food stockpiling

Your Survival Garden: Time to Start Thinking About Calories

May 30, 2020 / 14 Comments

In good times there are tons of reasons to garden.  It saves money, gets you closer to your food supply, teaches you valuable skills and gives you some independence.  In bad times there is only one real reason to garden—to grow food so you can survive. But looking deeper, it isn’t the food that keeps us alive but the calories within.  It may be difficult to tell, but most garden vegetables contain more than 80% water and then a good …

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4 Simple but Clever Ways to Keep Cooking Oil Fresh Longer

May 30, 2020 / 56 Comments

How do you feel about eating boiled food for every meal?  If you’re not storing oil, that’s what you may end up eating every day, meal after meal.  Quite a nightmare!  Oil is tricky to store long-term, however, and I’ve noticed that some food storage books and websites don’t even address the issue. Polyunsaturated oils can turn rancid before they actually smell that way, and rancid oils lose much of their nutritional value.  There’s evidence that rancid oils contain free radicals, which can be …

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prepping from scratch

Life Happens: How to Prep Again When You’ve Lost Everything

May 21, 2020 / 14 Comments

I remember the night so clearly. It was the end of an emotionally exhausting day. My husband and I were lying in bed, holding hands, feeling like it was the only thing we had to hold on to. He sighed and said, “The life that I am living doesn’t seem like mine. Everything we are going through seems like something that happens to someone else, not us.” I could not argue with him, he was right. We were watching much …

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teaching self-reliance

5 Steps to Creating a Culture of Self-Reliance in Your Family

May 30, 2020 / 6 Comments

We have all known people who save everything. My grandmother is one of them. If there are four green beans left in the pot, she puts them in the freezer. I remember one specific visit with her, 27 years ago, where she asked me to get her a bowl of ice cream. What I thought was the container of vanilla ice cream was actually a container of saved bacon grease. Fast forward to today. She is now 96 years old, …

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Sea Salt – An Indispensable Commodity for Uncertain Times

May 28, 2020 / 34 Comments

When we think about setting aside emergency supplies, most of us would agree that preserved food and purified water are the essentials and everything else is secondary to these. Some might even choose to incorporate things like a manual grain mill, a water purifier, a food dehydrator, a solar cook stove and so on. But who would ever consider something as simple and humble as salt as an indispensable necessity and commodity in the tumultuous days ahead? I would even …

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Oblivion, the 51st State

March 12, 2018 / 41 Comments

Every once in a while I’m asked what my friends and family think of our focus on preparedness.  My response is that I usually don’t talk about it with anybody. At first I did, wanting to be helpful, but after a while, I grew tired of feeling defensive about something that, to us, is just a rational thing to do.  One relative told me that God wouldn’t bless and protect my family because we weren’t relying on Him. Others have …

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REVIEW: Food Storage Made Easy

May 28, 2020 / 4 Comments

Earlier this year, Jodi and Julie of Food Storage Made Easy sent me a copy of their e-book.  I was in the middle of writing my own book, which included a couple of chapters on food storage, and didn’t want my own ideas to mix with theirs, even sub-consciously, so I didn’t read their book until just recently. Obviously, I’m a big fan of blogs, but one of their drawbacks is that the information isn’t organized all in a single …

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A Dutch Oven Cooking Primer, Part 2: Cooking Tips & Recipes

May 28, 2020 / 23 Comments

  There are several tools you will need to begin cooking in your Dutch oven. Lid lifter and/or long-handled tongue and groove pliers Gloves 16” or longer tongs Charcoal chimney starter (optional but almost a must-have) Newspaper and/or lighter fluid Matches Long handled spoon Charcoal Vegetable oil and applying clothes or paper towels Bricks for lid cooking When cooking in your Dutch oven it must be on a flat surface clear of dried weeds, grass, etc.  This is where a …

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LDS Resources and My Visit to The Bishop’s Storehouse

June 12, 2020 / 32 Comments

It’s no secret that the Mormons, or Latter Day Saints (LDS), are preppers.  One of their beliefs is that everyone needs to stockpile at least a one year supply of food for their own family. As such, they have lots of helpful resources and are happy to share with non-Mormons. One of their food storage resources is a Bishop’s Storehouse.  Here you can find bulk quantities of food, such as wheat and dehydrated milk, along with supplies like oxygen absorbers …

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“One Year Food Supply!” A good deal or not?

May 27, 2020 / 13 Comments

Just about every food storage company boasts several versions of a ready-made, pre-fab food supply. “One-year Food Supply for four people, $5,795!” I know you’ve seen the ads and have probably found it tempting to eliminate all your food storage issues with just one swipe of a credit card, but are these commercial food packages all they’re cracked up to be? Here are some reasons to be wary of these products. They likely do not contain the amount of calories …

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