Sensible_Food_Storage_Seminar_by_Wendy_DeWitt
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00:00:30.240 | The audio file you're about to hear is a presentation by Wendy DeWitt.
00:00:35.120 | She presented the content in this seminar
00:00:38.720 | to a group of people discussing how to set aside
00:00:42.760 | and store the food that you need to keep your family through
00:00:46.880 | a year. This audio is pulled from a video which is available on YouTube.
00:00:52.680 | That video has some visual aid but the audio will be easily accessible
00:00:57.200 | with the exception of her discussion on solar ovens where you won't be able to
00:01:00.400 | see it unless you go
00:01:01.440 | and watch the video. If you'd like more information
00:01:04.800 | make sure to check out the PDF file download linked in the notes for this
00:01:08.280 | show
00:01:08.840 | or you can find that PDF directly on Wendy's blog which is
00:01:12.760 | everythingunderthesunblog.blogspot.com
00:01:17.200 | again everythingunderthesunblog.blogspot.com
00:01:21.640 | [Music]
00:01:28.640 | Hi my name is Wendy DeWitt and I'd like to thank you for joining me.
00:01:38.880 | During the class I'm going to be referring to a booklet which I've written
00:01:42.200 | it's called Everything Under the Sun. All the information from the class is in this
00:01:45.880 | booklet
00:01:46.480 | it's available online, it's free, and you can get it at
00:01:50.600 | everythingunderthesunblog.blogspot.com
00:01:54.800 | or you can email at wdwitt22@gmail.com
00:01:58.400 | How many of you have a cell phone?
00:02:02.280 | Raise of hands. Almost everyone's got a cell phone. How many of you have
00:02:07.960 | a year's supply? Not as many hands go up on that one.
00:02:12.240 | In 1987 Ezra Taft Benson said the counsel to store food
00:02:16.440 | may be as essential to your temporal welfare as boarding the Arquoise in the
00:02:20.800 | days of Noah.
00:02:21.600 | That's life and death. More recently the
00:02:25.280 | Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Levitt
00:02:28.480 | was counseling citizens to have at least a three-month supply
00:02:32.280 | of food, water, and medicine. I've been teaching this class for more than 20
00:02:37.520 | years
00:02:38.040 | and I've never understood why people have chosen to ignore
00:02:41.680 | this kind of wise counsel. I've heard all the excuses and I finally came up with
00:02:46.280 | my own
00:02:46.920 | top 10 reasons why I don't have my year's supply.
00:02:50.320 | Number 10, my neighbors have a two-year supply.
00:02:53.880 | It's more likely that your neighbors don't have any food at all.
00:02:58.840 | Very few people have made the effort to be prepared for an emergency.
00:03:02.960 | So if your plan is to eat your neighbor's food, first off that's
00:03:06.360 | probably not very nice and second off it's probably not a very good plan.
00:03:10.240 | Number 9, I'm just gonna move in with my parents or my children.
00:03:14.000 | Not a good plan all by itself. A lot of people believe that when times get bad
00:03:19.880 | we're all just going to band together and we'll share our food and everyone
00:03:23.280 | will survive.
00:03:23.920 | The problem with that is nobody's sharing food so we won't survive for very long.
00:03:28.480 | And another problem is if you consider that if there were any kind
00:03:32.240 | of epidemic or pandemic you couldn't
00:03:35.440 | band together, you couldn't share, so you may have to survive
00:03:39.400 | on just what's in your home. Number 8, isn't that what my taxes are for?
00:03:44.600 | If there were any kind of national crisis or emergency,
00:03:50.080 | how long do you really think it would be before a government agency would reach
00:03:53.880 | you?
00:03:54.240 | And besides the government has been telling us to have a three-month supply
00:03:58.440 | of food, water, and medicines. Number 7,
00:04:02.760 | I donate to my church
00:04:06.520 | and I assume when things get bad they're just going to take care of me.
00:04:09.440 | I think a lot of people are expecting miracles in these times because they're
00:04:14.200 | not storing food.
00:04:15.200 | Elijah's never-ending barrel or maybe there's a Joseph of Egypt out there who's
00:04:19.280 | storing for everyone.
00:04:20.480 | I would suggest that the responsibility
00:04:24.200 | to have an emergency supply for your family isn't your neighbors,
00:04:27.960 | it isn't the government's, and it's not the church's.
00:04:31.200 | It's yours. Number 6,
00:04:34.320 | I have a year's supply and the bullets to go with it.
00:04:39.200 | I've heard people say, "Why would I go to all the effort
00:04:42.680 | of storing food for my family just to have some guy with a gun
00:04:46.560 | come to my home and either threaten or kill my family
00:04:49.600 | to take it away?" And I respond back, "Are you afraid of the guy with the gun?
00:04:55.120 | Because you should be more afraid of becoming
00:04:58.520 | the guy with the gun. What would you be willing to do
00:05:02.400 | if you were watching your child starve to death? I promise you would lie,
00:05:07.880 | cheat, steal, and you
00:05:11.120 | would become the guy with the gun to save your child's life.
00:05:15.040 | Food storage isn't just about your temporal welfare,
00:05:18.560 | it's also about your spiritual salvation. Number 5,
00:05:23.960 | the boat and the four-wheelers are taking up all my storage space.
00:05:27.000 | Number 4,
00:05:30.280 | I've got a thousand pounds of wheat, what else do I need?
00:05:33.760 | Unless you're eating that wheat on a daily basis and your body's accustomed to it,
00:05:37.880 | that wheat could kill you faster than a famine.
00:05:40.800 | Number 3, I've decided I'm just going to store non-perishable items
00:05:46.360 | and then I'm going to trade for food. I kind of chuckle, I'm thinking, "Good luck eating
00:05:50.720 | those gold coins."
00:05:51.800 | Because when people are starving, they're not going to share their food.
00:05:55.440 | They're not going to trade their food. And I guess the other point would be
00:06:00.200 | if they do, you're going to be buying the most expensive bowl of soup that you ever
00:06:04.880 | ate.
00:06:05.400 | Number 2, I can't afford scrapbooking
00:06:09.520 | and food storage.
00:06:13.640 | The average food storage can cost as little as a dollar
00:06:16.800 | a day. When I ask how many of you have cell phones,
00:06:20.080 | I know everyone's going to raise their hand and I know
00:06:23.160 | that you spend more than a dollar a day on that service. Is your cell phone
00:06:28.120 | really more important than your family's survival?
00:06:31.200 | And the number one reason why I don't have my year's supply,
00:06:35.600 | I'm waiting for them to sell Papa John's dehydrated pizza.
00:06:39.240 | Food storage has such a stigma attached to it. If it's not
00:06:43.680 | wheat, beans, and powdered milk, it can't be food storage.
00:06:46.880 | And with the system that I'm going to show you, you could be eating sweet and
00:06:50.280 | sour chicken,
00:06:51.200 | minestrone, enchiladas, even chocolate chip cookies.
00:06:55.560 | Your imagination and your pocketbook are just about the only limitations that you
00:06:59.560 | have.
00:06:59.960 | Most people understand the importance of having emergency supplies.
00:07:05.080 | They know they should have it. They want to have it. Sometimes they just don't know
00:07:09.440 | how.
00:07:10.080 | There are so many questions. What do you store? How do you store it?
00:07:13.400 | How do I rotate it? What will it cost? There are so
00:07:16.800 | many questions that it becomes overwhelming
00:07:19.840 | and they just give up. I'm hoping that in this class I'm going to be able to
00:07:24.120 | answer those questions for you
00:07:25.640 | and give you a new attitude about food storage. Now the system I use
00:07:30.080 | is based on a worst-case scenario.
00:07:33.160 | And I recognize there are worst cases, but I'm going to give a survivable
00:07:36.960 | worst-case scenario
00:07:38.080 | that there's no electricity, no running water, no stores to go to,
00:07:42.560 | and no help is coming. Even in that scenario,
00:07:45.720 | my family can not only survive, but we're going to be eating
00:07:49.080 | chocolate brownies.
00:07:52.280 | What do you store and how much do you store? Before I started the system, I would
00:07:56.920 | look at my food storage, the stacks of wheat
00:07:59.200 | and beans and powdered milk and legumes, whatever they are.
00:08:03.000 | And I'd think, "I can't make dinner out of this.
00:08:07.160 | What's for dinner?" And it was kind of depressing. And I thought, "There's got to
00:08:11.520 | be a better way."
00:08:12.440 | And I decided I was going to put the food I love
00:08:15.880 | into my food storage. So I created a system.
00:08:19.320 | Now here's the system. It's very simple. You're going to take 14 note cards
00:08:23.680 | and you're going to choose seven breakfasts and seven dinners
00:08:27.480 | that your family loves. Things that you wouldn't mind having
00:08:31.000 | once a week for a year. Now if you're like my husband Colin,
00:08:34.920 | first thing he said was, "Did she say lunch? I didn't hear lunch."
00:08:39.000 | I said, "Honey, we're going to get up late. We're going to go to bed early.
00:08:42.840 | I'm not planning lunch." The truth is, if we're in a worst-case scenario,
00:08:47.200 | we're not going to be able to be cooking dinner at five o'clock with solar
00:08:50.680 | cooking.
00:08:51.320 | That's what I'm going to be doing most of my cooking in if we have no
00:08:54.880 | electricity.
00:08:55.660 | And so we're going to have breakfast in the morning. We'll have our
00:08:59.080 | big meal in the middle of the day like our ancestors used to do.
00:09:02.120 | And then during those good cooking hours, I'm going to be making a daily
00:09:05.560 | loaf of homemade bread. And we'll have that in the evening. So we really do have
00:09:09.520 | the three meals.
00:09:10.400 | Just had to tease him a little bit. So you've got your
00:09:13.760 | seven breakfasts and your seven dinners, your 14 cards.
00:09:17.000 | You're going to have these meals once a week for a year.
00:09:20.040 | There's 52 weeks in the year, so you're going to have them 52 times.
00:09:23.640 | If spaghetti were one of my meals, and it took a jar of spaghetti sauce
00:09:28.200 | and a pound of noodles and maybe a pint of sausage,
00:09:31.960 | the water to cook the noodles in, the salt, everything
00:09:35.040 | that it takes to have that meal. Maybe you want to have garlic toast.
00:09:38.160 | Whatever you're going to plan to have with your spaghetti,
00:09:41.360 | you multiply everything by 52. When you're done,
00:09:45.400 | this card is going to tell you exactly what it's going to take to feed your
00:09:48.600 | family spaghetti
00:09:49.600 | once a week for a year. You fill out the rest of the cards,
00:09:52.840 | and you know exactly what it's going to take for an entire
00:09:56.680 | year supply. Don't forget to add, if you're going to have the breads,
00:10:00.120 | if you want to have chocolate cake, pies, whatever your desserts are,
00:10:03.920 | everything that it's going to take to feed your family for a year.
00:10:08.320 | Don't forget to add the spices and the water, everything that it takes.
00:10:12.480 | The system is very simple and
00:10:15.760 | straightforward. Does anybody have any questions about the system?
00:10:19.520 | Yes. I have celiac, and I was wondering if you have any suggestions for using
00:10:25.000 | your system for those of us who have food allergies.
00:10:27.360 | The system actually works really well for that because
00:10:30.880 | you're the one who's deciding exactly what goes into your food storage.
00:10:34.800 | Now there's two ways that you can do this. If you have
00:10:37.920 | a not so severe allergy and it's not taking a lot of foods out of your
00:10:42.200 | storage, you just plan your meals around
00:10:45.280 | not having those foods in your food storage. If it's pretty severe and
00:10:49.120 | there are a lot of things that you can't have,
00:10:50.720 | have two separate ones. Have one for your family and all the things that they like,
00:10:55.000 | and then a separate one for you. It's not that big of a deal to do
00:10:59.040 | because you're going to know what you can have
00:11:00.960 | and what you like. Also you want to have,
00:11:04.120 | if you've got rice flour, if you're buying pancake mixes and things that have
00:11:07.480 | rice flour,
00:11:08.200 | you're going to want to learn how to make your own. Get online and figure out how
00:11:11.440 | to make rice flour. It's very simple.
00:11:13.240 | Have a grinder and store them in their original form.
00:11:16.280 | The oats, the rice, brown rice. There's a brown rice flour you can use.
00:11:19.840 | And just learn how to make those mixes yourself,
00:11:23.360 | and it's just that simple. It works for allergies. It works for
00:11:28.040 | if you have food problems, diabetes. There's all kinds of problems that
00:11:31.640 | people have, and they're not able to just pick out any food storage. It's very
00:11:35.680 | specific.
00:11:36.440 | So it's good for that, but it's also good if you just have different tastes.
00:11:40.040 | My husband likes oatmeal. He wants to have oatmeal for breakfast
00:11:43.040 | three times a week. I like oatmeal. I'm not having it three times a week.
00:11:47.000 | So we actually have separate breakfasts. I have malt meal
00:11:50.360 | and rice pudding and different things, and it's not a problem for me to make up
00:11:54.520 | separate cards for him
00:11:55.720 | and separate cards for me, and I shop according to those cards.
00:11:58.960 | So it's a very simple process that way. This system
00:12:02.560 | can save you time and effort and money
00:12:06.080 | because you're no longer buying foods that you don't eat or even like.
00:12:09.960 | You're only going to buy what you need. You're not going to buy too much
00:12:13.680 | or too little. I used to buy dehydrated apples
00:12:17.960 | by the case. It was one of those foods that I'm looking at it going,
00:12:21.320 | "That would be a good snack. It's got fruit. That would be something good."
00:12:25.400 | And I just kept buying them. I had cases of them.
00:12:28.600 | Well, when I started the system, I realized what I really wanted
00:12:31.760 | was to have homemade apple pie every Sunday.
00:12:34.760 | And all I need for that is nine cans
00:12:38.080 | of dehydrated apples. It's a great system. You are the one that decides
00:12:42.480 | how much you eat, what you eat, even how often you eat.
00:12:46.000 | And it is wonderful for the individuality
00:12:49.160 | that it provides you. Now you've got your
00:12:52.560 | your 14 cards. There are
00:12:57.160 | recipes in the booklet that...
00:13:01.200 | the 14 cards, you're welcome. I want you to use your own recipes. I want you to make up
00:13:05.120 | your own recipes.
00:13:06.000 | But if you get into the booklet, there's about 40 recipes in here.
00:13:09.400 | I put them in mostly to show you the variety of foods
00:13:13.200 | that can be in a food storage. You're going to be surprised at the kind of
00:13:17.000 | things that you can have.
00:13:17.960 | Chicken creole and sweet and sour chicken, enchiladas. There are so many
00:13:21.960 | foods that you would not have thought
00:13:23.520 | would be food storage. So you're welcome to use the recipes, but I want you to use your
00:13:28.000 | own, your favorite recipe, because that's the way you're going to put the food you
00:13:31.840 | love
00:13:32.280 | into your food storage. Now once you get
00:13:35.720 | your cards all made up, I want you to make...
00:13:39.240 | get a notebook. This will be your food storage notebook, and you're going to make
00:13:42.680 | a shopping list. My shopping list has five columns in it.
00:13:46.360 | First one is the food. It's an alphabetical listing of
00:13:49.600 | everything that's on my card. Every spice, every meat,
00:13:53.280 | everything that's on those cards. You transfer it to this shopping list.
00:13:56.880 | If I were to be looking at my rice column,
00:14:00.200 | it would say rice under the food item.
00:14:03.240 | Then the next column is all the meals that that food is in.
00:14:07.160 | I've got 36 cups in my salmon and rice, 36 cups in my sweet and sour,
00:14:11.840 | for a total of 72 cups of rice. You go, okay,
00:14:15.480 | how many pounds is 72 cups of rice? If you go to the back of the booklet,
00:14:20.080 | there's going to be a couple of pages called the equivalency pages,
00:14:24.360 | and in there you're going to find all this great information.
00:14:27.480 | Two cups of sugar in a pound of sugar. If you look at the rice, it's going to say
00:14:32.000 | rice has a 30-year shelf life. There are 12 cups
00:14:35.520 | of rice in a number 10 can. There are two and a third cups of rice
00:14:39.380 | in a pound, and that one cup of rice makes three cups cooked.
00:14:43.120 | So all the information that you're going to need to take
00:14:46.280 | the hundreds, you will have hundreds, of teaspoons of salt
00:14:50.040 | and spices and all these foods, teaspoons, tablespoons, cups,
00:14:54.040 | and it's going to translate it, those equivalency pages,
00:14:57.160 | into what you'll actually buy in the store. So it will save you a lot of time
00:15:00.800 | and you'll be able to say in your third column what you need.
00:15:04.240 | You say 72 cups of rice. That will equate to
00:15:07.800 | six number 10 cans. So that's what you'll be able to buy. The fourth column
00:15:11.920 | has a lot of important information. It's the food that you already have,
00:15:16.080 | where it's stored, and when you bought it. For rotation purposes, this is important
00:15:21.240 | information.
00:15:21.920 | And the last column is how much I need to buy. So you've got the food,
00:15:25.880 | the meals, what you need, what you have, and what you still need to buy.
00:15:30.080 | You'll take this notebook everywhere with you when you go shopping,
00:15:33.600 | and when you see food on sale, you buy it, you mark it off, you're going to know
00:15:37.000 | exactly how much you need.
00:15:38.280 | You'll date it and you will put it away.
00:15:41.400 | Now where do you store an entire year of supply?
00:15:45.520 | You think it's this massive amount of food. And actually,
00:15:48.640 | a year's supply for one person will fit under a twin size bed.
00:15:52.160 | So you don't have to make little tables out of wheat cans and put tablecloths on them.
00:15:56.880 | You don't have to have the rolling shelves.
00:15:58.560 | You know, just go ahead and whatever is under your bed, it's never going to be
00:16:02.760 | more important
00:16:03.640 | than your family's survival. Keep it in your house.
00:16:06.840 | If you live in a desert, you don't want to put it in the garage or in the attic.
00:16:10.360 | You might as well not buy it,
00:16:11.600 | because heat, light, air, and moisture
00:16:15.280 | will destroy your food storage very quickly. Your shelf life will go to nothing.
00:16:19.040 | So,
00:16:19.440 | this is an investment. This can save your family's life. Take care of it.
00:16:23.640 | Keep it in your home where you've got a good temperature control.
00:16:27.280 | Alright, rotation.
00:16:30.320 | That's one of the most frustrating things about food storage,
00:16:33.960 | because I know a lot of you have had food storage in the past,
00:16:37.360 | and it wasn't food that you ate. You didn't even like it, but you stored it
00:16:41.120 | because somebody told you to store legumes.
00:16:43.000 | And you didn't eat it, so it went to waste.
00:16:46.200 | Or, I've had systems before where I think there's 20 pounds of spaghetti in the
00:16:50.840 | cupboard, and I'm digging through there, and half an hour later there's no
00:16:53.900 | spaghetti,
00:16:54.600 | but I find a can of powdered milk from 1976.
00:16:58.040 | And you've all done that. So, that doesn't happen to me anymore
00:17:01.600 | with this system. What I'll do
00:17:04.680 | is, in a timely manner, I will buy
00:17:07.840 | all my food storage. Now, that doesn't mean in a week, but it doesn't mean five
00:17:11.880 | years.
00:17:12.440 | In a timely manner, you're going to eventually
00:17:15.520 | check off that last item in your book. You're going to close the book
00:17:19.720 | for a year. That's the best part about rotation.
00:17:22.880 | It's a yearly process. I don't think about my food storage all year long.
00:17:27.280 | And then, once a year, I'll take out my book, and I will go
00:17:30.880 | alphabetically down every column and every item.
00:17:34.760 | And what I'm looking for is any food that looks like it's going to be coming
00:17:38.640 | up for expiration
00:17:39.840 | in the coming year. If it is, I'll note how much
00:17:43.680 | it is. I will go out and buy it. I'll
00:17:47.400 | repackage it however it needs to be packaged, if it's vacuum packed or
00:17:50.960 | in the number 10 cans. Date it. Mark in my book that I have a new date for that
00:17:55.400 | food.
00:17:55.920 | I'll put it under the bed, and I'll take the food that's coming up for
00:17:59.000 | expiration
00:17:59.800 | and put it in my kitchen pantry for daily use. So,
00:18:03.880 | I think the best part about this particular system for me was
00:18:07.520 | I don't have to do rotation more than once a year, and I always have
00:18:11.360 | a full year supply. I'm not gonna worry about if I'm ready to go to the store
00:18:16.080 | the next day, and I need to
00:18:17.320 | replenish whatever it is, and something happens,
00:18:21.080 | I'm stuck. I don't touch my food storage food
00:18:24.800 | at all, unless it's time to rotate it into my kitchen pantry.
00:18:28.860 | I really like that part of the program because
00:18:32.280 | I feel that security of knowing no matter what happens, no matter when it
00:18:35.640 | happens,
00:18:36.240 | I'm prepared. Alright,
00:18:40.000 | another thing that helps me with the rotation is that I'm
00:18:43.420 | all about long shelf life. I won't have anything in my food storage that doesn't
00:18:47.780 | have at least a
00:18:48.560 | three-year shelf life. Most of my food has a 10,
00:18:52.200 | 20, 30-year shelf life. Some of it's indefinite.
00:18:55.600 | I love the indefinite food. Try to get those. If you will go to
00:18:59.920 | ProvidentLiving.org, the website there is going to
00:19:03.840 | tell you the latest information about dry pack foods. This is
00:19:07.720 | what dry pack food looks like. It's the number 10 can, and
00:19:11.160 | it has an oxygen packet inside. The website there
00:19:14.800 | is talking about the dry pack foods that have 30
00:19:18.360 | year shelf life. They are beans, rice,
00:19:22.200 | wheat, apples, macaroni, oats,
00:19:25.440 | potato flakes, onions, spaghetti, sugar.
00:19:28.720 | Sugar has an indefinite shelf life. They're even giving powdered milk
00:19:32.400 | a 20-year shelf life. Keep in mind,
00:19:35.720 | the longer you hold on to it,
00:19:39.160 | the less the quality and the nutritional value is going to be.
00:19:43.600 | If you open it 30 years later, it's certainly not going to be
00:19:47.200 | as tasty or nutritional as if you opened it in five years.
00:19:50.920 | But that's a decision that you get to make. The point is
00:19:54.240 | that it is safe to eat, that it will sustain
00:19:57.600 | life. If we're eating food storage,
00:20:00.600 | that's what it's all about, is sustaining life. So 30-year shelf life on some of
00:20:04.800 | those foods.
00:20:05.420 | I didn't have a lot of canned foods in my storage because I thought it had
00:20:09.200 | maybe a one or two-year shelf life. On this website it says,
00:20:13.280 | "For emergency storage, commercially canned foods in metal or jars
00:20:17.720 | will remain safe to consume as long as the seal
00:20:21.920 | has not been broken." You understand that this is the seal,
00:20:25.920 | and if there is any damage to the can,
00:20:29.560 | if it's dented, if it's bulging, if it's weeping,
00:20:33.320 | if you open it and it spurts, then that's not safe.
00:20:36.520 | The old saying, "When in doubt, throw it out," you remember that.
00:20:39.720 | But if the seal is still intact, it says, "As long as."
00:20:43.680 | To me, that's a long time. So I'm pretty excited about that.
00:20:47.720 | The Canned Food Alliance concurs, and they say that canned food is safe to eat
00:20:52.120 | as long as the can is not damaged in any way. So
00:20:55.920 | I have begun putting a lot more canned foods in my food storage.
00:21:00.160 | First off, because it takes less fuel to cook because it's already cooked,
00:21:04.760 | and I don't have to store as much water because
00:21:08.120 | it's already got the water, it's fully cooked. So I've got fruits and vegetables and a lot of
00:21:12.320 | foods
00:21:12.920 | that I didn't have before because I was about the long shelf life.
00:21:17.240 | If you go to the Hormel website, they actually say that their Hormel chili
00:21:21.320 | has an indefinite shelf life. On their website, they say that. So they
00:21:26.520 | really have discovered canned foods last much,
00:21:30.000 | much longer than we ever imagined. Another way that I am able to get the
00:21:35.360 | long shelf life that I like
00:21:36.840 | is with food exchanges. I don't store oil,
00:21:40.240 | I'll only store shortening. Shortening has, unopened shortening,
00:21:43.600 | a 10-year shelf life. And even after you open it, there's a little trick that you
00:21:47.920 | can use.
00:21:48.520 | You've all had the five-pound can of shortening and you get to the bottom and it's
00:21:52.000 | rancid
00:21:52.680 | and you toss it out. Well, when you open your shortening now,
00:21:56.120 | take what you need and then melt the shortening,
00:21:59.680 | the rest of the shortening, and pour it into
00:22:02.880 | mason jars, any size mason jar. While it's hot,
00:22:06.800 | make sure the rim is clean, put a lid on it and a ring on it.
00:22:09.880 | This is a lid and a ring. Put the lid on it and put the ring on it.
00:22:14.320 | And as it cools, that exchange of heat
00:22:17.920 | will seal the jar and it'll be just like it's never been opened.
00:22:21.280 | So you can keep your shortening for a lot longer. Another food exchange that I
00:22:25.800 | use,
00:22:26.360 | I store cream of tartar and baking soda.
00:22:29.480 | Both of those items have an indefinite shelf life.
00:22:32.560 | If you combine those two items, and it's in the booklet, how to combine them,
00:22:37.120 | if you combine those two items, you can make baking powder. So you've got
00:22:40.960 | three items that have indefinite shelf life. The
00:22:44.240 | other one I do, powdered eggs. I don't store powdered eggs, I'll store
00:22:48.040 | unflavored gelatin, like the Knox unflavored gelatin, but you can buy it
00:22:51.920 | generic, you don't have to buy the Knox. Buy it in bulk, it's much cheaper in bulk.
00:22:56.840 | And for about three cents a teaspoon, you add
00:23:00.280 | hot water and cold water to the Knox unflavored gelatin,
00:23:03.340 | and that is a substitute for an egg. And you can put that in your
00:23:06.800 | brownies, in your cakes, muffins, anything that you're baking,
00:23:10.680 | you can exchange with the unflavored gelatin, and that has an indefinite shelf
00:23:15.520 | life.
00:23:15.880 | So there's a lot of ways to get that long shelf life.
00:23:19.680 | When you're doing your
00:23:22.680 | yearly food rotation and checking things out, you're going to
00:23:26.880 | visually check every one of your vacuum sealed
00:23:30.240 | foods. I pull out the box and I will open it up and
00:23:33.520 | actually touch the top of every single jar to make sure that it's still sealed.
00:23:38.560 | If it's come undone, you might as well not have bothered because
00:23:42.360 | air has gotten to the food and it's not going to extend the shelf life.
00:23:46.520 | So visually, when you're doing that yearly check, visually check
00:23:49.640 | every one of your jars vacuum sealed. Now we're going to talk about vacuum sealing.
00:23:53.920 | What you're using is a vacuum sealer of some kind, a vacuum
00:23:58.920 | they've got all kinds of different kinds. I have
00:24:02.240 | just gone back to the Food Saver. These things last forever.
00:24:05.640 | My sister's got one that's 30 years old and it's still working.
00:24:09.880 | So this is a Food Saver. They cost about a hundred dollars new.
00:24:14.520 | I don't want you to buy it new. I want you to go online.
00:24:17.720 | You go to one of those sites where you buy from your neighbors or
00:24:21.560 | the Bay Place where you bid. You can go ahead and check those out.
00:24:25.840 | Every time I've checked online in these different places,
00:24:29.240 | there are at least a hundred Food Savers that they're selling,
00:24:32.800 | usually about twenty, maybe thirty dollars. Some of them are brand new.
00:24:36.840 | Some of them have all the attachments with them. So go online
00:24:40.040 | and don't buy it brand new. Save a lot of money. The one thing that you're looking
00:24:44.280 | for
00:24:44.880 | on your Food Saver is the little porthole. It has to have a little porthole on the top.
00:24:50.240 | This part I never use. You've seen
00:24:54.000 | Food Savers that they do the little bags and that's really cool
00:24:57.360 | but they don't hold the seal. This is not good for long-term storage.
00:25:01.280 | Eventually every single bag that we've ever done
00:25:04.680 | has lost its seal. So we only do
00:25:07.720 | the vacuum sealing with the jars. You're going to get,
00:25:11.560 | besides the vacuum, the Food Saver, you're going to get
00:25:15.040 | a jar sealer attachment. This is the regular mouth. This is the wide mouth.
00:25:19.200 | I get both of them. They're about ten dollars each and that way you can use
00:25:22.920 | all of your jars. You can only use standard mason jars.
00:25:26.760 | You can't use spaghetti food jars, baby food jars. It has to be the standard
00:25:30.440 | mason jar. So you're going to take your jar sealer attachment.
00:25:34.960 | It's got a little hose. Make sure it comes with the hose. You plug it into that
00:25:38.560 | little porthole
00:25:39.520 | and you're going to take... you want to sterilize your bottles.
00:25:44.840 | Run them through the dishwasher. This is just an air exchange.
00:25:48.400 | It doesn't sterilize anything. You want to run this through the dishwasher. Make sure your
00:25:51.720 | lids are clean.
00:25:52.360 | But you put your food in the jar. You put your lid on. You don't have to heat it or
00:25:56.360 | do anything special to it.
00:25:57.600 | You put your jar sealer over the top of it and then you push the button.
00:26:01.640 | And within about 10 seconds it will have pulled the air
00:26:04.920 | out of the jar. And this should stay sealed
00:26:08.080 | until you open it. Like I say, I check every year to make sure that nothing's come
00:26:12.600 | unsealed, but generally speaking this will stay sealed
00:26:15.880 | until you open it. And when you open it, if you're careful
00:26:19.000 | and don't bend the lid, you can just take it off like that
00:26:23.160 | and you can reuse this lid over and over.
00:26:26.160 | Alright, are there any questions about vacuum sealing foods?
00:26:30.720 | Yes? What is the shelf life of the vacuum sealed foods?
00:26:35.360 | That's really going to depend on kind of where you live
00:26:39.280 | and how you take care of your foods. I live in the desert
00:26:42.680 | and it's, you know, I get a three-year shelf life out of my food storage, out of my
00:26:46.800 | vacuum sealed foods.
00:26:47.840 | If you live in the mountains and you've got a basement, a nice cool dark basement,
00:26:52.040 | your vacuum sealed foods will last longer. Five years, maybe
00:26:56.000 | more. As you experiment with this and you test them every year
00:27:00.040 | when you're doing your rotation, you can open up a jar of
00:27:03.280 | M&M's, that's the best part, and test it and make sure that they're still good.
00:27:07.760 | And you'll get a better idea as you practice with it.
00:27:11.480 | I think the least amount of shelf life
00:27:14.640 | is my chocolates. It's two years on that, but I kind of have to confess that it's
00:27:19.760 | probably because
00:27:20.720 | I eat them before they ever get past two years. So you'll have to experiment with
00:27:24.920 | chocolates yourself and see how long they'll last.
00:27:27.000 | What the Food Saver does
00:27:30.360 | for me is it put the foods, the real foods
00:27:34.120 | I love, into my food storage. Because
00:27:37.440 | if you've got foods that have a high moisture, oil,
00:27:41.200 | or sugar content, they can't be sealed in the number 10 cans.
00:27:44.880 | So vacuum packing will put all of those foods,
00:27:49.080 | by putting them in glass jars, is going to put those foods,
00:27:52.480 | raisins, nuts, chocolates, granola bars,
00:27:57.040 | brown rice, almost anything that will sit in your kitchen pantry on the shelf,
00:28:01.760 | you can vacuum pack. You can vacuum seal them
00:28:04.800 | and it's going to extend the shelf life, like I say, depending on where you live
00:28:08.680 | and how well you take care of it,
00:28:10.160 | by at least three years, maybe five years,
00:28:14.200 | maybe more. You have to do the testing on that.
00:28:19.960 | This is what changed my whole concept
00:28:23.360 | of food storage. This is the base, the basis of my system.
00:28:27.480 | I know it doesn't look that great, but this is
00:28:31.440 | real meat. This is bottled chicken. This is what makes my food storage
00:28:36.120 | chicken enchiladas, it's real chicken. Beef, stew,
00:28:39.640 | it's real beef. This is solid meat, it's
00:28:42.880 | fully cooked, ready to eat, it makes its own juice,
00:28:46.520 | it's tender, it sits on the pantry shelf, needs no refrigeration, just like you can
00:28:51.640 | tuna fish,
00:28:52.400 | but it's going to taste so much better than your canned meats
00:28:55.960 | and it's going to be cheaper because you're going to be buying
00:28:59.080 | all your meats on sale. There's hardly any meat that you can't
00:29:03.400 | bottle. You can do beef, chicken,
00:29:06.440 | turkey, ham,
00:29:09.520 | fish, it will actually dissolve the bones in fish. I've even had moose.
00:29:14.000 | So I joke that say if you can catch it, you can can it.
00:29:17.480 | I can't
00:29:21.160 | say enough good things about this because this does change your food
00:29:24.040 | storage
00:29:24.560 | to know that you can have real meat. Now you're having real
00:29:27.960 | meals. The process could not be simpler. You're going to start with a pressure
00:29:32.320 | canner
00:29:32.880 | and there is a difference
00:29:36.080 | between a pressure canner and a pressure cooker.
00:29:39.680 | A pressure cooker is a thin metal pot.
00:29:42.840 | It's got a little lid that goes on the top and it screws on like that. It just kind of
00:29:46.480 | twists on.
00:29:47.180 | Then it has a little cap that goes on the top of it. When it gets to a certain
00:29:50.000 | pressure
00:29:50.720 | or heat, it starts rocking back and forth. That's a pressure cooker.
00:29:54.080 | You can't bottle meats
00:29:57.520 | in a pressure cooker. It might work.
00:30:00.680 | You might put them in there and it might seal, but it's not safe.
00:30:03.760 | You haven't had it at the right pressure or the right time. Don't do it with a
00:30:08.040 | pressure cooker. You have to have a pressure canner.
00:30:10.240 | A pressure canner is a much heavier metal.
00:30:13.360 | You've got the lid.
00:30:16.520 | If you don't have a pressure canner already, I'm going to suggest that you
00:30:21.160 | buy
00:30:21.600 | metal to metal. There's no rubber gasket inside of here.
00:30:24.800 | If you've already got a canner and it has the rubber gasket, that's fine. It'll
00:30:28.160 | work.
00:30:28.600 | But I suggest that you order some more
00:30:31.760 | gaskets because at some point it will be the fatal flaw of
00:30:36.000 | that mechanism. It's going to go bad and you'll have steam pouring down everywhere.
00:30:40.360 | It's going to have wing nuts as some kind of mechanism to hold
00:30:43.840 | the lid down. It's going to have a pressure release valve.
00:30:47.440 | I have five pressure canners that I bought online.
00:30:51.080 | One of them is over 80 years old
00:30:54.080 | and it still works metal to metal. It has a pressure release valve that is just a
00:30:58.280 | valve that
00:30:58.880 | is up when it's open and you push it down when it's closed. This one actually has
00:31:02.960 | a little weight, 5, 10, 15 and you put the weight on there
00:31:07.360 | to close up the valve. Then it's going to have a pressure gauge
00:31:10.880 | and that's going to have 5, 10, 15 and then the digits in between to let you know
00:31:15.800 | how many pounds of pressure you're cooking. The
00:31:20.320 | pounds of pressure that you need to use is going to depend on
00:31:24.200 | your altitude. So when you get a pressure canner,
00:31:27.200 | if you get a used one, it's not going to have an instruction booklet,
00:31:30.680 | but you can go online, know what your altitude is and it will tell you how
00:31:34.520 | many pounds of pressure
00:31:35.720 | you need to cook at. I'm in the desert and I
00:31:39.120 | cook at 10 pounds of pressure. If you're higher up in the mountains it could be 13, 14.
00:31:43.240 | So that's very important. Look that up when you get your pressure canner.
00:31:47.040 | Let's start with the bottles.
00:31:50.560 | If you have never bottled
00:31:53.760 | meat before, I want you to,
00:31:56.840 | I'm going to suggest that you buy new bottles.
00:32:01.120 | If you've got bottles that came from grandma's attic or a thrift shop or a yard sale
00:32:05.800 | or something,
00:32:06.400 | you don't know how old they are. You don't know how many times they've been used.
00:32:09.360 | It's really sad to have that really yummy meat inside the canner
00:32:13.240 | and you open it up and the bottle had a hairline crack
00:32:16.600 | and there's meat floating in there. So I suggest you buy new bottles
00:32:20.120 | and then you can use them over and over because
00:32:23.920 | you know how many times they've been used. You know they're safe. You're going to
00:32:28.920 | start with
00:32:29.760 | raw meat. I like the raw pack. There are other ways to do it
00:32:33.840 | but I like the raw pack. It's easier, it's faster, there's
00:32:37.640 | no preparation whatsoever. Literally, you take raw meat
00:32:41.760 | and you put it in a jar. That's it.
00:32:45.200 | You can put a little bit of salt in there if you want. I'm going to suggest
00:32:49.360 | that you don't put anything else in the meat. You'll want to experiment. You'll want to
00:32:54.400 | make chicken noodle soup.
00:32:55.680 | You'll want to do all kinds of things with gravy and beef. Please don't. There are a
00:32:59.760 | lot of foods that
00:33:00.960 | aren't safe for home canning. Rice,
00:33:04.000 | dairy products, flour,
00:33:07.560 | there's a lot of things that aren't safe.
00:33:10.760 | So if you just do meat and I don't even put spices in mine,
00:33:14.840 | just salt. If you'll do that, you know your meat will be safe
00:33:18.240 | and you can always add those ingredients later when you're cooking your meal.
00:33:21.800 | So just do the meat. So we have the meat in the jar.
00:33:25.120 | You've got a pan on your stove that you're boiling
00:33:28.520 | the lids. You're going to soften this little rubber gasket here
00:33:32.320 | and that is going to, after they've been maybe, you know,
00:33:35.840 | two or three minutes, the meat's in here. Make sure the rim of your jar is very
00:33:40.040 | clean.
00:33:40.600 | There's no grease or anything on there. You'll put your lid on
00:33:43.800 | and you'll put your ring on and you put it on finger tight.
00:33:47.120 | For my husband that's a whole lot tighter than for me, so
00:33:50.640 | finger tight. Now you're going to come to your canner and you've got about three
00:33:54.360 | inches of water in your canner
00:33:56.000 | and you've got a tray in the bottom of it.
00:33:59.760 | Don't put your bottles directly in the bottom of the canner.
00:34:02.840 | They have to sit on a tray. So you put your tray in there and then you've got your
00:34:07.040 | bottles. If you're doing pints, you can, this is a
00:34:10.200 | 921 canner, you can do about
00:34:13.360 | 17 to 19 pint jars. The quart jar
00:34:17.160 | will hold two pounds of meat. The pint jar will hold one pound.
00:34:20.480 | If you have a big family, you're going to want to have these
00:34:23.600 | and it'll hold seven. They do have one at the
00:34:27.160 | 930 and it will stack quarts.
00:34:30.240 | I've always wanted one of those. It will stack quarts double high so you can put
00:34:33.880 | 14
00:34:34.840 | quart jars in there. That's 28 pounds of meat in
00:34:37.920 | one cooking, one shot. So if you've got pints,
00:34:41.360 | you can stack them. You put the first layer in
00:34:44.760 | and then you need another tray that you put on top of that
00:34:49.360 | and then start stacking the second layer. If you don't have another tray,
00:34:53.320 | if you bought this secondhand and there's not another tray,
00:34:56.800 | then you're going to want to stack them, but don't
00:35:00.440 | stack them on top. Do a stagger like that
00:35:03.680 | so that they're not sitting right on top. And from there, put your lid on
00:35:07.600 | and what you're going to do next
00:35:11.840 | is called exhausting the canner. You turn the heat on high
00:35:16.680 | and after 10-15 minutes, just depends on how hot
00:35:20.720 | your stove runs, you're going to see steam coming out of your exhaust valve here
00:35:25.840 | and eventually you'll see water spitting out of it.
00:35:28.920 | When you get to that point about five minutes after you've had water spitting
00:35:32.640 | out,
00:35:33.040 | what you're doing is exhausting the canner that's pulling the air out of the
00:35:37.000 | canner
00:35:37.640 | and out of the jars. So it's an important process. Don't skip that process.
00:35:41.520 | And then if we're cooking in the desert, 10 pounds of pressure, I'm going to put this
00:35:44.960 | weight
00:35:45.480 | on at 10 pounds and immediately my gauge is going to start going up.
00:35:49.920 | When it gets to 10, or if you're doing in the mountains, whatever the
00:35:53.840 | altitude is, when you get to the right pressure,
00:35:57.040 | then you start timing. If you've got pints, it's 75 minutes. If you've got
00:36:01.320 | quarts,
00:36:01.960 | it's 90 minutes. And if you've got fish, you add 15 minutes to both of those.
00:36:06.600 | You've got 90 minutes going.
00:36:10.680 | Right away you're going to have to turn down the heat, otherwise it's going to go
00:36:13.400 | too high.
00:36:14.000 | So right away you're turning down the heat and during the entire 90 minutes
00:36:17.280 | you're going to continue turning that heat down to keep it at 10 pounds of pressure.
00:36:20.960 | Here's what happens if you walk away and it gets up to 13
00:36:25.000 | and you run in and you turn it down and it goes down to 8 and you turn it up again.
00:36:28.480 | What's happening inside your canner? You didn't put any water
00:36:32.960 | in with that meat. The raw pack, there's no water. It makes its own juice.
00:36:37.560 | It's this great
00:36:38.720 | broth that's being made.
00:36:41.920 | And when the temperature goes too high,
00:36:45.840 | a vacuum effect actually pulls the juices out of your jars.
00:36:49.760 | So if you keep it at a steady 10 pounds of pressure, you're going to keep all
00:36:53.720 | those juices in there.
00:36:54.720 | When you're done, you take the lid off,
00:36:57.960 | take the jars out, put them on a counter away from a cool draft.
00:37:01.520 | Eventually you're going to hear that lovely little plink sound
00:37:04.640 | and they've all sealed. If you have one, occasionally you'll have one that won't seal,
00:37:09.360 | go ahead and put it in the refrigerator and have it later that night or you can
00:37:12.760 | reprocess it
00:37:13.760 | but you'll have to use a new lid. It will be double processed but it's still great
00:37:17.560 | in a soup.
00:37:18.200 | And wipe them off when they're all cooled. Wipe them off, put them in the box,
00:37:22.800 | date them, date them, and put them away.
00:37:26.720 | So that was a long way of saying meat goes in the jar,
00:37:31.240 | jar goes in the canner, cook, take it out,
00:37:34.360 | market, put it away. It could not be
00:37:37.920 | simpler. If you've ever done fruits or vegetables, you're going to be thrilled
00:37:42.600 | at how much easier and faster it is to do meats.
00:37:46.080 | I did an experiment one day, I had three canners, two were on the stove and I
00:37:50.640 | would keep one filled
00:37:51.680 | and I put up a hundred and fifty pounds of chicken
00:37:55.160 | in 12 hours. So you could easily do
00:37:59.000 | 50 pounds in a day. Easy with one canner.
00:38:02.320 | Yes? Are there any meats that you shouldn't can?
00:38:06.400 | There are.
00:38:10.080 | It's not that you can't can them, you know, if you can catch it you can can it.
00:38:13.920 | You don't want to do any processed meats,
00:38:17.080 | hot dogs, bologna, turkey ham,
00:38:20.520 | anything like that. You just don't want to do that, it turns out really mushy.
00:38:24.520 | Hamburger, I used to do hamburger
00:38:28.720 | and I didn't like how it was kind of a pasty texture.
00:38:32.560 | Now you can do ground meats but you're going to want to
00:38:35.920 | brown them first. Sausage, I do have sausage in my food storage.
00:38:40.040 | So I will brown that meat first and then put it in a jar,
00:38:43.800 | kind of loosely put it in a jar and add hot water to it
00:38:46.920 | and then process it like you normally would. But when
00:38:50.320 | when hamburger went up in price, I decided that there wasn't anything in my food
00:38:54.200 | storage
00:38:54.720 | that wouldn't taste better with shredded meat than it would with hamburger.
00:38:58.760 | So I pretty much stopped doing hamburger. Another idea is
00:39:02.400 | you know after Thanksgiving you're taking all the meat off the leftover turkey and
00:39:06.440 | you put it in a baggie and you stick it in the fridge and three or four days later you stick it in the freezer
00:39:10.920 | and
00:39:11.360 | about six months later you throw it away because it's freezer burn. You've all done that.
00:39:15.720 | What you're going to want to do now is just take the meat off the bone,
00:39:20.280 | put it in your jar, add the hot water on top of it
00:39:24.280 | because you've already cooked the juices out of it so it won't make its own juice, but you
00:39:27.600 | add hot water to that
00:39:28.680 | and process it like you would normally. The same amount of time, everything.
00:39:32.000 | And that will just be a nice chicken soup type of meat.
00:39:35.720 | And you might want to mark on it that it was leftovers,
00:39:38.800 | that it wasn't raw pack. So the rotation of meats.
00:39:43.280 | Any other questions about cooking meats? There's always
00:39:47.520 | questions about the meat. Yes? Is it safe to bottle meats on a glass top stove?
00:39:52.400 | If you buy a new canner, it's actually going to say do not bottle,
00:39:56.360 | do not use a glass top stove. And I kind of
00:39:59.440 | wondered about that but I found the reason was, there's two reasons.
00:40:03.040 | It's quite heavy and when it's full of meat it's got to be even heavier
00:40:06.520 | and if you were to accidentally set that down too hard it could crack the glass
00:40:10.600 | top stove. So you have to be careful with that.
00:40:12.560 | But I think the biggest reason is the diameter of your burner
00:40:16.280 | is usually quite a bit smaller than the diameter of your canner
00:40:20.000 | and as it gets hot that heat radiates out
00:40:23.200 | and it can discolor your stove. I have done
00:40:26.920 | literally hundreds of pounds of
00:40:30.160 | meat on my glass top stoves. I've had three glass top stoves
00:40:33.560 | different homes and I've never had a problem. But I
00:40:36.920 | I think it's a good idea to warn you about that and you use your own
00:40:40.240 | discretion on that.
00:40:43.920 | Rotating meats. That's kind of hard because you know
00:40:47.600 | I say it's easy and it is easy but when it's done
00:40:50.920 | you know it's almost like gold. You're just looking at this chicken and you're going
00:40:54.840 | "Oh this is so good" and you just think "I don't want to use it, that's my food storage."
00:40:59.040 | Please use it. You are going to be so
00:41:02.200 | excited about how nice this is to come home
00:41:05.320 | and you open this up and you've got instant chicken enchiladas, you've got a
00:41:09.440 | chicken salad sandwich, you've got
00:41:11.080 | green chili burros. It goes on and on forever
00:41:15.520 | and it's a 15-minute dinner so the convenience
00:41:18.760 | is going to be really nice in your daily life. So you want to rotate it.
00:41:23.160 | Also if you keep it for a really long time it's going to, again, like all the
00:41:28.400 | other foods, it will lose its nutritional value
00:41:31.680 | and it's just better to use it up. So here's
00:41:34.960 | a good rotational system. If you're going to have a meat dish in
00:41:38.880 | all of your daily, you know one meat dish every day,
00:41:42.200 | 365 meat dishes, you're going to eventually
00:41:45.800 | bottle up, you know if you can do 50 pounds a day you could have
00:41:48.880 | all your food storage done in about a week. So you bottle it all up,
00:41:52.880 | you date it, you put it under the bed. You have two choices. You can
00:41:56.320 | bottle up 50 more pounds and put that in your kitchen pantry
00:42:00.240 | or you can take 50 pounds out from your food storage
00:42:03.400 | and put that in your kitchen pantry. But the idea is that you want it in your
00:42:07.400 | pantry.
00:42:08.000 | If you use two bottles a week, that 50 pounds will be gone
00:42:12.640 | in about six months. And you will have, then when it's gone,
00:42:16.160 | you know that you've done 25 beef, 25 chicken, whatever it is.
00:42:19.880 | You bottle up 50 more pounds, put that under the bed,
00:42:23.080 | take out 50 more pounds, put it in the kitchen pantry. It's just this nice,
00:42:27.400 | like a free ride that you get to take it out of your pantry.
00:42:31.080 | It's not coming out of your food storage. So you take it out
00:42:34.440 | and just do that rotation. Two bottles a week, you will have your entire food
00:42:39.000 | storage,
00:42:39.520 | the 365 jars, rotated in about three years.
00:42:43.160 | If you really like it and you want to use three bottles a week,
00:42:46.480 | you'll have it rotated in about two years. So please
00:42:50.080 | use the meat. I think you're going to be really excited about it. And
00:42:53.560 | don't be afraid of it. I've heard stories about
00:42:56.680 | Aunt Ethel maiming six of her children with the pressure canner and
00:43:00.160 | they're all just scared to death of it. It's very, very safe, especially the new
00:43:04.600 | ones. They've got
00:43:05.400 | every safety precaution there is. It's a fabulous way
00:43:08.960 | of putting real foods, real meals,
00:43:12.440 | into your food storage. Now, if you
00:43:16.080 | have a bowl of beans or you have a bowl of chili and cornbread,
00:43:19.840 | the only difference is your spices. Spices are going to make or break your
00:43:25.080 | food storage.
00:43:25.880 | So don't forget to get your spices. Buy them by the pound.
00:43:29.480 | They're going to be a lot cheaper if you buy them by the pound. I think you can get a
00:43:32.280 | pound of cinnamon for about three dollars
00:43:34.280 | if you buy it in bulk. And what I do is I just bring it home,
00:43:37.840 | I'll take out what I need for my food storage and I'll vacuum seal that.
00:43:41.240 | And then that goes in my food storage and the rest goes in my pantry.
00:43:44.480 | And if it's vacuum sealed, you shouldn't have any problem rotating
00:43:48.360 | every five years. It would be an easy rotation. You might
00:43:51.640 | even be able to go longer. But don't forget your spices. That's really important.
00:43:55.600 | One of my favorite sources of alternative fuel is the solar oven.
00:44:00.320 | Solar cooking is used all over the world. In India alone,
00:44:04.040 | there are hundreds of thousands of solar ovens being used.
00:44:07.560 | This is a clean heat. It keeps the heat
00:44:11.440 | out of the kitchen. It tastes
00:44:14.840 | really good. They've actually done tests and they found that solar cooked food
00:44:18.840 | wins out over all of the other sources of fuel,
00:44:22.720 | your regular cooking. And it's a free source of fuel.
00:44:26.080 | You're using the sun. If the sun is shining, it's going to work. You set it out in your
00:44:30.160 | backyard,
00:44:30.840 | open it up, within 20 to 30 minutes you're going to have a 350 degree oven.
00:44:36.000 | And you can cook almost anything in an oven that hot.
00:44:39.840 | I've cooked rice and pastas and casseroles.
00:44:43.080 | It bakes bread beautifully. It browns it. It makes a beautiful loaf of homemade bread.
00:44:47.840 | There are three kinds of solar ovens. You've got the simple box oven.
00:44:52.080 | You've got the parabolic solar cooker. And that is
00:44:56.240 | a circle of mirrors. It's pretty complicated. And then you've got
00:45:00.040 | the panel cooker. And my favorite is the panel cooker. This is the Global Sun Oven.
00:45:04.600 | I really like this one. It's my favorite. Process, you set it out there.
00:45:08.520 | And you've got the panels. This is very easy to open.
00:45:13.040 | It just opens like that. These panels will catch the light
00:45:17.800 | and it will shoot it into the oven. Inside,
00:45:21.760 | you've got a glass door. And the glass door
00:45:25.280 | is on a rubber gasket, a heavy rubber gasket. And that keeps the seal
00:45:29.400 | in the oven. It's also got a rocker arm inside.
00:45:33.040 | And that keeps the food level if you have to move the oven around.
00:45:36.440 | So it's going to keep that food level. It won't spill. And then there's actually a
00:45:39.880 | temperature gauge up here in the corner. So you're going to know when your oven is
00:45:43.680 | hot enough.
00:45:44.440 | It's easy to close up.
00:45:47.840 | Just like that. I keep my solar cooker on a
00:45:52.720 | rolling cart so that as I'm moving it around
00:45:56.000 | it's not going to spill the food. That just makes it a little easier to follow
00:45:59.320 | the sun.
00:45:59.920 | Cooking with a solar oven takes about twice as long
00:46:03.120 | as it would normally. If it takes 25 minutes to cook your bread, it's going to
00:46:06.720 | take about
00:46:07.440 | 45 or 50 minutes with solar cooking. If you have a large amount of food,
00:46:12.000 | you want to, instead of putting it in one big pan, you want to split it up
00:46:15.760 | and maybe cut it up into smaller pieces. And it's going to cook faster that way.
00:46:19.720 | Cookware. You want to buy your oven first
00:46:22.720 | and then get your cookware. Because you don't want to buy a pan that's not going to
00:46:26.440 | fit.
00:46:26.920 | You can have Dutch ovens if you'd like to use those. That's really good for that
00:46:31.680 | occasional cloudy day. The sun comes out and goes behind a cloud.
00:46:35.800 | A Dutch oven takes a little longer to heat up, but it will hold on to the heat
00:46:40.120 | so that when the sun goes behind the cloud it's going to keep that food hot
00:46:43.440 | so that it's safe. Another type of cookware is you want to have
00:46:46.880 | metal. You want to have dark metal, thin metal that's going to
00:46:50.760 | heat up very quickly. And you want to have tight-fitting lids. That's going to keep
00:46:54.360 | the moisture inside your foods
00:46:56.120 | so that you've cooked spaghetti on top of a stove and you see all that steam coming up.
00:47:00.400 | When you cook in a solar oven, you've got that tight-fitting lid.
00:47:03.480 | You don't lose that moisture. So you actually use less water
00:47:07.440 | when you're cooking with solar because that moisture stays inside.
00:47:10.560 | There are a lot of things that you can do with a solar oven besides just cooking
00:47:14.840 | food.
00:47:15.360 | You can pasteurize water. You can kill infestations of grain or other foods.
00:47:20.240 | You can sanitize dishes or dry firewood.
00:47:23.280 | You can sprout foods. And you can decrystallize jams or honey.
00:47:28.280 | Honey is one of those foods that has a very long shelf life,
00:47:31.280 | but it will go hard. As it gets old, it goes hard, it crystallizes.
00:47:35.080 | I used to buy honey in the big buckets,
00:47:38.120 | and now I buy it in the small five or six pound
00:47:41.720 | jars. And that will fit inside my solar oven because
00:47:45.200 | if it's gone hard and if it's crystallized,
00:47:48.200 | heat will bring it back. So I just pop it in a solar oven
00:47:51.320 | and you're able to bring back that honey. For those of you who are interested, a
00:47:55.040 | solar oven
00:47:55.920 | will cost about $200. And I need to warn you that you're not going to be able to
00:48:00.000 | go on the websites and get them
00:48:01.840 | used or discounted because once people buy these,
00:48:05.160 | they pretty much keep them. So if you go in with a group,
00:48:08.960 | sometimes you can get a discount that way with a solar oven.
00:48:12.000 | So this is one of my favorite alternative sources of fuel.
00:48:15.600 | And my other one is called the rocket stove. I was teaching a class
00:48:20.120 | in Portland a few months ago, and they weren't really interested in the solar
00:48:23.920 | oven,
00:48:24.360 | as you can imagine.
00:48:28.160 | And they were doing demonstrations on a rocket stove.
00:48:31.960 | Just the name is so cool. The guys are going, "Rocket stove!"
00:48:36.040 | They were showing rocket stoves. And a rocket stove
00:48:39.680 | is great because you're going to be able to get
00:48:42.840 | a very hot, almost smokeless fire.
00:48:46.320 | And because of the design of the rocket stove, it concentrates the heat
00:48:50.840 | and it burns the fuel more efficiently. So you're going to use 75%
00:48:55.440 | less fuel than you would if you were just making a fire.
00:48:58.560 | They're really great. You can buy them for about $40 or $50.
00:49:03.160 | You can buy it already made, or you can make your own. And I guarantee the guys
00:49:06.680 | are going to want to make them.
00:49:07.680 | When I was in New Mexico, a guy had made one out of a propane tank.
00:49:12.200 | And he had welded all this cool stuff on it. It looked like it was going to take off.
00:49:16.240 | It was a rocket. My husband and I made a double burner
00:49:20.520 | rocket stove. We used five-gallon metal cans.
00:49:23.720 | And we put the stove pipe inside, and we have an oven grate on the top. And it's
00:49:28.080 | just really cool.
00:49:29.320 | Less than $20. You can make them for under $20 very easily.
00:49:33.320 | I brought one that you can make for free. And the instructions how to make this are
00:49:37.680 | in the booklet.
00:49:38.680 | But I'm going to walk you through it in case my instructions aren't very clear.
00:49:41.680 | You need a number 10 can and four soup cans.
00:49:45.000 | And then some kind of insulation, maybe ashes or vermiculite or something.
00:49:48.600 | But you're going to start with the number 10 can, and you're going to take the lid off
00:49:51.720 | and save the lid. And then you're going to cut a hole
00:49:55.160 | in the edge, in the side of the can, the size of your tomato soup can.
00:49:59.560 | So that it just fits inside. Now you want to make it
00:50:02.600 | almost exactly the right size because
00:50:05.680 | if you don't, you'll have your ashes coming out the edges here. So
00:50:09.520 | I use, get some of these nice little tin snips that have the curve to them.
00:50:13.960 | And cut it kind of small and then keep cutting to make it
00:50:17.080 | just right. So that it's going to be the right size. You're going to take your first
00:50:21.360 | soup can, and you're going to take just the lid off.
00:50:24.480 | And cut a hole the size of the can
00:50:27.720 | in the side of that. Take your second can, cut the top
00:50:31.720 | and the bottom off, and that's going to fit inside of that first can.
00:50:35.640 | And that's the beginning of your elbow. You're going to take your third soup can,
00:50:39.760 | cut the top and the bottom off, and cut it a little bit shorter.
00:50:43.960 | And then you're going to pinch it just enough so that it fits inside
00:50:47.600 | of your first can. And that's the elbow.
00:50:52.120 | This is going to fit inside the can, and this
00:50:55.600 | part of the elbow is going to come out of this hole. That's your elbow. And you
00:50:59.680 | want that to be just below
00:51:01.440 | the lid of your number 10 can. Then you're going to take your fourth can.
00:51:05.480 | I'm sorry, you cut this one, the top and the bottom, and you cut it up the side
00:51:10.480 | so that you can pinch that together. Then you're going to take your fourth can, and you're
00:51:14.640 | going to
00:51:15.320 | take out the top and the bottom, cut it up the side, and then flatten it out.
00:51:19.680 | And you're going to be making a shelf to put inside
00:51:23.240 | the elbow. And I like to make mine in just a bit of a T shape
00:51:27.360 | so that it doesn't go all the way in. This is the shelf where your wood goes.
00:51:31.280 | You put your wood here. This is your airflow.
00:51:34.480 | And because of the design, your airflow goes through here. You put a piece of paper,
00:51:39.040 | light the match, and the wood catches on fire. And
00:51:42.520 | you're going to be amazed at the size of the flame that comes shooting out of here.
00:51:46.880 | So what you've got is, you put it through here.
00:51:52.320 | And then
00:51:55.560 | your lid, you're going to also cut the size of your
00:51:58.720 | soup can so that that goes over the top of it, over the vermiculite or the ashes,
00:52:04.760 | and it will sit on top of that. And that's where you've got the top of the
00:52:08.360 | elbow coming out.
00:52:09.240 | Now I was able to, with
00:52:12.320 | a handful of twigs and sticks, it wasn't even
00:52:16.240 | real wood, it was just twigs and sticks, I brought two cups of water to a boil
00:52:21.360 | and boiled it for 20 minutes. So you can imagine,
00:52:25.440 | it wouldn't take a lot of wood for you to have a year's supply
00:52:28.560 | of wood if you're using a rocket stove. Two reasons you want to have this. If you
00:52:33.680 | live in Portland,
00:52:34.520 | definitely. And if you live anywhere else,
00:52:38.640 | I found that I was really excited about having a rocket stove because
00:52:42.160 | I'm putting foods back into my food storage that I had taken out
00:52:45.880 | because I couldn't cook it in a solar oven. I was just kind of the blinders,
00:52:49.560 | like if it won't
00:52:50.400 | cook in a solar oven, then I can't have it.
00:52:53.600 | Knowing that I don't have to have cords of wood in my backyard,
00:52:57.040 | with just a handful of twigs, I put back in pancakes
00:53:00.800 | in my breakfast. I put in tortillas so that I can make
00:53:04.480 | homemade tortillas and enchiladas and different things.
00:53:07.560 | Fry bread, chili and fry bread was one of my favorite meals, and I put that back in
00:53:12.080 | my food storage.
00:53:12.920 | So besides being able to cook a full dinner on a cloudy or rainy day,
00:53:16.800 | I have put foods back into my storage that I had taken out before.
00:53:20.680 | So rocket stoves, get online. In the booklet or on my blog, I've got several
00:53:26.360 | locations that you can go to that are going to give you detailed instructions
00:53:29.440 | on how to make large ones.
00:53:30.560 | They make them as big as you can imagine to heat a whole house,
00:53:34.160 | or you can make them out of a number 10 can. The design is the same,
00:53:37.840 | the technology is the same, it's just the size and
00:53:41.040 | like the guy in New Mexico, how crazy you want to get with it,
00:53:44.080 | you can do just about anything with your rocket stoves. The next thing I have
00:53:49.440 | is water. If your electricity is out,
00:53:52.800 | if it's city water, you're not going to have water because you have to have
00:53:56.400 | electricity to get the water out of the ground.
00:53:58.520 | So you have to store water. I keep my water in the 55 gallon barrels,
00:54:03.320 | and if you go to the blog,
00:54:06.400 | the Everything Under the Sun blog.blogspot.com,
00:54:10.760 | you'll see a water barrel holder that is to die for.
00:54:14.080 | It's just great. It allows you to lay your barrels on the sides,
00:54:18.440 | and it'll stack two or three tall, so you're saving a lot of space
00:54:22.480 | by having the water barrels stacked tall, and you're not going to have to worry
00:54:26.720 | about that little plastic pump
00:54:28.360 | that you know is going to break within the first week of using it.
00:54:31.880 | If it's lying on its side, one of the lids, you take the lid out,
00:54:36.040 | and it's a perfect fit for a faucet, just the kind that you get
00:54:39.640 | at the hardware store. So now you just
00:54:42.680 | turn on the faucet, and you've got your water. When you're filling the barrels and
00:54:46.120 | emptying the barrels,
00:54:47.200 | all you need is a hose. You don't have to,
00:54:50.720 | when you're emptying it, you don't have to dump them over. You just turn on the
00:54:53.200 | faucet.
00:54:53.760 | When you're emptying and filling your water, please don't use your garden hose.
00:54:57.800 | You have no idea
00:54:59.280 | what is inside that hose. You don't want it in your water. Go ahead and go to the
00:55:03.440 | hardware store and get what's called a potable
00:55:05.760 | water hose, P-O-T-A-B-L-E, and that will keep your water clean.
00:55:10.160 | Any questions about storing water?
00:55:13.320 | Yes? Do you put bleach in your water, and how often do you rotate it?
00:55:17.440 | I used to put bleach in my water, and
00:55:20.560 | I used to rotate it every six months.
00:55:23.760 | Not too long ago, we know some people that work
00:55:27.040 | in the city water systems, and they're saying that
00:55:30.160 | most city water supplies have enough chlorine in them that you don't have to
00:55:34.200 | add bleach,
00:55:34.960 | which I was really happy about, because I really hated that bleach taste in my water.
00:55:39.000 | So, they have enough bleach in the city system, you don't have to add it,
00:55:43.120 | and it should stay safe for a year. So we empty our water barrels
00:55:47.720 | once a year, and we'll just write on the end of the barrel when we
00:55:51.240 | emptied it out last.
00:55:54.720 | Yeast is one of those have-to-have foods for me.
00:55:58.880 | I can't imagine how depressing it would be to be eating a bowl of boiled wheat,
00:56:03.520 | knowing I could have had homemade bread. If you don't have yeast,
00:56:07.960 | you're going to be eating boiled wheat. Yeast will last for at least
00:56:12.040 | five years in your freezer. So, just
00:56:15.160 | you've got, this is what I buy, it's usually vacuum sealed,
00:56:18.920 | and I just put that in the freezer, and every five years
00:56:22.880 | I'll just rotate it out and buy new. So,
00:56:25.920 | yeast have-to-have food, be sure and get that.
00:56:29.400 | White wheat is something I discovered not too long ago. White wheat,
00:56:33.280 | if you're not a big fan of whole wheat bread, the turkey red hard wheat,
00:56:37.120 | sometimes people think it's a little too heavy,
00:56:40.600 | maybe the flavor's a little bit too strong. If you've never tried white wheat,
00:56:45.280 | I think you're going to like it. It's got a lighter color, lighter
00:56:48.840 | texture, and a lighter flavor than whole wheat.
00:56:52.400 | It's almost like you've taken white flour and wheat flour and
00:56:55.560 | combine them, and it's great, especially if you're going to be doing cinnamon rolls
00:56:59.520 | or things like that in your food storage.
00:57:01.120 | You want to have that white wheat, and it has the same
00:57:04.440 | nutritional content, moisture content,
00:57:07.880 | the price is the same, the shelf life is the same,
00:57:11.920 | so if you haven't tried white wheat, you might want to try that.
00:57:15.640 | Now, speaking of wheat, they've
00:57:18.800 | done kind of a research on people who
00:57:21.840 | do have food storage, and they found that of that small amount of people
00:57:26.160 | that have food storage, 90 percent of them did not have
00:57:30.040 | a wheat grinder. And they kind of smile and think, "Well,
00:57:33.840 | you guys are going to be eating boiled wheat, and I'm going to be having homemade bread,
00:57:37.640 | because
00:57:38.160 | I definitely have a wheat grinder." You'll want to get a hand grinder first,
00:57:42.200 | just in case there's no electricity, and then maybe get
00:57:45.520 | an electric grinder, because you're going to want to practice making homemade bread
00:57:48.880 | if you haven't done it.
00:57:49.840 | The booklet is going to tell you information on where to get them,
00:57:54.040 | the best kinds, and the research that's been done,
00:57:57.320 | and what they're going to cost. So get your wheat grinder.
00:58:00.680 | Technology has given us the ability
00:58:04.080 | to have so many foods
00:58:07.240 | in our food storage. If you're not a real fan
00:58:10.920 | of powdered milk, you can actually have real milk.
00:58:14.360 | This is shelf-stable milk that sits on your counter,
00:58:17.480 | and it's good for at least a year. If you are
00:58:20.760 | a fan of butter and cheese,
00:58:24.320 | you can actually... I used to bottle my own butter, and I don't do that anymore.
00:58:28.480 | I had a high failure rate, and I discovered that you can buy
00:58:31.840 | canned butter, and this has an extremely long
00:58:35.120 | shelf life. I don't know what that means. I'm thinking
00:58:38.520 | almost indefinite. They won't say that, but they do say extremely long. So you can
00:58:42.840 | buy canned butter
00:58:43.960 | and canned cheese that will sit on your shelf, and you've got a really long shelf
00:58:47.800 | life with that.
00:58:48.560 | If there are no other questions,
00:58:51.720 | I'd like to thank you for coming to the class. I hope that
00:58:55.880 | I've been able to answer your questions about food storage,
00:58:59.040 | and I hope I've been able to motivate you and get you excited
00:59:03.240 | with a new attitude about getting prepared. Thank you.
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