submerged in lard (which doesn't sound like a good deal to me... too much wasted lard), or you can coat the eggs in lard. To use the lard coating process, you take the clean but unwashed eggs and check them to make sure they are good eggs, with no cracks or holes. Smear lard all around the shell and coat it well, making sure to cover the whole surface. Then you polish the lard off with a towel. Well coat the egg again, and leave just enough lard on the surface to lightly coat it. Place the egg in an egg carton or crate. Do this to all the eggs you want to preserve, then store them in a cool, dark place... LIKE YOUR ROOT CELLAR! According to what I read, these eggs will be good for 7 months to a year or longer. One of the articles recommended using one egg a month after 5 months to make sure that the eggs have not gone bad. You might run into a bad one, so if you find a bad one then try another. If it is good, then keep them in storage. Use them and begin to replace them at 7 months, marking each carton as you replace it with a new dozen. First in is first out in storage. I think it would be a good practice (and one I will aim at over the next year or so) to keep 10 dozen eggs per family member. This sounds like a good number for storage. You can store less (like we do) if you store powdered eggs or eggs preserved in some other fashion.
Glass Storage Units
Going back to the basics, of courses, means lots of food storage. I just mentioned using pickle jars for storing eggs. We can buy large 1 gallon jars of pickles in glass jars from our local market for less than $7. Believe me, the jars are worth $7 and the pickles are then free, and the children love to snack on them. It would be worth it to me to buy the pickles and feed them to the pigs if the children didn't like them so much. We use the jars for milk processing and for egg storage. Get the glass jars and not the plastic ones.
We also use a lot of 1 gallon wine bottles. We here on the land (virtually all the families I think) like to buy Sangria wine in 1 gallon bottles. You can use this wine for cooking or recipes, but we like to drink it - especially on the Sabbath or when we have guests. Sangria is both tasty, and a cultural thing here in Texas. I keep quite a few bottles in storage, and as we drink them we usually fill them with purified water for storage. All of our water is purified through a Big Berky filter, so it is important that we have a lot stored since it takes awhile for the rainwater from our catchwater to be filtered through the Berky. We have an old chest freezer (unplugged) where Danielle stores our daily use water. Part of her daily work is running rain water through the Berky and storing it in glass bottles in the freezer. I also use these bottles for making wine and other beverages. The fellas sometimes use these bottles of water to haul to the worksite for water throughout the day.
Ok, enough for this day. Love to hear your comments, questions, or corrections.
Your servant in Christ Jesus,
Michael
posted by Michael Bunker at 11/28/2007 07:45:00 AM
1 Comments:
It is truly a blessing to prepare meals for the family from the fruits of your own farm.
We noticed the wine bottles when we were there, and have started doing the same ourselves. We used to buy boxed wine, now it's strictly gallon bottles.
Thanks!
Judy
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