Tricks from the Great Depression.

[Hugo]

I'm starting to doubt that there is going to be high inflation or a deep recession. It seems that that the global stock market is showing confidence and gold price is going down. But the strange thing is that the demand of gold is so high that there isn't much to go around. Cnn reported today that companies in South Africa, one of the biggest gold exporting countries, are out of gold and the demand is much higher than the supply.

 

[dannno]

I'm starting to doubt that there is going to be high inflation or a deep recession. It seems that that the global stock market is showing confidence and gold price is going down. But the strange thing is that the demand of gold is so high that there isn't much to go around. Cnn reported today that companies in South Africa, one of the biggest gold exporting countries, are out of gold and the demand is much higher than the supply.

Post count.

 

[freelance]

I've decided to dehydrate. We experimented during the hurricane power outage with dried onions, garlic, bullion, jerky, and beans. It was delicious!I don't know what to call it except for Gustav soup. The meat cooked to pieces but it was still good. A llittle hard to control the heat on our propane burner too.

Sandra, can you give us the Dehydration for Dummies Cliff Notes? I looked into it last summer, but I ended up totally confused. Which dehydrator do you use? Which foods are the best candidates for dehydration and how do you store them once dehydrated.

TIA

 

[tmosley]

I'm starting to doubt that there is going to be high inflation or a deep recession. It seems that that the global stock market is showing confidence and gold price is going down. But the strange thing is that the demand of gold is so high that there isn't much to go around. Cnn reported today that companies in South Africa, one of the biggest gold exporting countries, are out of gold and the demand is much higher than the supply.

Think again. The Fed is pumping big money into the system, and the fractional reserve banking system is going to add its 100X multiplier, and we'll end up with dollars that have been devalued by at least 50% by next year. Imagine if everything you had to buy cost twice as much next october. That means $6/gallon gas, $40 for a bag of flour, etc, while your wages remain the same, or only go up by some fraction of that amount.

This is going to kill people.

 

[Anti Federalist]

That's a really nice filter. However, the last thing I'm worried about is organisms which is what most of those types of filters are for. I'm more worried about chemicals and other toxic substances if water become scarce. I can always boil water to remove microorganisms. What about a water purifier that desalinates? Now that would be an amazing invetion

Already done:

http://www.basegear.com/desalinator35.html

 

[LiveFree79]

Already done:

http://www.basegear.com/desalinator35.html

Wow that thing is expensive but way cool. Any idea how it actually takes the salt out of the water?

 

[LittleLightShining]

Sandra, can you give us the Dehydration for Dummies Cliff Notes? I looked into it last summer, but I ended up totally confused. Which dehydrator do you use? Which foods are the best candidates for dehydration and how do you store them once dehydrated.

TIA

Not Sandra, but this is the route I'm taking, too. The thought of losing all the hard work that goes into canning to a freeze is too scary for me. Also, canned food is heavy.

I bought one of these.

You can fit a lot of food in it and since the fan is in the back instead of on the bottom you don't have to worry about rotating trays. It comes with a handy booklet with basic drying information and recipes for using dried food.

So far I've had the best results with carrots, tomatoes and bananas. I have a foodsaver machine that I use for storage.

 

[MsDoodahs]

When I was little, we had 4 apple trees in the yard. OMG how many yellow jacket stings did I get as a kid? lol....

Mom would freeze some, she'd peel them and save the peelings, she'd drop the peeled apple sections into a dishpan filled with salt water to keep the pieces from discoloring. She'd freeze the apple sections in those little boxes...remember those? lol....

Then, she used the peelings to make apple jelly.

Some of the apples, she'd cut into thin pieces and lay onto ... WINDOW SCREENS covered with cheesecloth that she laid across sawhorses. She'd leave them outside during the day, then she and daddy would move them into the garage at night, and put them back out in the morning. When the apples were dry, she'd bag them up.

Those dried apples, she'd cook up with sugar and cinnamon and make filling for ... fried apple pies.

Oh...yum....

And for any of you lucky enough to be within driving distance of North Georgia....

http://www.georgiaapplefestival.org/

You can get hot fried apple pies at several of the "apple houses" on that list.

eta: this is a link that some of you might enjoy....especially if you are in Georgia:

http://agr.georgia.gov/00/article/0,2086,38902732_39654299_40311428,00.html

edited again to make sure you guys see this page:

http://www.agr.state.ga.us/mbads/Ads.aspx?CategoryID=460

That's the "things to eat" section. Black walnut meats...dried apples....fig preserves....muscadines and scuppernongs....punkins....

 

[tpreitzel]

When I was little, we had 4 apple trees in the yard. OMG how many yellow jacket stings did I get as a kid? lol....

.

Personally, the sting of a Yellow Jacket bee is much more intense than the sting of a scorpion. I've been bit at once by several scorpions and the pain didn't even approach that of one Yellow Jacket.

As far as food preservation, dehydration is probably the simplest and most compact form of food preservation from my preliminary research. Although, I haven't bought a dehydrator yet, I've been looking at them. Although people vary, the main problem with dehydration seems to be the chewiness of reconstituted food.

 

[rancher89]

Not Sandra, but this is the route I'm taking, too. The thought of losing all the hard work that goes into canning to a freeze is too scary for me. Also, canned food is heavy.

I bought one of these.

You can fit a lot of food in it and since the fan is in the back instead of on the bottom you don't have to worry about rotating trays. It comes with a handy booklet with basic drying information and recipes for using dried food.

So far I've had the best results with carrots, tomatoes and bananas. I have a foodsaver machine that I use for storage.

I concur

 

[rancher89]

When I was little, we had 4 apple trees in the yard. OMG how many yellow jacket stings did I get as a kid? lol....

Mom would freeze some, she'd peel them and save the peelings, she'd drop the peeled apple sections into a dishpan filled with salt water to keep the pieces from discoloring. She'd freeze the apple sections in those little boxes...remember those? lol....

Then, she used the peelings to make apple jelly.

Some of the apples, she'd cut into thin pieces and lay onto ... WINDOW SCREENS covered with cheesecloth that she laid across sawhorses. She'd leave them outside during the day, then she and daddy would move them into the garage at night, and put them back out in the morning. When the apples were dry, she'd bag them up.

Those dried apples, she'd cook up with sugar and cinnamon and make filling for ... fried apple pies.

Oh...yum....

And for any of you lucky enough to be within driving distance of North Georgia....

http://www.georgiaapplefestival.org/

You can get hot fried apple pies at several of the "apple houses" on that list.

eta: this is a link that some of you might enjoy....especially if you are in Georgia:

http://agr.georgia.gov/00/article/0,2086,38902732_39654299_40311428,00.html

edited again to make sure you guys see this page:

http://www.agr.state.ga.us/mbads/Ads.aspx?CategoryID=460

That's the "things to eat" section. Black walnut meats...dried apples....fig preserves....muscadines and scuppernongs....punkins....

made me hungry just reading--uummmm--I love figs, planted one this year, can't wait.

My great grandmother was the food preservation queen. She didn't dry anything, but she made her own root beer, pickles, chow chow, and everything else she grew in upstate NY.

BTW, Some of the best peaches in the world come from GA, I know, I've eaten them til I busted....peach jam, peach jelly, peach syrup......ah peaches.....

 

[MsDoodahs]

Chow Chow. OMG with some pintos ... and OF COURSE a big pone of cornbread.

And not that sweetened crap SOME people call cornbread.

The real deal Southern style cornbread, the kind poor people eat.

It is NOT sweet.

And it doesn't have creamed corn in it, either.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Wow that thing is expensive but way cool. Any idea how it actually takes the salt out of the water?

Yes, it passes the water through a semi-permeable membrane, basically a filter that can filter down to the molecular level. Think GoreTex fabric, but much finer.

The only way to make it work with salt water is to have a membrane so fine that it takes pretty extreme hydraulic pressure to force through the membrane.

Marine units that supply fresh water to ships run at 3000 - 4000 psi and also "bypass" quite a bit of the water that runs through them, about a 10 to 1 ratio in order to keep the membranes open and free flowing. But these units can make up to thousands of gallons a day.

A unit like the one above uses a hand pump, much like a hydraulic car jack to force the water past the membrane. I don't think they bypass any water, so I imagine that at some point, the membrane would have to be replaced or flushed manually.

The other hand held units, that can filter fresh (meaning not salt water), but dirty, water probably wouldn't work on seawater, since the membrane "openings" are larger.

 

[BeFranklin]

Guys, it does not hurt to know what natural edibles are in your particular area.

Example: our tradition every year was to go pick wild blackberries on my uncle's farm over the July 4th holiday. We would have blackberry cobblers for a few days, we'd can some of the fruit for winter cobblers and we'd make jelly with some.

Also, in the spring, we would have "poke sallet" scrambled into eggs. Oh, YUMMY! CAUTION: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EAT POKE WITHOUT DOING YER RESEARCH. It's deadly if you don't know what you're doing!

I love foraging. This year all I have time for is walnuts, but begin to pick anything, and you start to appreciate how much food stuff is just out there.

 

[angelatc]

People see the Great Depression as one big event that led to long food lines, etc. But is was more than one event. Often overlooked is the real reason that led to the scarcity of food. It was the Dust Bowl, and unless we have long periods of drought and gigantic dust storms taking out all the farmland in the Midwest and Plains, we will not experience what happened in the Great Depression.

We have more than that. We have Global Warming.

 

[angelatc]

Not Sandra, but this is the route I'm taking, too. The thought of losing all the hard work that goes into canning to a freeze is too scary for me. Also, canned food is heavy.

I bought one of ..... food dehydrator [/IMG]

So far I've had the best results with carrots, tomatoes and bananas. I have a foodsaver machine that I use for storage.

Alton made a dehydrator out of a box fan and some furnace filters. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/dried-fruit-recipe/index.html

He did a whole show on dehydrating without a dehydrator.

The show was titled Urban Preservation.

Part 1 - jams (canning) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlIVZax10iw
Part 2 - jerky (dehydrating) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIK4DVLHf7Y

 

[AmericasLastHope]

Everyone is talking about food, guns and ammo but what about water? You can live weeks without food. Living in SoCal I'm a helluva lot more worried about lack of water than food or guns/ammo.

http://www.berkeyfilters.com/

 

[Crowish]

You can make your own sauerkraut in a food grade plastic bucket or you can get a kraut crock so you don't have to skim off the crud on top. Lotsa vitamin C and enzymes.

http://www.wisementrading.com/foodpreserving/harsch_crocks.htm

You can do pickles the same way.

This is good bread that you don't have to knead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html

Google "edible landscaping." If you live in the Southern USA, consider planing a paw paw tree. Disease resistant and yummy.

http://www.petersonpawpaws.com/CulturalAdvice.php

The Tightwad Gazette is a book that has lots of tips, including pretty extreme things like weighing cartons of eggs in the produce department while grocery shopping, so that you can choose the heaviest carton haha.

http://www.tightwad.com/