The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon October 16th, 2009

Thanks, btw, to everyone who sent good wishes to me for my lousy mood yesterday – I really appreciate you all letting me use my blog as therapy!  I’m a lot happier this morning, and am actually going to go indulge in a little necessary retail therapy – it is a sale day at Goodwill and I’m off to hunt for a mid-weight jacket for Simon and a couple more sweaters for Eric, who doesn’t actually believe that there’s any reason he can’t teach in ripped jeans and a sweater with holes in the armpits, even if I do .

On to today’s actual topic.  I’ve done Friday Food Storage Quickies several times intermittently, but I’d really like to get more serious about it.  My goal is for one year to post a shopping guide every week, to help people add a little to their food storage.  I think it is really helpful to give some people a specific task, so I’m going to focus on two foods and one preparedness item/practice, and my goal is to actually keep up with it.  I think this breaks things down and reminds us all (me too!) to make food storage and preparedness a part of our regular day-to-day stuff.

I would also, btw, encourage you while you are out shopping, and if you can, to pick up a few items for your local food pantry – put that in your budget as well.  As we all know, our local food security infrastructure is pretty strained these days, and they can use all the help they get.  I’ll include a suggested item for the food pantry as well.

Ok, for this week, we’re going to add food I’ve suggested in the past, but are still a great starting point – popcorn and potatoes! 

Why these two?  Well, almost everyone will eat both foods – even if your kids or spouse thinks that food storage is crazy, they’ll almost certainly eat popcorn.  Popcorn can be popped or it can be ground into flour.  It makes a good snack, or you can eat it for breakfast like cereal.  It is a whole grain, but also a delicious treat.  Remember, you don’t want the microwaved or butter flavored stuff, you want regular popcorn.  Local from a farmer who grows their own is best, of course, but in bulk from the coop or even a bag from the supermarket still gets you ahead.  How much?  What you can afford – it keeps a long time.

Why potatoes?  Because most people pretty much eat them, because they are simple and delicious.  If you have even a reasonably cool, dark spot to put them in (cooler on the porch, basement stairs, closet in a room that runs cool, under a couple of bales of straw in the garage…) they will last you most of the winter.  They are cheap and plentiful now – the carrot barn near me is selling them 50lbs for $14, and while you may not get that, you should get a good deal.  How much?  As much as you think you’ll eat in a few months.  Roast them, bake them, mash them, scallop them, cover them in greens and make salsa, cheese sauce or chili to go on top and you’ve got dinner. 

For the food pantry, let’s pick up some peanut butter – it is one of the highest demand foods out there, and nutritionally dense – and kids home alone after school can make themselves a sandwich.  And if you’ve got a little extra money, pick up a container of infant formula as well and donate it. Yes, I know it would be better if women could breastfeed, but the reality is that that’s often long-since decided, and what happens otherwise is that poor women give their infants cow’s milk or other inappropriate, but cheaper food rather than pricey formula. 

Finally, a preparedness item – let’s start easily, with *matches*!  You need these to light your candles, gas stove, wood stove or sterno can when the power goes out.  They go in your evacuation kit.  They are great for building a fire outside on these cold, starlit nights.  They keep, as long as you keep them dry.  So pick up a couple of boxes today and add them to your kit.

Ok, more next week!

Sharon

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Sharon May 15th, 2009

I’ve finally got internet service back – apologies to anyone who tried to reach me in the last few days and failed.  I’m back now. 

In good new _A Nation of Farmers_ is officially out.  We got a kick-ass review from Library Journal, recommended by Mother Earth News, and a lot of good early publicity.  This is exciting stuff!  If you’d like a copy, you can order it through Aaron here.  Or get it at your local bookstore.  Or for that matter, your local library!

Also, I do still have a couple of spots left in my food storage class.  The class begins this coming Tuesday and runs for six weeks.  The class is run entirely online, and is asynchronous (ie, you don’t have to be online at any particular time),  Here’s the syllabus and class information. The goal is to help people build up a reserve of food, and also to get people ready for harvest season this year.   Cost of the class is $150. 

I don’t take a lot of speaking engagements in May and June – too much to do on the farm.  But I did want to let people know that come July, I’ll be speaking at the Pax Christi conference in Chicago - Pax Christi is the national Catholic Peace organization, and I’m tremendously honored that they asked me.  I believe that the mobilization of existing religious groups will be absolutely necessary to facing the future, and I hope I’ll meet some of you there.

Ok, on to the Friday Food Storage Quickie.  As you know, the idea is to break down the project of storing food and do a little at a time.  This week, we’re going to concentrate on a couple of things.  Recently, we’ve added popcorn, peanut butter, rice and beans/tofu to our food storage, and dealt with lighting and fire safety. 

Now that diet is a little limited, isn’t it.  So let’s add some fruit and vegetables – no point is making sure you have food, only to suffer fatal constipation .  So this week, we’re going to add dried fruit and a canned vegetable to our list in as large a quantity as you can afford/manage.

Why dried fruit?  Well, dried fruit will save you from aforementioned death by irregularity , but it will also make you a lot happier – it is sweet, most people like at least some kind of fruit, it gives you treats to offer children, and it is nutritionally dense. 

The cheapest options are raisins, and they aren’t bad.  Prunes are better (don’t be prejudiced against them), and almost as inexpensive.  Dried apricots, mango, cranberries, blueberries, etc… are much pricier but IMHO, tastier.  Get what your family likes, and what you can afford – or dry what you’ve got in abundance at your place.  Don’t get anything with tons of added sugar – you want nutrients, not a sugar high here. Cranberries and blueberries have the most nutritional value of all your options, generally.  You can use the dried fruit in breads and muffins, throw it into oatmeal and rice pudding, or just eat it plain.

On to vegetables.  This is a little harder, since most of us may not eat a lot of canned vegetables.  We’ve been told that they aren’t as nutrious as fresh ones, and if you are eating fresh from your garden, this is undoubtably true.  If you are eating conventional supermarket produce, picked underripe a week ago, waxed, sprayed, and shipped for five days, before sitting the supermarket for several more, that may not be true, actually. 

While sprouts are a good source of fresh veggies and should also be part of your storage (more about this next time), few people actually eat sprouts in huge quantities.  So you will want to add some preserved vegetables to your list – you can can your own, or buy supermarket ones, or dehydrate greens. Right now, there’s tons of nettle, dandelion and other greens out there to be preserved. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume you are going to buy supermarket veggies for whatever reason.

My recommendations are two things.  First, canned mustard or turnip greens.  These are fairly innocuous, and the liquid they are canned in is extremely nutritious – it will have most of the vitamins. Thus, you can add it to soup stock, or even mix it in small quantities into juice or tang or whatever.  The greens are finely chopped and inoffensive (unfortunately, that’s the best you can say for them, but this puts them well ahead of most canned vegetables), and can easily be mixed into rice and beans or other dishes. 

Second, I’d recommend canned pumpkin or sweet potatoes.  This is highly nutritious, delicious and dense – you can add it to rice or other grains and with an egg make fritters, you can add it to breads to add moisture and sweetness, make desserts with it, including delicious pancakes and puddings.  High in vitamin A, this, combined with the greens, will make sure your diet is reasonably nutrious.  Again, you’ll get  better flavor and nutrition if you grow your own and preserve them by root cellaring or home canning or dehydrating, but the supermarket options are pretty tolerable if you are just getting started.

As for our non-food item, this week you are going to pick up multi-vitamins.  You can endure all sorts of diets if you have a basic multivitamin to cover you from major deficiencies.  Don’t just get them for the kids – get them for adults too.  If you are pregnant or nursing, pick up an extra package of prenatals.  If you have children, get an age appropriate vitamin.  If you rely on other vitamins, now is a good time to pick up and extra package if you can afford it as well.

 Cheers,

 Sharon

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Sharon April 24th, 2009

Ok, this week we’re going to add some more stuff to our pantries – I find that my food storage gets down to its lowest ebb around now.  The fall’s meat is being finished up, the vegetables are down to the ones no one is excited about.  The greengage, raspberry and peach jams are all gone, leaving rhubarb and one lonely jar of strawberry.  The potatoes have sprouted and gone soft, so have the onions, and there’s still not much out there in the garden.  And with all the spring stuff to do, it can be hard to think about shopping.  So it isn’t a bad idea for me to remedy some deficiencies.   For those of you just starting to think about food storage, picking up a little extra each week at your regular grocery shopping is a good way to get started.

Of course, you’ll get much better deals and better food if you can afford to buy in bulk, perhaps from a local coop, direct from farmers, or through a buying club, but food storage isn’t just for people with easy access to these things, or with enough money to buy 50lbs of this and big sacks of that.  It is something that everyone needs, that can be built up incrementally.

Don’t forget, if you so desire, to pick up a little extra for the food pantry – or to make a donation if you can.  Remember, food pantries are really strapped right now.

Ok, this week we’re going to buy rice.  Why?  Because nearly everyone can eat rice, you don’t need any fancy equipment to prepare it – just a pot, and you could use an old tomato can or a soup bowl (in the microwave)  if you had to.  Nearly everyone likes rice in some form, too.  And some rice keeps a very long time.

Now this is where rice gets tricky.  At most stores, you can buy two forms of rice, brown and white (I am leaving out instant or converted rice, which isn’t good for you and which no one really needs – you can make regular rice even if all the cooking facilities you have is a microwave).  Now most people know that brown rice is the healthier one, and if they imagine having to live on their food storage, they want a lot of it.

The problem is that brown rice goes rancid very quickly – in a matter of months at room temperature.  So if you buy more brown rice than you can eat in six months to a year, you are likely to have rancid rice.  Some percentage of the population will be able to taste that it is rancid, but a lot of people can’t taste rancid oils in grains, and they don’t realize it is – and rancid oils are not good for you (if I had nothing else, I’d eat rancid brown rice, but I don’t recommend it otherwise).

The reason for this is that brown rice is not, as most of us imagine, whole rice.  When rice is harvested, it has a hull on it.  The hull is not very digestible, and most people don’t have a way of removing the hull at home, so it is removed in rice processing.  When just the hull, but not the germ is removed, you get brown rice.  When the germ is removed as well, you get white.  Of course, the germ is very good for you, but it also contains oils that are oxidized in contact with air, so like ground whole wheat flour or cornmeal, it doesn’t last very long.  White rice lasts 30 years.

That means that if you are going to buy more than six months worth of rice, you should probably buy white rice or some whole grain, like barley, to be cooked and eaten like rice.  This is the bad news.  The good is that six months of rice is a lot, and that almost everyone can eat rice – in fact, it may actually be impossible to have a true allergy to rice.  So even if white rice isn’t the most nutritious food, it can be useful to have a supply of it for emergencies – it is up to you. 

The second thing we’re going to buy (which is way less complicated) is some kind of non- animal, long lasting protein.  This could mean dry beans (the longest storage life, and better tasting when you cook them yourself than canned beans), it could mean lentils or dried peas, canned beans (I don’t really recommend canned baked beans, but you could, if you like them), soymilk or shelf-stable tofu (Mori-Nu is the most readily available brand).  Personally, I think all food storage programs should probably have a variety of these – at least several kinds of legumes – beans, lentils, split peas, cowpeas.  The range of flavors and textures is quite dramatic.  I also think some shelf-stable tofu is really nice to have for stir fries and other treats – I can’t make drunken noodles without it. 

Why would you buy beans and tofu if you eat meat?  Well, there are a number of good reasons.  First if you buy dried beans, you will have the cheapest form of dense protein you can buy.  Second, lots of meat eaters like tofu, beans *and* meat – it isn’t an either or.  Diversity is always good.  Third, the reality of the future is that we all need to eat less meat than we do now.  Plus, even if you aren’t a vegetarian, you may want to invite one to dinner.  Most of all, these are good foods – if you think tofu and beans don’t taste good, you just haven’t learned to cook them yet.

Finally, in our non-food section, we’re going to check out your lighting situation.  Ok, right now – do you know where all your flashlights are?  Can you find them in the dark?  Do you have at least two for everyone in the household, in case one breaks?  Do you have rechargeable batteries, and a solar charger?  Flashlights that can be powered without batteries?  Do you have a headlamp for outdoor chores or two handed projects at night?  An LED nightlight for children who are scared of the dark?  LED night lighting for elders vulnerable to injury?  What about candles or oil lamps?  Do you have those?  Do you have a safe place to hang/put them, away from pets, children and fire hazards (I like wall sconces and hanging lanterns, personally).  Do you know how to clean and maintain your oil lamps?  Do you have matches or lighters, and lamp oil?  And again, can you find what you need in a low light situation, by flashlight?  Even if you can’t get the whole thing put together this week, at least consider picking up some extra matches, checking flashlight locations and batteries, and gradually adding to your list.

Cheers,

 Sharon

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Sharon April 17th, 2009

Yet another thing I’ve been neglecting – my weekly food storage suggestions.  And I’ve wanted to restart these because of something really cool that struck me recently, about how I might use this project not only to help people build up their pantries, but also to enrich local food pantries that are desperately in need.  For those new to this, my “Friday Food Storage Quickie” is an attempt to break down food strorage into a manageable project, reminding you to pick up a couple of items each week to build your stores.

I’m stealing a new idea from my mother’s church.  Every week, they call for donations to the food pantry, and what they found was that donations were fairly inconsistent from week to week.  But when they changed their call from “please bring canned goods” to “this week we are going to buy peanut butter (or cereal or soup or whatever) and donate it” nearly everyone remembered to contribute.  While generalities didn’t stick, it was really easy for people to remember to bring a few jars of peanut butter.

So I thought I’d try this here – to make at least one of the items that I encourage you to get something that is a good donation to your local food pantry.  And for those who are not yet struggling, I would encourage you to pick up a couple for your family – and one or two to donate.  As we all know, food pantries are really feeling the pinch, with dramatically increasing need and lower donations, and these are our neighbors we’re feeding.  Obviously, if you are already giving your limit, you shouldn’t feel any pressure – but if, like me, you aren’t always good about consistent donations, maybe this will help a little, and I’m going to try to post one every Friday.

 One note – a lot of the foods that food pantries need most are not extremely healthy foods, or ones that I generally recommend as major parts of food storage.  The reason is that many lower income families are working multiple jobs, some have no cooking or refrigeration facilities, for example if they are living in subsidized motels, or the person doing the cooking is extremely disabled or very young.  It may well be that the best they can do is open a tuna can or heat up canned soup.  And while I’d like to see people eating higher quality food, if you can’t give it away because people can’t or won’t eat it, those people won’t be fed.  So there’s a balance to be found here, but the priority should be on making sure families don’t go hungry.

 So this week, we’re going to concentrate on two items.  The first one is one we’ve done before, but that bears repeating – popcorn.

Why?  Because popcorn is the one whole grain that even people who won’t eat whole grains will usually eat.  It is a snack food, which makes it valuable if you ever have to produce 3 meals plus snacks from scratch – it is quick, easy and delicious.  You can use it as breakfast cereal, you can grind it for cornmeal. 

You do not want microwave popcorn for this, but the regular stuff, as local as you can find.  If you want to donate some, pick up the microwave kind, though, since most people don’t know how to use regular popcorn anymore, sadly.  I’d skip the artificial-butter-flavored-grease, though. 

The second thing we’re going to buy this week is peanut butter.  Why?  It is good, it is high in protein, it is high in fat (this is actually an advantage in food storage, if not in daily life), most people without allergies will eat it happily, and it makes them happy – like popcorn it is a taste of normalcy.  Moreover, it is your best friend in a crisis – the peanut butter sandwich is a low time, low energy, benign survival food.

 If you have a manual grinder, the easiest way to get the best tasting and freshest peanut butter is to store whole peanuts.  Otherwise, look for shelf-stable peanut butters without transfats in them – Skippy has a brand.  You can keep using natural peanut butter for daily use, but having some emergency backup is good.

If you are allergic to peanuts, and can afford/eat other nut butters, those are good too.  If you are not, as they say “from peanut butter” and like marmite or something like it better, more power to you.

If you are donating the food pantry, you probably want regular old shelf-stable peanut butter, but if you can, don’t get one with trans-fats.   It will be gratefully received. 

In addition to stocking up each week on a couple of food items, I also try and remind people of one “preparedness” item or project they might not be up to date on.  This week’s reminder is about fire safety equipment.  First of all – batteries for your smoke detectors (and carbon monoxide detectors if necessary) are a good thing to store. Real Goods www.realgoods.com sells a 10 year smoke detector battery, but some extra backups are extremely valuable.  You do not want to lose power and lose your smoke detectors. 

 Also, if you don’t have an ABC fire extinguisher, you need one.  If you have one, and have never read the manual, and don’t know how to use it, do it today.  Remember, in a power outage or extended crisis, you may be using candles, kerosene lamps, oil stoves, wood heat or other less familiar things that increase your risk of fire. 

Finally, you need a fire safety plan.  Have you practiced getting out of your house?  Taught the kids?  Do you have an escape ladder on the second or third floor, if necessary?  Do you have a family meet up plan?  One of the single most likely-to-happen crises is that you have a fire.  Make sure you also have a plan for it, and that everyone is familiar with it.

Sharon

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Sharon December 19th, 2008

Ok, the first thing we’re going to do this week is buy some rice.  Why, you ask?  Because rice has the function of being hypo-allergenic – according to the International Rice Research Institute, it is not possible to have a true allergy to rice – although there are a very few people who have rice intolerances.  But generally speaking, if you store rice in your food storage, everyone will be able to eat it.  This is especially important if you imagine having babies, or ill people – you want easy to digest, and there’s nothing easier to digest than rice. 

A large chunk of the world’s population relies on rice as a staple food, and rice recipes have evolved all over the world – if there’s one thing you can be sure of it is that peasant rice based-cuisines are pretty well developed. 

Now the first and most important thing that I can say is that you have to understand that Brown Rice *IS NOT* actually a whole grain.  You see, when rice comes from the plant, it has a fairly heavy, not real digestible hull on it.  Brown rice is rice with the hull removed, exposing the germ to air.  And when the germs of grains are exposed to air, they oxidize.  So while whole wheat will keep nearly forever, brown rice has a very short lifespan – under a year. 

 Now whenever I say this people note that they’ve eaten brown rice that they’ve stored for several years, maybe it tasted a little stale, but it was fine.  But the problem is that what happens to brown rice isn’t that it gets stale – the oils in the grain go rancid.  And rancid oils are link to various cancers, particularly stomach cancer.  Not to mention that your body won’t get much nutritional value from a food with rancid oil in it, and it can upset stomachs as well. 

People’s ability to taste rancidity varies quite a bit – some people can’t taste it at all, some people can’t taste it until the grain is extremely rancid.  It is very hard to know objectively how good your tasting skills are.  So it is better to be safe than sorry on this subject, and I recommend storing no more than 6 months of brown rice at a time – you could probably go a little longer if you were buying right after the harvest, from an asian grocery store with a quick turnover, but 6 months is probably safest. 

That means if  you want to store more rice than you will eat in six months, you need to store white rice (there is actually a way to store unhulled rice, but I’ll get back into that some other time, or you can look through my old posts on storing grain – this is a quickie, and the answer is complex). This is unfortunate, because white grains are not as tasty or nutritious as whole grains.  That said, however, if you are storing a variety of grains and foods, some white rice will not be a problem.  White rice is just about the only white food my family does store.

Americans tend to see rice pretty much as rice, while in the rest of the world, people enjoy a huge range of flavors, scents and textures in their rice.  My suggestion is that if you don’t live near a place where rice is grown, and must rely on distant rice, you might try an Asian grocer, where a huge variety of rices, all smelling and tasting different, and many with different textures are available, and most will be available in 25lb bags (a Vietnamese friend of mine observes that this is not because his family stores food, but because his family can go through a 25lb bag of rice like lightning – make it the base of every meal, and you’ll see how fast it disappears).

 Generally speaking, typical American rice is long grain rice.  To me, supermarket long grain tastes extremely bland, but it has the characteristic of seperateness and dryness that many Americans like.  Jasmine and basmati rice are both scented rices that improve considerably over basic long grain.  Short grain rices like Arborio or Sushi have a lot of starch and produce a different texture when cooked – they are good for making rice balls or creamy textures.  Sticky rice is something entirely else, a delicious, almost sweet rice with a fascinating texture – it is usually cooked by steaming and we adore it. 

Ok, rice is a fairly bland food – whatever you eat with it, you’ll want to be fairly highly seasoned to provide contrast.  And highly seasoned means a good supply of spices.  If you’ve been contaminated by the idea that spices are doled out mostly by the pinch or 1/8 teaspoon, you may not think you need a lot of spices.  But to me, the secret of good  cooking is seasoning well – and with a fairly liberal hand.  I have no idea why most recipes are so parsimonious with the ingredients that give flavor.

You can probably grow most of your own herbs almost everywhere – either keep some fresh inside or dry your own.  But unless you live in a tropical climate suited to it, you’ll probably need to buy imported spices.  This is not a problem, as long as you can buy fair traded spices whenever possible.  Because spices are dry and even people who cook like I do use only comparatively small quantities, spices are a superb trade item, and a great way for the Global South to connect with the Global North. 

Whole spices keep much longer than ground ones – if you plan to store for a long time, you probably want to grind your own.  You can buy spice grinders, use a mortar and pestle, or, assuming you’ve got power, a small coffee grinder (don’t grind your coffee in it, unless you want it to taste strongly of whatever spice you ground last).  We buy nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, tumeric, ginger and a host of others as whole spices and grind them at need.  You can usually get good deals on bulk whole spices at whole foods and various internet sites.  Ground spices are convenient, but don’t last much longer than a year – and they last best if kept tightly sealed, cool and away from light and the stove.  Me, I’m just not doing without cinnamon sticks for my cinnamon-hot chocolate or vindaloo.

 Finally, I’ve mentioned lighting before, but I think the recent ice storm may be a good reason to remind people that you need a lot of flashlights, solar lanterns or oil lamps to survive an extended power outage.  Now is the time to stock up.

And if you are stocking up, and you don’t mind spending a little extra for a good cause, this is pretty wonderful https://www.bogolight.com/Articles.asp?ID=136

- spend $49 for a heavy duty solar powered light, and they will not only send one to you, but send one to a poor village in Africa, or a charitable program that needs basic lighting.  These are large enough and sturdy enough to light public areas - so they’ll work for your neighborhood blackout barbecue – and to help areas that have minimal lighting get enough.  I am definitely going to be acquiring one!   They allow you to choose between many areas of the world and charitable programs to make your donation. 

Cheers,

 Sharon

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