Wow Spuds, that's some serious bacon! I just finished canning 12 pints of spiced applesauce today, after going apple picking yesterday. That should be it as far as canning projects for the season.

Jolt,that sounds soooooo good,a nice treat of sweets,man I cant wait to do some soon.

The basic preps are good,but the sweet stuff,I would really miss those,applesauce sounds so good right now.

I still have some of that tomato jelly,sweet as can be.If I wind up with green maters I will make more of that.

9.25 lbs betterboys and 3.75 lbs romas today.Amazing!!!!! We are even dehydrating em have so many.

Getting about 12 lbs a week right now,awesome!

I doubt we have six plants,a row maybe 20 feet long? A lot from such a small space.And no cages.I just let em grow against a 3 foot high fence and rest on ground,pick ground ones before fully ripe and even pill bugs dont bother em,lost I bet easily less than a dozen,which went to chickens.Just amazed.



Pics a couple weeks ago....

Love this stuff.These will ripen over the week on the windowsill,cool to watch em get perfectly ripened




These very ripe,eat ASAP next couple days




These? Have to figure something out




For dinner,homemade garlic herb bread,toasted,tomatoes and lettuce and mayo,light yet filling dinner.

Well the tomatoes ripened real fast,so into the dehydrator,2 top are roma,bottom is betterboys.

Coming along.This dehydrator only goes to 117F so things take a while.Will store in this form,Mrs says she may powder some for instant tomato soup,a couple/3 TBS powder to a cup hot water is all it takes.

Girl making sure its being done right.

Blast,

I feel your pain. The drought here in MO destroyed my entire corn crop. One of my apple trees may be dead. Wax moths destroyed our bee hive, and a hawk killed one of our chickens this past weekend.

I did expand one of our gardens and will be putting in twice the wheat we did 2 years ago, so hopefully that will go better than the corn did this year. At least all the raised beds I dug seem to be producing.

Hopefully winter doesn't take out any more of our trees. I assume the drought in Houston last year took out some of yours? I know my folks in Kingwood lost some.

Greg

I've been trying to cut down on the bread and pasta, so have been grilling on a small tailgate size propane grill recently...

flashback from 1971...on a slow mid shift in Japan there was not much activity so a couple of us analysts would make a yakitori run for the entire flight (600 sticks of yakitori...every bar in Saitozaki was cooking for us)at least once a month

yakitori is typically chicken (or pork) on a skewer....so bought some bamboo skewers...cut up some chicken breast, marinated in soy, sugar, garlic powder and organge juice... alternated between onion slices... another time with pork..

and it dawned on me..the bamboo skewers (cut the points off with a wire cutter after skewering) would be an excellent cooking method for a power out setting... sanitary...no clean up...utilize a small heat source from most any fuel...with the tips cut off they could be used to eat noodles, rice, veggies as chop sticks (hashi/kuaizi)...never was able to use them well enough to drink soup...perhaps an ancient society might have figured out the way to eat with minimum resources...we might better pay attention...

Not sure if it's a "project" or not, but I did pick up some of these LRP rations. IIRC these are the summer rations. I didn't really want the breakfast ones all that much but the dinner/lunch entrees are really good. They're basically Mountain House Pro-Pak in slightly different packaging. They're pretty hard to find at times (the LRPs). There are a couple places that have them reliably but you need to buy pretty large amounts.

They're really not a food storage item, more of a camping & survival product.

I went the 'traditional' food storage,ie,lots of carbs.....now Im thinking,after recent research has shown, that a high fat diet is actually good for you heart wise.That the caveman diet with lots of meat and fat may just have the science behind it to back up heart healthy claims. Sooooo many food myths that sound good on paper when in actuality have pretty much zero actual research to back it up. But thats another topic.....

Back to your Asian cooking.I like their emphasis on fast hot cooking,based on the fact that cooking fuel was a luxury for them. I used to cook steaks fast and hot on a grill with sticks/twigs on the ground in my starving student days (Lived in a bus in middle of desert),fast and hot,just 7 minutes approx for a steak,amazing!

So great post for that idea!
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Phaedrus,those LRPs sound super if not a bit pricey. Looks like the Mtn House just in a heavier package,what a super item for the car BOB. I like Mtn House a lot,a little salty,but you will need that salt too in a survival situation.Good stuff!

A Bud runs a survival/prep store.He is down on MRE's because he says they constipate and are designed to do just that.Retired military....he cant understand why MRE's sell so well,he wont eat em!But I guess short term meals they have a place?