Hi Everyone,
NOTES:
- TEST TIME I saw this PREPAREDNESS TEST and thought it offered some things to think about.
- Coffee Filters – because I don’t drink coffee, I never thought I would need coffee filters. But when I started using sourdough yeast, I began to keep a pack in my kitchen drawer. I use them on the yeast because it allows air in but keeps the bugs out. Here is a list of ways you can use coffee filters: everything from sprouting seeds to removing fingernail polish. COFFEE FILTER USES
GARDEN NOTES:
Feel free to skip this part if you are NOT a gardener.
- My garden is nearly all planted. It seems like every year I end up rotating where plants go in the yard, trying to find the “sweet spot” where the plants really like to be. So far, the only things that REALLY produce every year are the blackberry plants. I’ve moved the blueberry pots to the other side of the yard where they can get more sun. I’ve got some tomatoes growing in full sun and some on the north side of the house. When it’s super hot, we have to cover everything with shade cloths anyway. I just ordered some: Vensovo 30% Sunblock Shade Cloth Net Black Resistant – 8×20 Ft Garden Shade Mesh Tarp for Plant Cover, Greenhouse, Chicken Coop, Tomatoes, Plants: Patio, Lawn & Garden. Every year I promise I will be better about patrolling for bugs! If you see one, get on it! If you let it go, those bugs will overtake everything.
- This year, I’m going to harvest my own lettuce seeds. I harvested tomato seeds and pepper seeds from last year but wasn’t sure how to do lettuce. Well…… you start by planting lettuce in a 5-gallon container and DON’T PICK OFF THE LEAVES!. Let it pour all its energy into the plant and seeds. Just let it grow. After 3 months or so (depending on the heat) it will begin to stretch up (bolt). Then it will send out shoots and flowers. Let it go. I got my lettuce transplanted this week, so my journey has begun. Stay tuned.
The best gardening thing I ever did was to buy a “Leafy Greens” course. Since that time, I have had a continual lettuce garden going. Here is today’s harvest. The milk is for comparison so you can see I’ve used my LARGEST bowl for the lettuce. I get this much lettuce EVERY week. I give lots away and have a friend who buys a big bag every 2-3 weeks.
The best gardening thing I ever did was to buy a “Leafy Greens” course. Since that time, I have had a continual lettuce garden going. Here is today’s harvest. The milk is for comparison so you can see I’ve used my LARGEST bowl for the lettuce. I get this much lettuce EVERY week. I give lots away and have a friend who buys a big bag every 2-3 weeks.I grow this lettuce in “under-the-bed” Sterlite containers that you get at Walmart. They are 5 inches deep and maybe 12 X 18 or something like that? Anyway, the problem is that after they sit in the sun and weather for a year, they do this:
They literally break up and fall apart.
So, my husband and I were brainstorming what we could do to protect the plastic. I found some old felt and covered the plastic tub.
You can see that we drilled holes in the plastic for drainage, and the water just goes right through the felt. Then I filled the tub with dirt and transplanted all the little lettuce plants.
Whenever you transplant anything, you should:
- Water immediately. The roots will start to die after about 15 minutes when they are exposed to air. Watering removes the air pockets around the roots.
- Cover with a shade cloth. Here is my new tub:
I stuck the skewers in there to keep it from blowing away in the wind we’ve been having. Three days in the shade will allow the roots to settle in and give the plants a fighting chance. You can see the tub next to 
this one has baby sprouts coming up. The secret to ALWAYS having lettuce is to rotate the tubs. I have 8 tubs. Every three weeks, I pull out the oldest lettuce and replant new. I haven’t bought lettuce for about 2 1/2 years. Eating different colors gives you different nutrients. I LOVE knowing I have something fresh to eat EVERY day!!!
During the winter, the tubs sit out on the patio table in the middle of the backyard with the sun all day. In the hot summer, I move them to the side of the house where they are sheltered from the hot afternoon sun. That’s the nice thing about tubs, they can be moved!!!
THIS WEEK’S PURCHASE: pasta
I’ve read that in some places, pasta is already in short supply. Part of the reason is that there is a developing shortage of eggs (because of so many flocks being culled from the flu). At MY grocery store last week, there was
plenty of pasta, even though the price has gone up about 10%. Just take $20 and get 15-18 pounds of pasta (whatever you eat the most). Date it and then find a way to store it. I always vacuum seal mine because well….. I have a vacuum sealer, and pasta tends to get pantry moths if I don’t. You can seal it in mylar bags, or buckets with tight lids. If it’s small pasta like small macaroni or shells, you could even put it in empty, clean 2-liter bottles.
You can MAKE YOUR OWN pasta. I’ve watched a couple of videos on this, and I like this one the best. How to Make the SIMPLEST Homemade Pasta – YouTube. She seems pretty down-to-earth like I would do it. Plus, she makes me feel like this is something I COULD do!
* In my effort to better rotate my pasta, I opened a package of spaghetti last week that I had vacuum-sealed in 2016. Perfectly fine.
MISC PURCHASE: dishwashing detergent
I go through about one bottle of liquid dish detergent a month, even WITH a dishwasher. I try to keep 5-6 on hand. I have a spot in the garage where I can store extra dish detergent, plastic wrap, trash bags, and stuff like that. When you fill the sink with soapy water, you DON’T need a big squirt of detergent. Really. AND if you’re doing just a pan or bowl, you only need one or two drops. When I taught kindergarten, and we were teaching the kids to use the glue, we would say, “Dot, dot, not a lot.” Just think that as you use the detergent.
FOOD STORAGE RECIPES
Homemade pesto sauce
This comes from SOS Foundation Pesto
I like this recipe because they suggest variations you might want to try–like adding spinach, arugula, kale, walnuts, cashews, or even parmesan cheese. Right now my basil plants are looking good.
2 1/2 c. fresh basil – rinse and remove stems
1/3 c. parmesan cheese
1/4 c. olive oil
1-2 cloves of garlic, minced
Put everything in a food processor. Blend while slowly pouring in the olive oil. This should be enough for 1/2 lb. of pasta (about 4 servings). You could add shrimp or chicken to make a full dinner.
Baked Chicken and Spaghetti
from “New Ideas for Cooking with Basic Food Storage” (No author listed. Just a pdf I picked up along the way.)
I like this recipe because everything can be shelf-stable.
1 onion chopped – or use dehydrated onions
2 TB shortening or butter – Sauté onion in shortening or butter
1 can of tomatoes (no size indicated, nor whether to use diced or crushed?)
2 TB sugar
dash of pepper
Add and heat to boiling.
2 c. diced cooked chicken (which for me is a pint jar of canned chicken)
10 oz. cooked and drained spaghetti (doesn’t this seem like an odd amount to you???)
Toss chicken and noodles with tomato sauce. Pour into greased baking dish and sprinkle with
1/2 grated cheese (your favorite kind I assume – maybe a little Parmesan and a little mozzarella?)
Bake 375˚ for 20 minutes.
Pasta Salad
I REALLY like this one because you can use all shelf-stable ingredients. Mix and match or add and subtract. The recipe is “old” and I have no idea where it came from or if it’s even the same recipe I started with. I’ve made it so often that it’s probably been changed somewhere along the way.
1 package spiral macaroni (I like to use the 3-colored type)
Cook and drain. Rinse in cold water.
1 can corn, drained
1 can of black-eyed peas, rinsed and drained
1 can of peas, drained (I like to use the baby peas)
3 diced Roma tomatoes (OR you can use 1 can of diced tomatoes)
3 chopped green onions (or use dehydrated onions if needed)
( diced bell peppers, chopped celery, etc. optional)
DRESSING
I use Newman’s Oil and Vinegar Dressing (about 1/2 c.)
1-2 TB sugar
big squirt of lime juice
1/2 tsp Accent – Yes, I use Accent. All the hype a few years ago was totally made up by a competitor.
Shrimp Scampi and Angel Hair Pasta
This light meal is perfect for a summer day. Not a lot of fuss, and so easy. I realize that shrimp is not a food storage ingredient. So consider it a good way to rotate your pasta.
2 TB butter
2 TB olive oil
1/2 c. chopped shallot – Sauté shallot in oil mix
zest of 1/2 lemon – add
baby shrimp (I like to buy raw shrimp, no shell, no tail. It’s only about $5-6 at Winco for 1 pound. I pour it into a bowl and fill the bowl with really hot water just from the tap. Let it sit while you are cooking the onion and it will thaw perfectly.)
Heat with the shallot in the saucepan.
2 handfuls of grape tomatoes (I usually cut them in 1/2)
Add about 1/4 c. chicken broth or white wine (yes…. sometimes I cook with white wine.) Let it simmer to cook off the alcohol and infuse all the flavors.
Cook the pasta, drain and add to the skillet.
Season with chives, salt, and pepper.
Keep working on your storage…Please!!!
Marti
Whether it’s beef, pork, chicken, or fish, we turn to these resources as our primary source of protein and also as a source of fat. Our bodies need both proteins and fat to survive. Though other sources are available, your average modern grocery store meat department isn’t likely to carry elk, moose, venison, alligator, goat, rabbit, quail, or any of the other hundreds of different meats available. The American palate has essentially narrowed in on just the four: beef, pork, chicken, and fish. Though we could examine the failings of any of those four, let’s focus on the one most prominently in the headlines today–chicken.
With the growing avian flu problem, panic buying, and inflation, you will likely see a rise in the price of eggs, if not scarcity in your area. Scarcity stokes more panic buying and exacerbates the existing problem or creates a whole new one. Again, raising your own hens isn’t possible for the average American. If it is an option for you, returning to a wartime posture of Hens for Uncle Sam, like many of our ancestors did, is probably your best option. Just two hens will keep a family in eggs. 
In its weekly report, USDA noted that ongoing labor and freight shortages would continue to limit the butter supply in 2022. Overall butter production declined 2.8% year to date, and prices have skyrocketed 40% this year. The process to get butter to your table is complicated, but it starts with a healthy cow somewhere eating nutritious feed. If feed grain is too costly, milk production drops, trucks stop running, grids go down, or any of the processes become muddled, stalled, or fail, you aren’t likely to pull out your butter churn, milk your cow, and make your own. It’s not likely that anyone within a hundred miles of you is ready to simply start making their own. It’s a highly commercial process, and butter only has about three months of shelf life. Still, as much of a luxury that butter is, it’s a critical source of healthy fats. There are two easy solutions to keep you in butter after SHTF. One or all of these solutions will keep you in this precious yellow fat.
Several countries worldwide are currently or will soon face a wheat shortage and, therefore, a flour shortage. The Russo-Ukrainian war isn’t helping. China hoarding grain isn’t helping. Crop failures aren’t helping. Wheat shortages aren’t new, either. The Great Wheat Shortage of 1797 forced many to turn to potato breads to extend their supply. I have a video on pulling yeast from the air using a potato. That might be advantageous to watch right now, too. That 1797 shortage was a result of poor harvests. Today’s problems facing the wheat industry range from war to fertilizer to corporate farming to seeds to supply chains. They are far more fragile and far more intricately woven. If the system breaks now, it isn’t likely your neighbor is growing some wheat you can help harvest for a share.
When most of your asparagus comes on a boat from Peru or Chile, you know there is a problem. It has assuredly been grown somewhere else when it’s off-season, but you are still eating whatever fruit and vegetable you crave. If you lived in the fifties in New England, you probably didn’t get much citrus or tomatoes in the off-season, but you had a steady supply of apples, pears, and cherries. If you lived in the southwest United States, juicy blackberries or raspberries were a treat. Now, getting them is a quick trip to your local grocery store. Supply chains are great to be able to provide us with a cornucopia of fresh vegetables and fruit year-round, but you can’t expect that to last uninterrupted forever. Supply shortages aren’t solely based on bad seasonal storms or droughts anymore. 
Dehydration is the oldest and most natural form of food preservation in the world. At some point, some humans left vegetables or meat on a hot rock in the hot sun, and all the moisture evaporated out of it. It became as hard as a rock, probably. Maybe it was smashed between two stones to make smaller pieces. At some point, early humans realized rehydration was possible. They probably made this discovery in their mouths. Then the dried pieces may have been thrown in water, and the dehydrated were rehydrated. They may have also noticed that the harder, dry version of foods was less susceptible to insects and critters and didn’t spoil or go rancid as quickly. Dehydration wasn’t invented in modern times despite what late-night infomercials might want you to believe. It was discovered around the same time man started eating.
Dehydration of food is the gentle application of heat to reduce the moisture content of food. This allows it to last much longer. Dehydrating food reduces the moisture content to between 5 and 20%. At that level, the bacterium that causes food to decay can’t move around or propagate effectively. It either dies or goes dormant. It doesn’t entirely die, and dehydrated food still has a usable shelf-life and is susceptible to rehydration by moisture in the air. However, the process of decay is slowed to a crawl through the use of dehydration. Dehydration is the fastest, simplest, and least expensive way to preserve food. If you have a productive garden or need to set food aside to survive a winter, you need to know the basics of dehydration which I will cover here. The simple fact is that you can’t eat an entire harvest of any plant before it goes bad. Preserving food is the key to having food in the future.
The water molecules are released when you dehydrate, and the remaining cells tighten up. This usually results in flavors intensifying. It can also result in pesticides concentrating. It can result in any bacteria or yeast on the surface not dying off entirely but going dormant. This is why the first rule of dehydration is proper food handling. If you haven’t seen the plant growing and don’t know how it was tended, you absolutely have to wash your food. 
The oldest method of dehydration is solar air drying. As this requires outdoor exposure to the sun, protecting the food from insects and critters is essential. This is usually accomplished with a vented cover or drying the food between screens. This method works the fastest with leafy plants and will take longer, perhaps more than a day, for fruits, vegetables, and meats. The sun’s activity limits you. You can maximize the sun’s activity through a solar cooker or reflective materials to concentrate the heat and expedite the evaporation process. Absent the sun’s drying effect, you can dehydrate simply by leaving anything exposed to dry heat and protected from airborne food spoilers and insects. You want the air warm and dry. Humidity will significantly reduce your ability to dehydrate anything. In the days of ovens with pilot lights, many people dehydrated simply by cutting the food and leaving it in the oven with the door closed. Even today, you can dehydrate food in the oven, and I often do when making jerky. However, the problem with this method is that many modern ranges won’t go below 175 degrees. Some do have a warming setting, though, and some people find the lowest setting on their oven, then simply prop the door open slightly to vent off excess heat. The oven works best with foods that can handle higher temperatures in the dehydration process. For more delicate foods with more delicate cell walls, you can dehydrate by warming your oven, turning it off, putting the food in with the door closed, then repeating the process when the oven comes back down in temperature until the food is dry. In my video on making the Ultimate Jerky, we use an air-fryer, dehydrator, and oven to make jerky and compare the results. We will link to that blog if you are interested in learning more.
Obviously, you wouldn’t have this method available to you if the grid goes down, but microwave dehydration is possible. You should use the absolute lowest setting on your microwave to accomplish this, which may be your defrost at the lowest setting. Some microwaves have a 10% or low setting on them. Herbs and leafy vegetables will be done in less than 5 minutes. Fruits can take as much as a half-hour. This works because the microwaves agitate the water molecules and cause them to gas off in the evaporation process. Even on the lowest setting, though, some food cooking can occur. We have used this method for herbs I want to dehydrate and preserve, but it isn’t my preferred method. We find that fruit and vegetables just take too long and slightly cook, and we have never seen any meat that dehydrates well with this method. The microwave cooks the meat even on the lowest setting. The rapid application of heat, even at the lowest setting, tightens the proteins in the meat too much, rendering it crunchy, cooked, and, in my opinion, inedible.
Electric dehydration better controls the steady application of heat and airflow, eliminating temperature and humidity fluctuations. This is why it is the preferred method for most people and the method we will demonstrate here. Any way that works to provide gentle heat and consistent airflow will work. You can dehydrate on a warm rock next to a fire if that’s all you have, but electric dehydrators allow you to regulate airflow and heat settings better. This gives you optimal control over the dehydration process. Rather than tend a fire, constantly adjust a solar dehydrator to properly align with the sun, or mess with the dials and buttons of a stove or a microwave, you can use an electric dehydrator to set it and forget it, as they say.
We rinse all food even if I grew it organically myself. You should see some bugs that come off food from the garden. That’s just what you can see, too. Commercial foods are often sprayed with copious amounts of pesticides, sprouting inhibitors, and God knows what. Rinse your food and allow it to air dry on a towel or paper towel. Slice fruits and vegetables into uniform slices no greater than 1/8th to a 1/4 inch. The smaller and thinner, the better. For the apples, we don’t even bother to core them, as I can run them over the Mandolin and get great uniform slices that will dry quickly. You can use a food processor or grater to process fruits and vegetables. You can leave the skins on or remove them. You can cut them into cored wedges or chunks. There isn’t a wrong way to do this unless your pieces are of varying sizes or too thick to allow all the moisture to escape. We soak them in water with lemon juice added to prevent them from browning, then I spread them in the Excalibur and Ronco dehydrators and put some in the oven on the warm setting.
At close to the 24-hour mark, my super thin apple slices were pretty much dry. They’ll keep for a few weeks like this, no problem. If I give them another 24-hours and try and get them even drier, pack them in a jar with an oxygen absorber, We can stretch their shelf-life out for months. Dehydrated fruits and vegetables will need moisture to allow mold, yeast, or bacteria to take hold. The mold you will see and the yeast you will smell and taste on fruits and vegetables long before bacteria really takes hold. You can boil the food for 10 minutes to render it edible by killing any pathogens in an emergency.
Those white squiggles in the leaf are caused by a leaf miner. They get in between the layers of the leaf. As a result, sprays don’t really work on them. You have to pinch off the leaf, then take it far away from your garden. I usually bring it in the house and throw it in the kitchen trash because I know it will be bagged up and taken out in a day or two. If you leave them in your garden, the leaf miner will lay eggs, which will hatch and cause more damage. They really like my tomatoes, but I watch for them on all the vegetables.
that’s a temporary fix. Here is a good idea. 
To begin with, you have to understand the terms inflation and hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a term to describe rapid, excessive, and out-of-control general price increases in an economy. While inflation measures the pace of rising prices for goods and services, hyperinflation is rapidly rising inflation, typically measuring more than 50% per month.
There’s also such a thing as deflation or negative inflation. This happens when prices generally fall in an economy. When the supply of goods is higher than the demand for those goods, or the buying power of money becomes greater. This was most notably seen this century in 2009 and 2015 as the United States and the rest of the world recovered from the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008 and the worldwide Great Recession that it sparked. Believe it or not, in 2009 and 2015, the price of goods actually dropped. As we all know as consumers, this is a rare occurrence. Typically, the currency buys less and less, and the cost of goods, manufacturing, and services goes up and up.
Three more terms to understand here are Asset-inflation, Shrinkflation, and Demandflation. Asset inflation is when a single category of goods experiences inflation like food, oil, gold, housing, etc. We definitely are experiencing that with oil, gas, and food. As of January 2022, food prices have increased by 7% in the United States, reflecting the highest food inflation we have seen in forty years.
Those were a lot of definitions to help us understand where we are at globally. If you have one takeaway from all that, let it be that this century’s hallmark is likely to be that the global economy is a more significant driver than an individual’s national economy. Where you go is because the rest of the world all is going in that direction too. No longer are recessions and inflation confined to a single country with problems: Syria, Greece, Venezuela, Chile, and so forth. Our economies and supply chains are so interwoven that this century may be marked by the fragility of the global economy and its many stutter steps and possible collapse.
Since SARS-COV-2 was first diagnosed as the cause of the COVID-19 outbreak in China at the end of 2019, governments worldwide have responded in different ways. From completely locking down their population to restricting travel, to mandating masks, to doing nothing and betting on herd immunity. Historians will best know the efficacy of any approach. For certain, the pandemic caused a significant shift in consumer purchasing priorities. It also shut down some parts of the supply chain, shuttered some factories worldwide, closed ports and airports, and locked down millions of people at home. This caused irreparable damage to some industries: travel & leisure, manufacturing, mining, education, arts, and food services, to name but a few. A couple of those major sectors turning down is enough to lead to inflation and possibly a recession. Several of them collapsing worldwide all at once leads to an unavoidable recession.
We have covered this in other blogs, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dashed any hopes of a rapid global economic recovery. The two countries account for almost 30 percent of global wheat exports, nearly 20 percent of corn exports, and more than 80 percent of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. Even with such a large percentage, most countries can compensate with other major crops like soybeans or rice. Non-first-world countries often will feel the impact of that in their gut. First-world countries will feel the inflationary and scarcity implications of that. The shortages of sunflower oil will push the rapeseed oil prices produced in Canada, China, India, France, Australia, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Romania much higher. Other oils like olive oil, vegetable oil, even lard and tallows go up in price to compensate for the shortfall. A country’s ability to not feel the impact of the loss of exports from Russia and Ukraine are factors of its ability to pivot usage, produce its own resources, or go without.
China, which we also do a deep dive on in other videos, hasn’t contributed much in recent years to the global economy’s health. COVID revealed how dependent many economies were on China as exports ground to a halt. At the same time, China has been stockpiling and hoarding most of the world’s grain supply and uses and produces the largest amount of coal as any other country in the world. It produces 3.7 billion tonnes. The next nearest countries are India, the US, Indonesia, Australia, and Russia. All of those other countries combined don’t equal China’s production. Even with that astronomical production rate, China consumes far more of the world’s coal than they produce. Almost a billion more tonnes than they produce, or 50% of the entire world’s consumption, is China’s share.
Those are the three central inflationary pressures, and there isn’t much you can do about any of them. Who knows what variant COVID will manifest next, what responses may be to it, or if it will just fade away? Who knows if the Russo-Ukrainian conflict will find a peaceful resolution and sanctions and embargoes will be lifted? Who knows how large, consumptive, and hoarding China will become? Those three factors could push the world’s walking inflation to a galloping pace. So, with no clear picture of where it will end nor how influential any of the big three will be on it or what other still unknown factor might manifest like a natural disaster, you have to ask what you can do to insulate yourself. Here’s a quick list:
Prep your finances like this will only get deeper and worse because it will worsen before it gets better. If you have a second or third car that has been sitting around, now might be the time to unload it while demand and prices are high. Gas is only going to go up from here. If you have considered a Home Equity Line of Credit for anticipated repairs or refinancing your home, now might be the time for that. The Fed has to raise interest rates even further, as we discussed, to get this recession throttling tool in its toolbox back to work. Postponing luxury items and focusing on your core preps is always a good option. Springing for a thousand-dollar smart TV now won’t do much good if you fall into such economic hard times that you have to cancel your cable or streaming services.
On one side of the scale, you have people who have nothing set aside though scarcity is on the horizon and price increases are happening now. On the far opposite that, you have people hoarding more than they will ever need. We are sure there are still people with more toilet paper than they will ever use in their lifetime. In between those extremes, you have the “herd.” These people run to the store and clear the shelves when they finally realize that the possibility of a shortage is real. These people end up with too much of one thing and not nearly enough of another. Then you have the prepper. The prepper assesses how much of any particular item is needed to get by for a period of time. The prepper is considering substitutions should one thing become unavailable or in short supply. The prepper is learning how to pivot and adapt to the changing environment outside their door. Sometimes that change is the weather that passes in a season. Sometimes that’s political and leads to a new way of life. Sometimes that “change” is drastic and alters humanity’s trajectory. Some of that you can prep for, and some of it you have to prep and pray.
We are not saying you have to download my free Start Preparing! Introductory Survival Guide, but you would be foolish not to. It’s completely free. It’s eighteen packed pages of precisely how you can prep. If you have been prepping for a while, it is a great guide to ensure you are prepped with a 360-degree approach. If you are new or semi-new to prepping, it will give you a solid foundation from which you can build. If you don’t use the free plan I am providing you, get a plan from somewhere and work that plan.
They are “grow bags”, made out of heavy material. I really liked the 7-gallon size, and I also bought some 10-gallon bags. 
After a year of growing food, the looked like this:
So, I emptied a big container, filled it with water and 1 c. bleach, and set the bags to soak. 
There is a little sun bleach, but they look so much better. They are now ready for new plants. The cost of pots is outrageous! And the plastic ones are only good for one or two years, then they start breaking. I’m VERY happy with my grow bags. 
I hope you have at least begun to store some food. I worry about what is coming. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints USED to call this part of provident living: Emergency Preparedness. Do you know that name has been changed? It is now called Emergency Response. The time for preparing is almost over. Here is a copy of my chart 
toiletries, soap, flashlight, matches, 3 days food, knife, mess kit, washrag and soap, TP, emergency blanket, notepad and pencils, scriptures, playing cards, small cooking stove, trash bags, feminine items, water filter bottles, Silcock key, cash, family photos, first aid kits
opener, vitamins, seeds, alcohol, medical gloves, face masks, batteries, trash bags, tin foil, plastic wrap, water, toilet paper, lip balm, hand lotion, over-the-counter medicines
and all. Trust me, there isn’t the bitterness to it that you might think, and the peel and pith have antibacterial properties and antioxidants. I initially thought, as was the case for other things I have freeze-dried in the past, that this would give me decent portions to freeze-dry and package. This method is excellent for soups, stews, and pasta, but it didn’t work well for me here. I ran it through an entire cycle in the Harvest Right freeze-dryer. When I pulled it out and used the digital moisture meter, some parts were done, but others contained enough moisture that it wouldn’t preserve. 
already use freeze-dried lemon powder and are buying it online, you could save hundreds of dollars on this one food alone by freeze-drying it yourself. Going into this project, I was skeptical. I thought the powder would be bitter because I was using so much of the pith of the lemon, which is known for being bitter, but there wasn’t any bitterness to it. You can eat a small chunk as it is for a burst of lemon flavor and vitamin C. You can mix it with ground pepper for a lemon pepper seasoning for chicken or fish. Most people I talked to simply take a powdered teaspoon of it and pour hot water over it. You can add a little honey to taste if you would like, but this gives you a soothing lemon tea that provides you vitamin C and is touted as a type of cold-buster. 
tried several recipes, but find this one to be the best. Be warned that it’s delicious and strong.
* This is an 8-part series from the BBC on how daily life in Britain during WWII. This particular episode talks about how people grew food and cooked. 
This is our last week to focus on rice. It’s something that will last for 30+ years and is easy to rotate into your regular menus. You can usually buy a 20-pound bag for under $10. Rice is a haven for pantry moths, so you HAVE to store it properly for the long term: either in 2-liter bottles, buckets, or Mylar bags, or just vacuum sealed (I have some of all those things!). Plus, it’s gluten-free. 
I’m not saying you need to learn how to do this. Back in the ’70s, we didn’t have the option of freeze-dried foods or canned chicken. But it IS an option if canning meat or purchasing meat is not in your budget – AND you just happen to have an overabundance of wheat stored. 
* Found this too for those of you with a child in diapers: 
How can you store meat on the shelf? One choice is canned meat that you can buy at the grocery store. Another choice is to purchase freeze-dried meats from