BlogShare: the chick n coop

the chick n coop: The 12 Days of Christmas!: Well, for the next 12 days we will be doing something crafty or yummy to celebrate the season and get ready for the big day. Today, we made ...

yum. Gotta note this to make!

BlogShare: American Preppers, a Year of Supplemental Food

Here is an excellent post via American Preppers on getting your pantry stocked for the family at a reasonable price. I've seen this 'recipe' referred to as scotch broth. Definitely not something to skip in your prepping plans.


A Year of Supplemental Food Storage for $300 for a family of FOUR !!

I have come across an amazing find, thanks to a FB friend; I have learned how to add enough food to my storage to feed us (2 adults and two kids) for a year! This is a combination of legumes, grains, beans etc that provides balanced, nutritious meals daily very cheap. The thing I love about this recipe is that it can be changed in many different ways by adding left over meats, vegetables, dry vegetables, TVP, potatoes, etc.

This recipe has been around the internet for years now, but this is the first time I have seen it. I have researched for hours on ways to get a years’ worth of food storage for a reasonable cost and finally found it, so I thought I would share it with all of our APN readers.

Note: Please feel free to share this with everyone you know. I feel it will greatly benefit anyone that has food storage, struggles with food storage, or is just beginning. I know for me, the thought of trying to get enough food for a year was sooo overwhelming, but with this plan, it created a *baseline* for me to build on so I felt secure knowing I had at least some basics to make a meal for my family. This will last a year if you ration it properly, but you will want/need to add things like meat and other vegetables (canned or dehydrated) to your pot of food. Lets face the facts, no one wants to eat the same thing over and over day in and day out. So you will want to build on this once you have it.

I am going to list the things needed and what you are supposed to do so you have an easy list at hand and instructions to add to your buckets.

What you will need:

Food:
4 x 22 pounds of rice. Any kind of rice will do. (Four 20 pound bags + 8 one pound bags) OR two 50lb bags at Sam’s.
2 x 11 pounds of Kidney Beans. (22 one pound bags)
2 x 11 pounds of barley. (22 one pound bags)
2 x 11 pounds of yellow lentils. (22 one pound bags)
1 x 5.5 pounds of split green peas. (6 one pound bags)
1 x 5.5 chick peas/garbanzo beans. (6 one pound bags)
30 pounds beef or chicken bouillon. (or both) It will be added to each batch as you cook it.

Hardware:
Four/Five 5 gallon buckets for the rice. (rice usually settles if you shake it down so its give or take here)
One 5 gallon bucket for kidney beans.
One five gallon bucket for the barley.
One 5 gallon bucket for the yellow lentils.
One 1 gallon bucket for the split green peas.
One 1 gallon bucket for the chick peas/garbanzo.
Thirty-two oxygen absorbers

Total of six 10 gallon buckets and two 1 gallon buckets.

Approximate Cost Where I Live:
Rice @ Sam’s: 2 x $16.48 = $32.96 (two 50 lb bags)
Kidney Beans /sale: 22 x $0.67 = $14.74
Pearl Barley /sale: 22 x $0.59 = $12.98
Lentils / sale: 22 x $0.45 = $9.90
Green Split Peas / sale: 6 x $0.40 = $2.40
Chick peas (garbanzo) / sale: 6 x $0.58 = $3.48
Beef Bouillon: $65.49

Total Food: $141.95
Ten 5 gallon food grade buckets: $51.10 (free shipping)
Ten Gamma lids: $69.70(pick up in store)
One Gallon Buckets & lids: $15.25 (have to order a min of five, $15.25 is total cost)
Shipping for buckets and lids: $7.90
Oxygen Absorbers: Sixty 300CC = $9.97 (3 packs of 20)

Total Hardware: $153.92

Total combined cost: $295.87

Note: The reason the title says for $300 is to give some room based on cost of living in your area.

Directions:
Put split green peas and the chick peas in a separate 1 gallon bucket, add 1 OA (Ooxygen Absorber) to the bucket, seal.
Put Barley, Kidney beans, and lentils in separate 5 gallon containers adding 5 OA per bucket, seal.
Divide rice up in remaining 5 gallon buckets with 5 OA in each bucket, seal.

How to make your soup:
8 oz of rice
2 oz of red kidney beans
2 oz of pearl barley
2 oz of lintels
1 oz of split green peas
1 oz of chick peas/garbanzo’s
Bouillon to taste

Take the 16 oz dry mixture and add 6-7 quarts of water with a spoon of butter or olive oil (optional) to prevent the water from boiling over. Add 3 tablespoons bouillon or to taste. Then add any other meats, vegetables, potatoes or seasonings you’d like to. I personally love to add garlic and Lima beans. DO NOT add onions. They will spoil the mixture. Bring to a boil and then let simmer for two hours. You should have enough to feed 4 people for two days if rationed correctly.

Note: Onions ferment too quickly and will cut the time you are able to store the already cooked soup mixture. There is always the option of dried onions and you can add it to smaller batches you know will be eaten on the first day.

On the second day you will need to add more water and a tablespoon of bouillon because it will thicken in the refrigerator overnight. Boil for a min of ten minutes to kill off any potential bacteria, especially if you’re not able to store it in the refrigerator because you’re without electricity.

You will be full off of ONE large bowl of this delicious soup. The kids usually eat about a half a bowl with bread. That’s what makes it so great. If able to, bake some bread or corn bread to go with it.

If there is any mixture left on the third day, then just add it to the new mixture you make. (If making a new mixture on the third day) As time goes by you will learn to tell how much of each ingredient you need to fit your family’s needs.

With the exception of dairy and Vitamin B 12, this should take care of your nutritional needs. Maybe not all of your wants, but once you get this out of the way, you can concentrate on adding the stuff you want to your food storage knowing you have enough for a year already if you half to use it.

I hope this helps you all to begin or expand your food storage like it has me!

Keepin It Spicy,

Jalapeno Gal

BlogShare: The Country Cook

Strolling along, minding my own business, feeling a bit hungry...you know how it goes. You find a recipe, you see some of their favorite blog reads, you follow one, then another, then another...

Pretty soon you've missed dinner in real life, you are achy from computer sitting far too long...

but OH.MY.WORD. the recipes you have found!

(that has happened to you, too, right? C'mon. Admit it. Don't leave me hanging here...)

Banana Pudding Cheesecake?
Homemade Kit Kat Bars?
Butterfinger Cake?
Cream Cheese Spice Cake?

Of course, I can find great recipes that aren't dessert. Not sure why you'd be more concerned about real food than dessert, but whatever...

Cheesy Chicken Tater Tot Casserole...
Spasagna...
Hash Brown and Pork Chop Casserole...
Grilled Chicken Alfredo Pizza...
Creamy Chicken Enchiladas...

And where did I find these delicious recipes?

The Country Cook page!

How-to: Homemade Pasta

There are plenty of recipes out there for making your own pasta. This is just how we do it. Here is our original post here about the noodles, with current pictures added in.

Here's our new recipe:
3 cups flour (I have used bread flour, Prairie Gold, and a combination of the two)
6 eggs (I just use the whole egg, some prefer only the yolk)
6 Tbs water
A pinch of salt

Our big batch noodles is:
30 cups flour
5 dozen (60) eggs
3 3/4 cups water

We start by dumping the flour and the salt into a large bowl. Making a 'well' in the middle of the flour, we start adding the eggs in. Once the eggs are in, we start stirring in the flour, pulling more into the eggs until we have it all worked in.

One of the keys to pasta dough is don't be afraid of the flour! A common mistake is to not add enough flour, resulting a very sticky, hard to handle, dough. I'm sure there is a point where you can add too much flour, but I haven't found it yet. I am very free with the flour. Probably comes from being a naturally messy baker :-)

Once you have your dough mixed into a nice ball, we let it rest for a bit. Not really sure why...just was always told to. You know how that goes.  After several minutes of resting, I divide the dough into manageable sized portions so it's easier to roll out without the dough drying too much. As you roll out each portion, keep a lightly dampened towel, or saran wrap, over the remaining dough portions. You don't want them to form a 'crust' while you tend to each batch in turn.

We generally roll ours using my hand-crank roller, but you can easily roll them by hand on a floured board (again, abandone your fear of too much flour! Flour your rolling pin or dough surface well and repeatedly) then cut using a sharp pointed knife. A typical pasta machine will only produce a flat sheet of pasta dough you can then use in various ways. My machine, an Atlas, has an attachment for cutting narrow spaghetti like pasta, as well as a slightly wider, fettucini style pasta. I can also simply roll the dough to the desired thickness and hand-cut using a knife or pizza cutter, or use the pasta wheel that has adjustable width cutters that create a fluted edge. Any width can be cut by hand, from a lasagna noodle to a spaghetti noodle, but I admit the spaghetti noodle is difficult and tedious to cut by hand. I can also roll the dough, then cut into large 'boxes'...a tablespoon of cheese or cooked sausage and the like, topped with another' box' and crimp to seal. Voila! Homemade ravioli! Delicious!

Homemade noodles will cook up about twice their thickness, so unless you are wanting a flat dumpling (which are excellent additions to soups and stews), roll out as thin as you can before cutting (1/16 inch). The hand-roller can be set to any setting to get your chosen thickness. I like to run each portion through twice per setting. For a more egg noodle like result, we roll at each setting up to 3 or 4. For a more delicate pasta, such as spaghetti, I will roll out to a setting of 5. the higher the setting, the thinner the resulting noodle will be. You can 'skip' settings once you have gotten to say a 4, but up to that thickness, you'll want to do it number-by-number to avoid forcing too much dough thru the crank. And keep that dough floured. It is a total pain to clean stuck dough from the rollers while in the middle of working a batch of noodles. Don't ask how I know this, just go with my, ahem, experience.

For a 'shaped' pasta, such as elbow macaroni, you will want a pasta extruder. The extruder works on the same principle as a meat grinder...you put a portion of dough into the hopper, turn a crack and force the pasta dough thru a die into various shapes depending on the die used. I don't have an extruder, but would like one. We get by with just the 'flat' pasta here, and I stock the pantry with plain elbow macaroni, but it would be nice to mix up the shapes for fun once in a while. And some dishes just deserve a shaped pasta to hold in all that great homemade sauce, kwim?

I take my cut noodles and hang them for a while on my rack. Yes, that is a regular, plastic-coated wooden clothes drying rack. You can easily wrap the bars in plastic wrap to use an existing rack. I don't dry clothes on this one, it's my pasta-only rack.

As the noodles dry, which varies given the air/weather conditions, they will become stiff then brittle. they tend to break off the rack rather easily by this point so we pull the noodles off and I lay them out on butcher paper to finish drying. To speed this along, I usually lay them somewhere with some heat/warmth. This recent batch, I laid the butcher paper on some cookie sheets and put them on the top of the warming oven of my cookstove. They were totally dry, meaning brittle like your regular store-bought pasta, in a few hours thanks to the gentle heat from the warming oven and stove pipe.

You can use your homemade pasta as soon as it has dried slightly and is easily handled. To cook your pasta, bring your water to a full, rolling boil first then add your pasta. Anything less than a hard boil and you may end up with a pasta that tastes over-cooked and squishy. The hard rolling boil really helps fresh pasta.

To store your dried pasta, pack it in whatever container works best for you. Something air-tight is best, to prevent the pasta from picking up moisture from the air. If the pasta hasn't fully dried to the 'brittle' stage, you can store it in the freezer. We usually pack ours into a 5 gallon bucket. Homemade pasta will keep *if totally dry* for about 6 months...we never manage to keep them that long :o)  I have to make a few batches a year, and I try to do it during the winter if I am wanting to store it.

As easy as homemade pasta is to make though, you can easily whip up a batch in the morning for a fresh pasta dish that evening!

Other recipes for homemade pasta: 
AllRecipes has a great assortment of recipes for homemade pasta (and everything else!)
Food Network's Mario Batali's recipe
of course, Ree, a.k.a. The Pioneer Woman, has a recipe to share!
Mamliga is a delicious blog...with a great recipe.
Joy the Baker...another delicious blog!