Andrea

Wonderful news! CONGRATS!!!!!!

(((Nana))) It's great to see you!!! Please, have a glass of homemade eggnogg and some almond brittle! 'Tis the season to indulge!

(((Stephanie and Family))) Praying.

Thank you Catwrangla and Gofish! I received the ornaments yesterday! (Gofish - my cat has already pulled yours off of the tree. I found it on the stairs this morning! I put it towards the top this time! LOL)

Cool ideas! And what a helpful kitty! LOL

:rofl: It's not you Luma! It's a guy thing. I can go on and on about something to my DH but if the tv or radio is on, he won't hear a single word!

Actually Philbe, I can't find a nutritional difference between instant brown rice and regular brown rice. And since regular brown rice goes rancid within 6 months and takes 40 minutes to cook, lately I've only been buying instant brown rice. White rice only takes 20 mins to cook so I've continued to purchase that since my family doesn't like the texture of instant white - they don't care for brown rice either which is why I hide it in soups and chilis!

I was glad to hear her admit that as well. I've followed her for years and couldn't believe some of the recipes she used to post. In fact, I think they are still available in archives over at the site. But, I'm sure the legal team at Backwoods Home probably brought her up to speed as far as publicly posted recipes. I did get the impression that she still used the old recipes for her own use. But, I'm guilty there as well. I still use an old "Minnesota" tomato & pepper recipe from Putting Foods By. I have started adding additional acid but I don't like it pressure canned. It totally ruins the texture.

Here is a link to a Survival Podcast Jackie Clay did with Jack Spirko last month: http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/clay-on-homesteading She is the first one to admit that some of her canning techniques are no longer considered safe and that she carefully avoids those recipes in her new books.

Garlic and echinacea. There is an echinacea tea on the market if the stubborn cuss won't take a capsule. Simply use a couple of echinacea tea bags along with the chai. He probably won't pop garlic pills either, but it is such a powerful antibiotic. Can you make garlic spaghetti tonight? Lightly saute an obscene amount of fresh chopped garlic in a small amount of olive oil and 1 tbls of butter. Then toss it with some cooked spaghetti noodles. Great for fighting infections and keeps the vampires away! For breakfast, scramble an egg or two with an equally obscene amount of garlic powder. For lunch, see if he'll eat some baked garlic cloves spread on toast . . . It works, it really does.

You can use them as flour, or soup/sauce thickeners. CrabGrass came up with this tip for beans that won't soften - freeze them after you've cooked them and the expansion from the freezing process will help soften them. I'm going to try dehydrating some beans this weekend. We LOVE chili beans and refried beans. Dehydrated versions, if they turn out well, would be very convenient to have on hand and would save on both freezer and cupboard space.

Thanks!

Hope you're having a WONDERFUL day!

Maybe we should schedule a time! Of course, this week is bad . . . What's everyone doing next Saturday morning?

Welcome!

I'm finishing up the third in the Apocalypse Blog series. They are really a good read and well -written.

Well, we could schedule a time to meet and test it out!

I didn't hit a single sale or even look through any of the sales flyers. I stayed home and worked. It was nice to actually earn money instead of spend it.

Thank you Pauline! Received it yesterday and I love it!

LOL - Been there, done that! Guests will arrive in an hour and a half. I've been cooking and cleaning all day and now I'm about to jump in the shower, but thought I'd drop in and wish you all a very HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Hope you had a W O N D E R F U L DAY!

My canner instructions say three quarts of boiling water. I have the smaller Presto canner - it holds 9 pints.

http://voices.yahoo.com/easy-homemade-cheese-sauce-recipe-2007072.html Forget boxes of pasta with powdered "cheese" sauces of questionable origin that will keep on the shelf for years. For great flavor, high quality, and knowledge of what is actually in your food, rely on this homemade cheese sauce. All natural ingredients and so easy to prepare, you'll never trade this easy sauce recipe for "convenience" foods again. The lack of radiation-yellow color is an added bonus. The recipe makes quite a bit of cheese sauce as written. Cut all ingredient amounts in half if you need less sauce, or refrigerate the excess to use later. To cut calories, use skim milk, lower-calorie cheeses, and cut back on the butter a bit. Choose organically produced ingredients for organic cheese sauce. Ingredients for Homemade Cheese Sauce so good it can even make whole-wheat pasta delicious: 6 Tbsp butter or margarine 4-5 Tbsp flour (this number is negotiable, depending how thick you like your cheese sauce) 3 cups milk 1 cup to 1 ½ cups shredded cheese (Whatever kind you like. Cheddar, Colby, Monterey Jack, Pepper Jack, or those shredded cheese mixes like "Taco" or "Mexican" all work well.) Salt and pepper to taste In a heavy saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Then add the flour and mix to form a paste. When the flour and butter are blended, add the milk all at once. Stir well to incorporate the milk into the paste. Cook until the sauce turns smooth and thickens, stirring constantly. Then slowly add the shredded cheese and continue cooking and stirring until the cheese melts and merges with the sauce (this happens fairly quickly). Do not allow to boil. Add salt and pepper to taste. If the sauce is too thick for your taste or intended use, add more milk, some cream, or a little chicken broth to thin it. This sauce has many applications. It is excellent in macaroni and cheese or for homemade Hamburger Helper. Add it to vegetables, such as cheddary broccoli. To make quick meals-on-the-go, mix some homemade cheese sauce with cooked cubes of chicken, beef, or pork and a vegetable medley and wrap it up in a tortilla or a crepe. It also works well in casseroles or pot pies. Modify the basic cheese sauce recipe to your taste and your recipe needs by substituting different types of cheese or spices. Turn it into a three-cheese sauce by using ½ cup each of three types of cheese. Adding jalapenos packs a punch in the sauce. If you experiment with cheese, herb, and spice variations, this basic recipe yields quite an array of unique cheese sauces for the home cook. ######################### I've made this with all storage ingredients, with the exception of the butter powder (which I have but am too cheap to open!) I store grated cheese in the freezer and I also have freeze dried cheese shreds (the real stuff - not the cheese "food"). My family won't eat the fake stuff anymore and I no longer can (allergic to preservatives).

SERIOUSLY?!?!?! Ugh. I need to check my fresh cranberries I just bought. I didn't know I needed to look for organic cranberries now too.

I have no idea if this is usda approved or not but it's an interesting thought . . . http://bisonrma.blogspot.com/2009/12/dehydrating-beans.html Friday, December 18, 2009 Dehydrating Beans <a href=" http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-MY_sV0BLKM/Syuwp_sisOI/AAAAAAAAAJI/pDuHKlrUjfM/s1600-h/beans+1+dehy+bulk.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-bottom: 1em; float: left; clear: left; margin-right: 1em"> Beans are obviously one of the main staples people store in their preps. They are very nutritious and very inexpensive, and they store forever. Their main drawback is the amount of time and resources they take to prepare. While this isn't generally an issue if you have access to water from the tap, and gas or electricity from a utility company, in a grid down situation, this can be a major problem. The traditional way of preparing beans first involves a pre-soak. You take the dry beans, throw them in a pot with triple the volume of water, and let them soak for 6 to 8 hours. You then pour away any remaining water, and add more water to cover the beans by an inch or so. They are then brought to a boil, then slow cooked for another 3 hours or so. Lots of time and resources. --- My local grocery store has a bulk foods section that had this ground mix labeled, "Refried Beans". The instructions said that you added 1 cup of boiling water to 3/4 cups of the mix, stirred it well, covered it for 10 minutes and viola! - refried beans. This bean mix cost $4.75 a pound! We did our weekly meal using emergency prep foods on Wednesday (burritos using beans, spices and home-canned meat from our prep stores) . I doubled the amount of beans (a total of 2 lbs dry) so I could do this test. I took what was originally about 1 pound of beans that had since been cooked as described above (no seasoning whatsoever), got as much liquid out of them by letting them sit in a strainer for 10 minutes, and put them in my dehydrator. I needed 4 trays in my American Harvest dehydrator, which I set on 140F degrees. After two hours, I turned off the dehydrator, and moved around the beans that had clumped together - trying to ensure each bean was getting fully dried. I let it run another two hours. I'd estimate that a good 95% of the beans were done - quite dry and brittle. I stirred things up again, and let it go for another hour to ensure everything was fully dehydrated. I wanted to do my test with the beans in their whole state and in a ground up state. I took 1/2 cup of each and put them in separate bowls. The part I ground up just went into a coffee grinder that I gave a couple of pulses. The whole beans kind of looked like dry roasted peanuts with the skins on. Most of them had developed cracks and splits. I added about 3/4 cups of boiling water to each bowl, stirred them up and covered them. I set a timer for 5 minutes, and gave them a try. Both the whole and ground beans were not yet fully rehydrated. There were little bits that had that undone-bean mouth feel. I covered them for another 5 minutes and tried again. Still a bit underdone. Five more minutes, and they were perfect! Well, at least in flavor and mouth feel. Here is a picture of the same batch of beans that had NOT been dehydrated/rehydrated - Honestly, the taste and feel of the rehydrated beans was the same as the regular beans. As you can see, they don't look quite as pretty, but in a grid down situation, who cares? Also, if you were out camping, these would be a fantastic quick and nutritious meal for the trail. I'm guessing that if they had been added to water which was then brought to a boil, taken off the heat and covered, they would have been ready in no more than 10 minutes. --- These are absolutely going to become a part of my prep stores. While I won't make a special batch of beans to do this, I WILL do as I did with this batch - I'll double up the recipe and dehydrate half of it. Also, my next batch will be with seasoned beans. No meats or fats, just vegetables, herbs and spices. That will make one less thing to have to worry about if we don't have access to all of our supplies. Accept The Challenge Give dehydrating cooked foods a try. We have done wheat (making bulgur wheat) in the past, and now beans. I'm going to be trying beef in the near future, as the price of the dehydrated/freeze dried stuff is obscene. Great tasting, but the price is just too high to have much on hand. I have a near obsession with Just Add Water foods and meals that I can make myself. I'll share some of these main courses and soups in the future. --- Copyright 2009 Bison Risk Management Associates. All rights reserved. You are encouraged to repost this information so long as it is credited to Bison Risk Management Associates. www.BisonRMA.com Posted by Chief Instructor at 9:23 AM