The audio file you're about to hear is a presentation by Wendy DeWitt. She presented the content in this seminar to a group of people discussing how to set aside and store the food that you need to keep your family through a year. This audio is pulled from a video which is available on YouTube.

That video has some visual aid but the audio will be easily accessible with the exception of her discussion on solar ovens where you won't be able to see it unless you go and watch the video. If you'd like more information make sure to check out the PDF file download linked in the notes for this show or you can find that PDF directly on Wendy's blog which is everythingunderthesunblog.blogspot.com again everythingunderthesunblog.blogspot.com Hi my name is Wendy DeWitt and I'd like to thank you for joining me.

During the class I'm going to be referring to a booklet which I've written it's called Everything Under the Sun. All the information from the class is in this booklet it's available online, it's free, and you can get it at everythingunderthesunblog.blogspot.com or you can email at wdwitt22@gmail.com How many of you have a cell phone?

Raise of hands. Almost everyone's got a cell phone. How many of you have a year's supply? Not as many hands go up on that one. In 1987 Ezra Taft Benson said the counsel to store food may be as essential to your temporal welfare as boarding the Arquoise in the days of Noah.

That's life and death. More recently the Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Levitt was counseling citizens to have at least a three-month supply of food, water, and medicine. I've been teaching this class for more than 20 years and I've never understood why people have chosen to ignore this kind of wise counsel.

I've heard all the excuses and I finally came up with my own top 10 reasons why I don't have my year's supply. Number 10, my neighbors have a two-year supply. It's more likely that your neighbors don't have any food at all. Very few people have made the effort to be prepared for an emergency.

So if your plan is to eat your neighbor's food, first off that's probably not very nice and second off it's probably not a very good plan. Number 9, I'm just gonna move in with my parents or my children. Not a good plan all by itself. A lot of people believe that when times get bad we're all just going to band together and we'll share our food and everyone will survive.

The problem with that is nobody's sharing food so we won't survive for very long. And another problem is if you consider that if there were any kind of epidemic or pandemic you couldn't band together, you couldn't share, so you may have to survive on just what's in your home.

Number 8, isn't that what my taxes are for? If there were any kind of national crisis or emergency, how long do you really think it would be before a government agency would reach you? And besides the government has been telling us to have a three-month supply of food, water, and medicines.

Number 7, I donate to my church and I assume when things get bad they're just going to take care of me. I think a lot of people are expecting miracles in these times because they're not storing food. Elijah's never-ending barrel or maybe there's a Joseph of Egypt out there who's storing for everyone.

I would suggest that the responsibility to have an emergency supply for your family isn't your neighbors, it isn't the government's, and it's not the church's. It's yours. Number 6, I have a year's supply and the bullets to go with it. I've heard people say, "Why would I go to all the effort of storing food for my family just to have some guy with a gun come to my home and either threaten or kill my family to take it away?" And I respond back, "Are you afraid of the guy with the gun?

Because you should be more afraid of becoming the guy with the gun. What would you be willing to do if you were watching your child starve to death? I promise you would lie, cheat, steal, and you would become the guy with the gun to save your child's life. Food storage isn't just about your temporal welfare, it's also about your spiritual salvation.

Number 5, the boat and the four-wheelers are taking up all my storage space. Number 4, I've got a thousand pounds of wheat, what else do I need? Unless you're eating that wheat on a daily basis and your body's accustomed to it, that wheat could kill you faster than a famine.

Number 3, I've decided I'm just going to store non-perishable items and then I'm going to trade for food. I kind of chuckle, I'm thinking, "Good luck eating those gold coins." Because when people are starving, they're not going to share their food. They're not going to trade their food. And I guess the other point would be if they do, you're going to be buying the most expensive bowl of soup that you ever ate.

Number 2, I can't afford scrapbooking and food storage. The average food storage can cost as little as a dollar a day. When I ask how many of you have cell phones, I know everyone's going to raise their hand and I know that you spend more than a dollar a day on that service.

Is your cell phone really more important than your family's survival? And the number one reason why I don't have my year's supply, I'm waiting for them to sell Papa John's dehydrated pizza. Food storage has such a stigma attached to it. If it's not wheat, beans, and powdered milk, it can't be food storage.

And with the system that I'm going to show you, you could be eating sweet and sour chicken, minestrone, enchiladas, even chocolate chip cookies. Your imagination and your pocketbook are just about the only limitations that you have. Most people understand the importance of having emergency supplies. They know they should have it.

They want to have it. Sometimes they just don't know how. There are so many questions. What do you store? How do you store it? How do I rotate it? What will it cost? There are so many questions that it becomes overwhelming and they just give up. I'm hoping that in this class I'm going to be able to answer those questions for you and give you a new attitude about food storage.

Now the system I use is based on a worst-case scenario. And I recognize there are worst cases, but I'm going to give a survivable worst-case scenario that there's no electricity, no running water, no stores to go to, and no help is coming. Even in that scenario, my family can not only survive, but we're going to be eating chocolate brownies.

What do you store and how much do you store? Before I started the system, I would look at my food storage, the stacks of wheat and beans and powdered milk and legumes, whatever they are. And I'd think, "I can't make dinner out of this. What's for dinner?" And it was kind of depressing.

And I thought, "There's got to be a better way." And I decided I was going to put the food I love into my food storage. So I created a system. Now here's the system. It's very simple. You're going to take 14 note cards and you're going to choose seven breakfasts and seven dinners that your family loves.

Things that you wouldn't mind having once a week for a year. Now if you're like my husband Colin, first thing he said was, "Did she say lunch? I didn't hear lunch." I said, "Honey, we're going to get up late. We're going to go to bed early. I'm not planning lunch." The truth is, if we're in a worst-case scenario, we're not going to be able to be cooking dinner at five o'clock with solar cooking.

That's what I'm going to be doing most of my cooking in if we have no electricity. And so we're going to have breakfast in the morning. We'll have our big meal in the middle of the day like our ancestors used to do. And then during those good cooking hours, I'm going to be making a daily loaf of homemade bread.

And we'll have that in the evening. So we really do have the three meals. Just had to tease him a little bit. So you've got your seven breakfasts and your seven dinners, your 14 cards. You're going to have these meals once a week for a year. There's 52 weeks in the year, so you're going to have them 52 times.

If spaghetti were one of my meals, and it took a jar of spaghetti sauce and a pound of noodles and maybe a pint of sausage, the water to cook the noodles in, the salt, everything that it takes to have that meal. Maybe you want to have garlic toast. Whatever you're going to plan to have with your spaghetti, you multiply everything by 52.

When you're done, this card is going to tell you exactly what it's going to take to feed your family spaghetti once a week for a year. You fill out the rest of the cards, and you know exactly what it's going to take for an entire year supply. Don't forget to add, if you're going to have the breads, if you want to have chocolate cake, pies, whatever your desserts are, everything that it's going to take to feed your family for a year.

Don't forget to add the spices and the water, everything that it takes. The system is very simple and straightforward. Does anybody have any questions about the system? Yes. I have celiac, and I was wondering if you have any suggestions for using your system for those of us who have food allergies.

The system actually works really well for that because you're the one who's deciding exactly what goes into your food storage. Now there's two ways that you can do this. If you have a not so severe allergy and it's not taking a lot of foods out of your storage, you just plan your meals around not having those foods in your food storage.

If it's pretty severe and there are a lot of things that you can't have, have two separate ones. Have one for your family and all the things that they like, and then a separate one for you. It's not that big of a deal to do because you're going to know what you can have and what you like.

Also you want to have, if you've got rice flour, if you're buying pancake mixes and things that have rice flour, you're going to want to learn how to make your own. Get online and figure out how to make rice flour. It's very simple. Have a grinder and store them in their original form.

The oats, the rice, brown rice. There's a brown rice flour you can use. And just learn how to make those mixes yourself, and it's just that simple. It works for allergies. It works for if you have food problems, diabetes. There's all kinds of problems that people have, and they're not able to just pick out any food storage.

It's very specific. So it's good for that, but it's also good if you just have different tastes. My husband likes oatmeal. He wants to have oatmeal for breakfast three times a week. I like oatmeal. I'm not having it three times a week. So we actually have separate breakfasts. I have malt meal and rice pudding and different things, and it's not a problem for me to make up separate cards for him and separate cards for me, and I shop according to those cards.

So it's a very simple process that way. This system can save you time and effort and money because you're no longer buying foods that you don't eat or even like. You're only going to buy what you need. You're not going to buy too much or too little. I used to buy dehydrated apples by the case.

It was one of those foods that I'm looking at it going, "That would be a good snack. It's got fruit. That would be something good." And I just kept buying them. I had cases of them. Well, when I started the system, I realized what I really wanted was to have homemade apple pie every Sunday.

And all I need for that is nine cans of dehydrated apples. It's a great system. You are the one that decides how much you eat, what you eat, even how often you eat. And it is wonderful for the individuality that it provides you. Now you've got your your 14 cards.

There are recipes in the booklet that... the 14 cards, you're welcome. I want you to use your own recipes. I want you to make up your own recipes. But if you get into the booklet, there's about 40 recipes in here. I put them in mostly to show you the variety of foods that can be in a food storage.

You're going to be surprised at the kind of things that you can have. Chicken creole and sweet and sour chicken, enchiladas. There are so many foods that you would not have thought would be food storage. So you're welcome to use the recipes, but I want you to use your own, your favorite recipe, because that's the way you're going to put the food you love into your food storage.

Now once you get your cards all made up, I want you to make... get a notebook. This will be your food storage notebook, and you're going to make a shopping list. My shopping list has five columns in it. First one is the food. It's an alphabetical listing of everything that's on my card.

Every spice, every meat, everything that's on those cards. You transfer it to this shopping list. If I were to be looking at my rice column, it would say rice under the food item. Then the next column is all the meals that that food is in. I've got 36 cups in my salmon and rice, 36 cups in my sweet and sour, for a total of 72 cups of rice.

You go, okay, how many pounds is 72 cups of rice? If you go to the back of the booklet, there's going to be a couple of pages called the equivalency pages, and in there you're going to find all this great information. Two cups of sugar in a pound of sugar.

If you look at the rice, it's going to say rice has a 30-year shelf life. There are 12 cups of rice in a number 10 can. There are two and a third cups of rice in a pound, and that one cup of rice makes three cups cooked. So all the information that you're going to need to take the hundreds, you will have hundreds, of teaspoons of salt and spices and all these foods, teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, and it's going to translate it, those equivalency pages, into what you'll actually buy in the store.

So it will save you a lot of time and you'll be able to say in your third column what you need. You say 72 cups of rice. That will equate to six number 10 cans. So that's what you'll be able to buy. The fourth column has a lot of important information.

It's the food that you already have, where it's stored, and when you bought it. For rotation purposes, this is important information. And the last column is how much I need to buy. So you've got the food, the meals, what you need, what you have, and what you still need to buy.

You'll take this notebook everywhere with you when you go shopping, and when you see food on sale, you buy it, you mark it off, you're going to know exactly how much you need. You'll date it and you will put it away. Now where do you store an entire year of supply?

You think it's this massive amount of food. And actually, a year's supply for one person will fit under a twin size bed. So you don't have to make little tables out of wheat cans and put tablecloths on them. You don't have to have the rolling shelves. You know, just go ahead and whatever is under your bed, it's never going to be more important than your family's survival.

Keep it in your house. If you live in a desert, you don't want to put it in the garage or in the attic. You might as well not buy it, because heat, light, air, and moisture will destroy your food storage very quickly. Your shelf life will go to nothing.

So, this is an investment. This can save your family's life. Take care of it. Keep it in your home where you've got a good temperature control. Alright, rotation. That's one of the most frustrating things about food storage, because I know a lot of you have had food storage in the past, and it wasn't food that you ate.

You didn't even like it, but you stored it because somebody told you to store legumes. And you didn't eat it, so it went to waste. Or, I've had systems before where I think there's 20 pounds of spaghetti in the cupboard, and I'm digging through there, and half an hour later there's no spaghetti, but I find a can of powdered milk from 1976.

And you've all done that. So, that doesn't happen to me anymore with this system. What I'll do is, in a timely manner, I will buy all my food storage. Now, that doesn't mean in a week, but it doesn't mean five years. In a timely manner, you're going to eventually check off that last item in your book.

You're going to close the book for a year. That's the best part about rotation. It's a yearly process. I don't think about my food storage all year long. And then, once a year, I'll take out my book, and I will go alphabetically down every column and every item. And what I'm looking for is any food that looks like it's going to be coming up for expiration in the coming year.

If it is, I'll note how much it is. I will go out and buy it. I'll repackage it however it needs to be packaged, if it's vacuum packed or in the number 10 cans. Date it. Mark in my book that I have a new date for that food. I'll put it under the bed, and I'll take the food that's coming up for expiration and put it in my kitchen pantry for daily use.

So, I think the best part about this particular system for me was I don't have to do rotation more than once a year, and I always have a full year supply. I'm not gonna worry about if I'm ready to go to the store the next day, and I need to replenish whatever it is, and something happens, I'm stuck.

I don't touch my food storage food at all, unless it's time to rotate it into my kitchen pantry. I really like that part of the program because I feel that security of knowing no matter what happens, no matter when it happens, I'm prepared. Alright, another thing that helps me with the rotation is that I'm all about long shelf life.

I won't have anything in my food storage that doesn't have at least a three-year shelf life. Most of my food has a 10, 20, 30-year shelf life. Some of it's indefinite. I love the indefinite food. Try to get those. If you will go to ProvidentLiving.org, the website there is going to tell you the latest information about dry pack foods.

This is what dry pack food looks like. It's the number 10 can, and it has an oxygen packet inside. The website there is talking about the dry pack foods that have 30 year shelf life. They are beans, rice, wheat, apples, macaroni, oats, potato flakes, onions, spaghetti, sugar. Sugar has an indefinite shelf life.

They're even giving powdered milk a 20-year shelf life. Keep in mind, the longer you hold on to it, the less the quality and the nutritional value is going to be. If you open it 30 years later, it's certainly not going to be as tasty or nutritional as if you opened it in five years.

But that's a decision that you get to make. The point is that it is safe to eat, that it will sustain life. If we're eating food storage, that's what it's all about, is sustaining life. So 30-year shelf life on some of those foods. I didn't have a lot of canned foods in my storage because I thought it had maybe a one or two-year shelf life.

On this website it says, "For emergency storage, commercially canned foods in metal or jars will remain safe to consume as long as the seal has not been broken." You understand that this is the seal, and if there is any damage to the can, if it's dented, if it's bulging, if it's weeping, if you open it and it spurts, then that's not safe.

The old saying, "When in doubt, throw it out," you remember that. But if the seal is still intact, it says, "As long as." To me, that's a long time. So I'm pretty excited about that. The Canned Food Alliance concurs, and they say that canned food is safe to eat as long as the can is not damaged in any way.

So I have begun putting a lot more canned foods in my food storage. First off, because it takes less fuel to cook because it's already cooked, and I don't have to store as much water because it's already got the water, it's fully cooked. So I've got fruits and vegetables and a lot of foods that I didn't have before because I was about the long shelf life.

If you go to the Hormel website, they actually say that their Hormel chili has an indefinite shelf life. On their website, they say that. So they really have discovered canned foods last much, much longer than we ever imagined. Another way that I am able to get the long shelf life that I like is with food exchanges.

I don't store oil, I'll only store shortening. Shortening has, unopened shortening, a 10-year shelf life. And even after you open it, there's a little trick that you can use. You've all had the five-pound can of shortening and you get to the bottom and it's rancid and you toss it out.

Well, when you open your shortening now, take what you need and then melt the shortening, the rest of the shortening, and pour it into mason jars, any size mason jar. While it's hot, make sure the rim is clean, put a lid on it and a ring on it. This is a lid and a ring.

Put the lid on it and put the ring on it. And as it cools, that exchange of heat will seal the jar and it'll be just like it's never been opened. So you can keep your shortening for a lot longer. Another food exchange that I use, I store cream of tartar and baking soda.

Both of those items have an indefinite shelf life. If you combine those two items, and it's in the booklet, how to combine them, if you combine those two items, you can make baking powder. So you've got three items that have indefinite shelf life. The other one I do, powdered eggs.

I don't store powdered eggs, I'll store unflavored gelatin, like the Knox unflavored gelatin, but you can buy it generic, you don't have to buy the Knox. Buy it in bulk, it's much cheaper in bulk. And for about three cents a teaspoon, you add hot water and cold water to the Knox unflavored gelatin, and that is a substitute for an egg.

And you can put that in your brownies, in your cakes, muffins, anything that you're baking, you can exchange with the unflavored gelatin, and that has an indefinite shelf life. So there's a lot of ways to get that long shelf life. When you're doing your yearly food rotation and checking things out, you're going to visually check every one of your vacuum sealed foods.

I pull out the box and I will open it up and actually touch the top of every single jar to make sure that it's still sealed. If it's come undone, you might as well not have bothered because air has gotten to the food and it's not going to extend the shelf life.

So visually, when you're doing that yearly check, visually check every one of your jars vacuum sealed. Now we're going to talk about vacuum sealing. What you're using is a vacuum sealer of some kind, a vacuum they've got all kinds of different kinds. I have just gone back to the Food Saver.

These things last forever. My sister's got one that's 30 years old and it's still working. So this is a Food Saver. They cost about a hundred dollars new. I don't want you to buy it new. I want you to go online. You go to one of those sites where you buy from your neighbors or the Bay Place where you bid.

You can go ahead and check those out. Every time I've checked online in these different places, there are at least a hundred Food Savers that they're selling, usually about twenty, maybe thirty dollars. Some of them are brand new. Some of them have all the attachments with them. So go online and don't buy it brand new.

Save a lot of money. The one thing that you're looking for on your Food Saver is the little porthole. It has to have a little porthole on the top. This part I never use. You've seen Food Savers that they do the little bags and that's really cool but they don't hold the seal.

This is not good for long-term storage. Eventually every single bag that we've ever done has lost its seal. So we only do the vacuum sealing with the jars. You're going to get, besides the vacuum, the Food Saver, you're going to get a jar sealer attachment. This is the regular mouth.

This is the wide mouth. I get both of them. They're about ten dollars each and that way you can use all of your jars. You can only use standard mason jars. You can't use spaghetti food jars, baby food jars. It has to be the standard mason jar. So you're going to take your jar sealer attachment.

It's got a little hose. Make sure it comes with the hose. You plug it into that little porthole and you're going to take... you want to sterilize your bottles. Run them through the dishwasher. This is just an air exchange. It doesn't sterilize anything. You want to run this through the dishwasher.

Make sure your lids are clean. But you put your food in the jar. You put your lid on. You don't have to heat it or do anything special to it. You put your jar sealer over the top of it and then you push the button. And within about 10 seconds it will have pulled the air out of the jar.

And this should stay sealed until you open it. Like I say, I check every year to make sure that nothing's come unsealed, but generally speaking this will stay sealed until you open it. And when you open it, if you're careful and don't bend the lid, you can just take it off like that and you can reuse this lid over and over.

Alright, are there any questions about vacuum sealing foods? Yes? What is the shelf life of the vacuum sealed foods? That's really going to depend on kind of where you live and how you take care of your foods. I live in the desert and it's, you know, I get a three-year shelf life out of my food storage, out of my vacuum sealed foods.

If you live in the mountains and you've got a basement, a nice cool dark basement, your vacuum sealed foods will last longer. Five years, maybe more. As you experiment with this and you test them every year when you're doing your rotation, you can open up a jar of M&M's, that's the best part, and test it and make sure that they're still good.

And you'll get a better idea as you practice with it. I think the least amount of shelf life is my chocolates. It's two years on that, but I kind of have to confess that it's probably because I eat them before they ever get past two years. So you'll have to experiment with chocolates yourself and see how long they'll last.

What the Food Saver does for me is it put the foods, the real foods I love, into my food storage. Because if you've got foods that have a high moisture, oil, or sugar content, they can't be sealed in the number 10 cans. So vacuum packing will put all of those foods, by putting them in glass jars, is going to put those foods, raisins, nuts, chocolates, granola bars, brown rice, almost anything that will sit in your kitchen pantry on the shelf, you can vacuum pack.

You can vacuum seal them and it's going to extend the shelf life, like I say, depending on where you live and how well you take care of it, by at least three years, maybe five years, maybe more. You have to do the testing on that. This is what changed my whole concept of food storage.

This is the base, the basis of my system. I know it doesn't look that great, but this is real meat. This is bottled chicken. This is what makes my food storage chicken enchiladas, it's real chicken. Beef, stew, it's real beef. This is solid meat, it's fully cooked, ready to eat, it makes its own juice, it's tender, it sits on the pantry shelf, needs no refrigeration, just like you can tuna fish, but it's going to taste so much better than your canned meats and it's going to be cheaper because you're going to be buying all your meats on sale.

There's hardly any meat that you can't bottle. You can do beef, chicken, turkey, ham, fish, it will actually dissolve the bones in fish. I've even had moose. So I joke that say if you can catch it, you can can it. I can't say enough good things about this because this does change your food storage to know that you can have real meat.

Now you're having real meals. The process could not be simpler. You're going to start with a pressure canner and there is a difference between a pressure canner and a pressure cooker. A pressure cooker is a thin metal pot. It's got a little lid that goes on the top and it screws on like that.

It just kind of twists on. Then it has a little cap that goes on the top of it. When it gets to a certain pressure or heat, it starts rocking back and forth. That's a pressure cooker. You can't bottle meats in a pressure cooker. It might work. You might put them in there and it might seal, but it's not safe.

You haven't had it at the right pressure or the right time. Don't do it with a pressure cooker. You have to have a pressure canner. A pressure canner is a much heavier metal. You've got the lid. If you don't have a pressure canner already, I'm going to suggest that you buy metal to metal.

There's no rubber gasket inside of here. If you've already got a canner and it has the rubber gasket, that's fine. It'll work. But I suggest that you order some more gaskets because at some point it will be the fatal flaw of that mechanism. It's going to go bad and you'll have steam pouring down everywhere.

It's going to have wing nuts as some kind of mechanism to hold the lid down. It's going to have a pressure release valve. I have five pressure canners that I bought online. One of them is over 80 years old and it still works metal to metal. It has a pressure release valve that is just a valve that is up when it's open and you push it down when it's closed.

This one actually has a little weight, 5, 10, 15 and you put the weight on there to close up the valve. Then it's going to have a pressure gauge and that's going to have 5, 10, 15 and then the digits in between to let you know how many pounds of pressure you're cooking.

The pounds of pressure that you need to use is going to depend on your altitude. So when you get a pressure canner, if you get a used one, it's not going to have an instruction booklet, but you can go online, know what your altitude is and it will tell you how many pounds of pressure you need to cook at.

I'm in the desert and I cook at 10 pounds of pressure. If you're higher up in the mountains it could be 13, 14. So that's very important. Look that up when you get your pressure canner. Let's start with the bottles. If you have never bottled meat before, I want you to, I'm going to suggest that you buy new bottles.

If you've got bottles that came from grandma's attic or a thrift shop or a yard sale or something, you don't know how old they are. You don't know how many times they've been used. It's really sad to have that really yummy meat inside the canner and you open it up and the bottle had a hairline crack and there's meat floating in there.

So I suggest you buy new bottles and then you can use them over and over because you know how many times they've been used. You know they're safe. You're going to start with raw meat. I like the raw pack. There are other ways to do it but I like the raw pack.

It's easier, it's faster, there's no preparation whatsoever. Literally, you take raw meat and you put it in a jar. That's it. You can put a little bit of salt in there if you want. I'm going to suggest that you don't put anything else in the meat. You'll want to experiment.

You'll want to make chicken noodle soup. You'll want to do all kinds of things with gravy and beef. Please don't. There are a lot of foods that aren't safe for home canning. Rice, dairy products, flour, there's a lot of things that aren't safe. So if you just do meat and I don't even put spices in mine, just salt.

If you'll do that, you know your meat will be safe and you can always add those ingredients later when you're cooking your meal. So just do the meat. So we have the meat in the jar. You've got a pan on your stove that you're boiling the lids. You're going to soften this little rubber gasket here and that is going to, after they've been maybe, you know, two or three minutes, the meat's in here.

Make sure the rim of your jar is very clean. There's no grease or anything on there. You'll put your lid on and you'll put your ring on and you put it on finger tight. For my husband that's a whole lot tighter than for me, so finger tight. Now you're going to come to your canner and you've got about three inches of water in your canner and you've got a tray in the bottom of it.

Don't put your bottles directly in the bottom of the canner. They have to sit on a tray. So you put your tray in there and then you've got your bottles. If you're doing pints, you can, this is a 921 canner, you can do about 17 to 19 pint jars.

The quart jar will hold two pounds of meat. The pint jar will hold one pound. If you have a big family, you're going to want to have these and it'll hold seven. They do have one at the 930 and it will stack quarts. I've always wanted one of those.

It will stack quarts double high so you can put 14 quart jars in there. That's 28 pounds of meat in one cooking, one shot. So if you've got pints, you can stack them. You put the first layer in and then you need another tray that you put on top of that and then start stacking the second layer.

If you don't have another tray, if you bought this secondhand and there's not another tray, then you're going to want to stack them, but don't stack them on top. Do a stagger like that so that they're not sitting right on top. And from there, put your lid on and what you're going to do next is called exhausting the canner.

You turn the heat on high and after 10-15 minutes, just depends on how hot your stove runs, you're going to see steam coming out of your exhaust valve here and eventually you'll see water spitting out of it. When you get to that point about five minutes after you've had water spitting out, what you're doing is exhausting the canner that's pulling the air out of the canner and out of the jars.

So it's an important process. Don't skip that process. And then if we're cooking in the desert, 10 pounds of pressure, I'm going to put this weight on at 10 pounds and immediately my gauge is going to start going up. When it gets to 10, or if you're doing in the mountains, whatever the altitude is, when you get to the right pressure, then you start timing.

If you've got pints, it's 75 minutes. If you've got quarts, it's 90 minutes. And if you've got fish, you add 15 minutes to both of those. You've got 90 minutes going. Right away you're going to have to turn down the heat, otherwise it's going to go too high. So right away you're turning down the heat and during the entire 90 minutes you're going to continue turning that heat down to keep it at 10 pounds of pressure.

Here's what happens if you walk away and it gets up to 13 and you run in and you turn it down and it goes down to 8 and you turn it up again. What's happening inside your canner? You didn't put any water in with that meat. The raw pack, there's no water.

It makes its own juice. It's this great broth that's being made. And when the temperature goes too high, a vacuum effect actually pulls the juices out of your jars. So if you keep it at a steady 10 pounds of pressure, you're going to keep all those juices in there.

When you're done, you take the lid off, take the jars out, put them on a counter away from a cool draft. Eventually you're going to hear that lovely little plink sound and they've all sealed. If you have one, occasionally you'll have one that won't seal, go ahead and put it in the refrigerator and have it later that night or you can reprocess it but you'll have to use a new lid.

It will be double processed but it's still great in a soup. And wipe them off when they're all cooled. Wipe them off, put them in the box, date them, date them, and put them away. So that was a long way of saying meat goes in the jar, jar goes in the canner, cook, take it out, market, put it away.

It could not be simpler. If you've ever done fruits or vegetables, you're going to be thrilled at how much easier and faster it is to do meats. I did an experiment one day, I had three canners, two were on the stove and I would keep one filled and I put up a hundred and fifty pounds of chicken in 12 hours.

So you could easily do 50 pounds in a day. Easy with one canner. Yes? Are there any meats that you shouldn't can? There are. It's not that you can't can them, you know, if you can catch it you can can it. You don't want to do any processed meats, hot dogs, bologna, turkey ham, anything like that.

You just don't want to do that, it turns out really mushy. Hamburger, I used to do hamburger and I didn't like how it was kind of a pasty texture. Now you can do ground meats but you're going to want to brown them first. Sausage, I do have sausage in my food storage.

So I will brown that meat first and then put it in a jar, kind of loosely put it in a jar and add hot water to it and then process it like you normally would. But when when hamburger went up in price, I decided that there wasn't anything in my food storage that wouldn't taste better with shredded meat than it would with hamburger.

So I pretty much stopped doing hamburger. Another idea is you know after Thanksgiving you're taking all the meat off the leftover turkey and 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 and about six months later you throw it away because it's freezer burn.

You've all done that. What you're going to want to do now is just take the meat off the bone, put it in your jar, add the hot water on top of it because you've already cooked the juices out of it so it won't make its own juice, but you add hot water to that and process it like you would normally.

The same amount of time, everything. And that will just be a nice chicken soup type of meat. And you might want to mark on it that it was leftovers, that it wasn't raw pack. So the rotation of meats. Any other questions about cooking meats? There's always questions about the meat.

Yes? Is it safe to bottle meats on a glass top stove? If you buy a new canner, it's actually going to say do not bottle, do not use a glass top stove. And I kind of wondered about that but I found the reason was, there's two reasons. It's quite heavy and when it's full of meat it's got to be even heavier and if you were to accidentally set that down too hard it could crack the glass top stove.

So you have to be careful with that. But I think the biggest reason is the diameter of your burner is usually quite a bit smaller than the diameter of your canner and as it gets hot that heat radiates out and it can discolor your stove. I have done literally hundreds of pounds of meat on my glass top stoves.

I've had three glass top stoves different homes and I've never had a problem. But I I think it's a good idea to warn you about that and you use your own discretion on that. Rotating meats. That's kind of hard because you know I say it's easy and it is easy but when it's done you know it's almost like gold.

You're just looking at this chicken and you're going "Oh this is so good" and you just think "I don't want to use it, that's my food storage." Please use it. You are going to be so excited about how nice this is to come home and you open this up and you've got instant chicken enchiladas, you've got a chicken salad sandwich, you've got green chili burros.

It goes on and on forever and it's a 15-minute dinner so the convenience is going to be really nice in your daily life. So you want to rotate it. Also if you keep it for a really long time it's going to, again, like all the other foods, it will lose its nutritional value and it's just better to use it up.

So here's a good rotational system. If you're going to have a meat dish in all of your daily, you know one meat dish every day, 365 meat dishes, you're going to eventually bottle up, you know if you can do 50 pounds a day you could have all your food storage done in about a week.

So you bottle it all up, you date it, you put it under the bed. You have two choices. You can bottle up 50 more pounds and put that in your kitchen pantry or you can take 50 pounds out from your food storage and put that in your kitchen pantry.

But the idea is that you want it in your pantry. If you use two bottles a week, that 50 pounds will be gone in about six months. And you will have, then when it's gone, you know that you've done 25 beef, 25 chicken, whatever it is. You bottle up 50 more pounds, put that under the bed, take out 50 more pounds, put it in the kitchen pantry.

It's just this nice, like a free ride that you get to take it out of your pantry. It's not coming out of your food storage. So you take it out and just do that rotation. Two bottles a week, you will have your entire food storage, the 365 jars, rotated in about three years.

If you really like it and you want to use three bottles a week, you'll have it rotated in about two years. So please use the meat. I think you're going to be really excited about it. And don't be afraid of it. I've heard stories about Aunt Ethel maiming six of her children with the pressure canner and they're all just scared to death of it.

It's very, very safe, especially the new ones. They've got every safety precaution there is. It's a fabulous way of putting real foods, real meals, into your food storage. Now, if you have a bowl of beans or you have a bowl of chili and cornbread, the only difference is your spices.

Spices are going to make or break your food storage. So don't forget to get your spices. Buy them by the pound. They're going to be a lot cheaper if you buy them by the pound. I think you can get a pound of cinnamon for about three dollars if you buy it in bulk.

And what I do is I just bring it home, I'll take out what I need for my food storage and I'll vacuum seal that. And then that goes in my food storage and the rest goes in my pantry. And if it's vacuum sealed, you shouldn't have any problem rotating every five years.

It would be an easy rotation. You might even be able to go longer. But don't forget your spices. That's really important. One of my favorite sources of alternative fuel is the solar oven. Solar cooking is used all over the world. In India alone, there are hundreds of thousands of solar ovens being used.

This is a clean heat. It keeps the heat out of the kitchen. It tastes really good. They've actually done tests and they found that solar cooked food wins out over all of the other sources of fuel, your regular cooking. And it's a free source of fuel. You're using the sun.

If the sun is shining, it's going to work. You set it out in your backyard, open it up, within 20 to 30 minutes you're going to have a 350 degree oven. And you can cook almost anything in an oven that hot. I've cooked rice and pastas and casseroles. It bakes bread beautifully.

It browns it. It makes a beautiful loaf of homemade bread. There are three kinds of solar ovens. You've got the simple box oven. You've got the parabolic solar cooker. And that is a circle of mirrors. It's pretty complicated. And then you've got the panel cooker. And my favorite is the panel cooker.

This is the Global Sun Oven. I really like this one. It's my favorite. Process, you set it out there. And you've got the panels. This is very easy to open. It just opens like that. These panels will catch the light and it will shoot it into the oven. Inside, you've got a glass door.

And the glass door is on a rubber gasket, a heavy rubber gasket. And that keeps the seal in the oven. It's also got a rocker arm inside. And that keeps the food level if you have to move the oven around. So it's going to keep that food level. It won't spill.

And then there's actually a temperature gauge up here in the corner. So you're going to know when your oven is hot enough. It's easy to close up. Just like that. I keep my solar cooker on a rolling cart so that as I'm moving it around it's not going to spill the food.

That just makes it a little easier to follow the sun. Cooking with a solar oven takes about twice as long as it would normally. If it takes 25 minutes to cook your bread, it's going to take about 45 or 50 minutes with solar cooking. If you have a large amount of food, you want to, instead of putting it in one big pan, you want to split it up and maybe cut it up into smaller pieces.

And it's going to cook faster that way. Cookware. You want to buy your oven first and then get your cookware. Because you don't want to buy a pan that's not going to fit. You can have Dutch ovens if you'd like to use those. That's really good for that occasional cloudy day.

The sun comes out and goes behind a cloud. A Dutch oven takes a little longer to heat up, but it will hold on to the heat so that when the sun goes behind the cloud it's going to keep that food hot so that it's safe. Another type of cookware is you want to have metal.

You want to have dark metal, thin metal that's going to heat up very quickly. And you want to have tight-fitting lids. That's going to keep the moisture inside your foods so that you've cooked spaghetti on top of a stove and you see all that steam coming up. When you cook in a solar oven, you've got that tight-fitting lid.

You don't lose that moisture. So you actually use less water when you're cooking with solar because that moisture stays inside. There are a lot of things that you can do with a solar oven besides just cooking food. You can pasteurize water. You can kill infestations of grain or other foods.

You can sanitize dishes or dry firewood. You can sprout foods. And you can decrystallize jams or honey. Honey is one of those foods that has a very long shelf life, but it will go hard. As it gets old, it goes hard, it crystallizes. I used to buy honey in the big buckets, and now I buy it in the small five or six pound jars.

And that will fit inside my solar oven because if it's gone hard and if it's crystallized, heat will bring it back. So I just pop it in a solar oven and you're able to bring back that honey. For those of you who are interested, a solar oven will cost about $200.

And I need to warn you that you're not going to be able to go on the websites and get them used or discounted because once people buy these, they pretty much keep them. So if you go in with a group, sometimes you can get a discount that way with a solar oven.

So this is one of my favorite alternative sources of fuel. And my other one is called the rocket stove. I was teaching a class in Portland a few months ago, and they weren't really interested in the solar oven, as you can imagine. And they were doing demonstrations on a rocket stove.

Just the name is so cool. The guys are going, "Rocket stove!" They were showing rocket stoves. And a rocket stove is great because you're going to be able to get a very hot, almost smokeless fire. And because of the design of the rocket stove, it concentrates the heat and it burns the fuel more efficiently.

So you're going to use 75% less fuel than you would if you were just making a fire. They're really great. You can buy them for about $40 or $50. You can buy it already made, or you can make your own. And I guarantee the guys are going to want to make them.

When I was in New Mexico, a guy had made one out of a propane tank. And he had welded all this cool stuff on it. It looked like it was going to take off. It was a rocket. My husband and I made a double burner rocket stove. We used five-gallon metal cans.

And we put the stove pipe inside, and we have an oven grate on the top. And it's just really cool. Less than $20. You can make them for under $20 very easily. I brought one that you can make for free. And the instructions how to make this are in the booklet.

But I'm going to walk you through it in case my instructions aren't very clear. You need a number 10 can and four soup cans. And then some kind of insulation, maybe ashes or vermiculite or something. But you're going to start with the number 10 can, and you're going to take the lid off and save the lid.

And then you're going to cut a hole in the edge, in the side of the can, the size of your tomato soup can. So that it just fits inside. Now you want to make it almost exactly the right size because if you don't, you'll have your ashes coming out the edges here.

So I use, get some of these nice little tin snips that have the curve to them. And cut it kind of small and then keep cutting to make it just right. So that it's going to be the right size. You're going to take your first soup can, and you're going to take just the lid off.

And cut a hole the size of the can in the side of that. Take your second can, cut the top and the bottom off, and that's going to fit inside of that first can. And that's the beginning of your elbow. You're going to take your third soup can, cut the top and the bottom off, and cut it a little bit shorter.

And then you're going to pinch it just enough so that it fits inside of your first can. And that's the elbow. This is going to fit inside the can, and this part of the elbow is going to come out of this hole. That's your elbow. And you want that to be just below the lid of your number 10 can.

Then you're going to take your fourth can. I'm sorry, you cut this one, the top and the bottom, and you cut it up the side so that you can pinch that together. Then you're going to take your fourth can, and you're going to take out the top and the bottom, cut it up the side, and then flatten it out.

And you're going to be making a shelf to put inside the elbow. And I like to make mine in just a bit of a T shape so that it doesn't go all the way in. This is the shelf where your wood goes. You put your wood here. This is your airflow.

And because of the design, your airflow goes through here. You put a piece of paper, light the match, and the wood catches on fire. And you're going to be amazed at the size of the flame that comes shooting out of here. So what you've got is, you put it through here.

And then your lid, you're going to also cut the size of your soup can so that that goes over the top of it, over the vermiculite or the ashes, and it will sit on top of that. And that's where you've got the top of the elbow coming out. Now I was able to, with a handful of twigs and sticks, it wasn't even real wood, it was just twigs and sticks, I brought two cups of water to a boil and boiled it for 20 minutes.

So you can imagine, it wouldn't take a lot of wood for you to have a year's supply of wood if you're using a rocket stove. Two reasons you want to have this. If you live in Portland, definitely. And if you live anywhere else, I found that I was really excited about having a rocket stove because I'm putting foods back into my food storage that I had taken out because I couldn't cook it in a solar oven.

I was just kind of the blinders, like if it won't cook in a solar oven, then I can't have it. Knowing that I don't have to have cords of wood in my backyard, with just a handful of twigs, I put back in pancakes in my breakfast. I put in tortillas so that I can make homemade tortillas and enchiladas and different things.

Fry bread, chili and fry bread was one of my favorite meals, and I put that back in my food storage. So besides being able to cook a full dinner on a cloudy or rainy day, I have put foods back into my storage that I had taken out before. So rocket stoves, get online.

In the booklet or on my blog, I've got several locations that you can go to that are going to give you detailed instructions on how to make large ones. They make them as big as you can imagine to heat a whole house, or you can make them out of a number 10 can.

The design is the same, the technology is the same, it's just the size and like the guy in New Mexico, how crazy you want to get with it, you can do just about anything with your rocket stoves. The next thing I have is water. If your electricity is out, if it's city water, you're not going to have water because you have to have electricity to get the water out of the ground.

So you have to store water. I keep my water in the 55 gallon barrels, and if you go to the blog, the Everything Under the Sun blog.blogspot.com, you'll see a water barrel holder that is to die for. It's just great. It allows you to lay your barrels on the sides, and it'll stack two or three tall, so you're saving a lot of space by having the water barrels stacked tall, and you're not going to have to worry about that little plastic pump that you know is going to break within the first week of using it.

If it's lying on its side, one of the lids, you take the lid out, and it's a perfect fit for a faucet, just the kind that you get at the hardware store. So now you just turn on the faucet, and you've got your water. When you're filling the barrels and emptying the barrels, all you need is a hose.

You don't have to, when you're emptying it, you don't have to dump them over. You just turn on the faucet. When you're emptying and filling your water, please don't use your garden hose. You have no idea what is inside that hose. You don't want it in your water. Go ahead and go to the hardware store and get what's called a potable water hose, P-O-T-A-B-L-E, and that will keep your water clean.

Any questions about storing water? Yes? Do you put bleach in your water, and how often do you rotate it? I used to put bleach in my water, and I used to rotate it every six months. Not too long ago, we know some people that work in the city water systems, and they're saying that most city water supplies have enough chlorine in them that you don't have to add bleach, which I was really happy about, because I really hated that bleach taste in my water.

So, they have enough bleach in the city system, you don't have to add it, and it should stay safe for a year. So we empty our water barrels once a year, and we'll just write on the end of the barrel when we emptied it out last. Yeast is one of those have-to-have foods for me.

I can't imagine how depressing it would be to be eating a bowl of boiled wheat, knowing I could have had homemade bread. If you don't have yeast, you're going to be eating boiled wheat. Yeast will last for at least five years in your freezer. So, just you've got, this is what I buy, it's usually vacuum sealed, and I just put that in the freezer, and every five years I'll just rotate it out and buy new.

So, yeast have-to-have food, be sure and get that. White wheat is something I discovered not too long ago. White wheat, if you're not a big fan of whole wheat bread, the turkey red hard wheat, sometimes people think it's a little too heavy, maybe the flavor's a little bit too strong.

If you've never tried white wheat, I think you're going to like it. It's got a lighter color, lighter texture, and a lighter flavor than whole wheat. It's almost like you've taken white flour and wheat flour and combine them, and it's great, especially if you're going to be doing cinnamon rolls or things like that in your food storage.

You want to have that white wheat, and it has the same nutritional content, moisture content, the price is the same, the shelf life is the same, so if you haven't tried white wheat, you might want to try that. Now, speaking of wheat, they've done kind of a research on people who do have food storage, and they found that of that small amount of people that have food storage, 90 percent of them did not have a wheat grinder.

And they kind of smile and think, "Well, you guys are going to be eating boiled wheat, and I'm going to be having homemade bread, because I definitely have a wheat grinder." You'll want to get a hand grinder first, just in case there's no electricity, and then maybe get an electric grinder, because you're going to want to practice making homemade bread if you haven't done it.

The booklet is going to tell you information on where to get them, the best kinds, and the research that's been done, and what they're going to cost. So get your wheat grinder. Technology has given us the ability to have so many foods in our food storage. If you're not a real fan of powdered milk, you can actually have real milk.

This is shelf-stable milk that sits on your counter, and it's good for at least a year. If you are a fan of butter and cheese, you can actually... I used to bottle my own butter, and I don't do that anymore. I had a high failure rate, and I discovered that you can buy canned butter, and this has an extremely long shelf life.

I don't know what that means. I'm thinking almost indefinite. They won't say that, but they do say extremely long. So you can buy canned butter and canned cheese that will sit on your shelf, and you've got a really long shelf life with that. If there are no other questions, I'd like to thank you for coming to the class.

I hope that I've been able to answer your questions about food storage, and I hope I've been able to motivate you and get you excited with a new attitude about getting prepared. Thank you. Get the perfect gift for the wine lover in your life at WineEnthusiast.com. Personalized wine openers?

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