Apoca-Rev

[apocarev]

Success!

I traded the spam for nearly expired steak and a half gallon of vitamin d milk!  Win!  Today we'll be making a little cheese and jerky.

[apocarev]

Spam, how I loathe you.

No matter what I did could I make spam palatable to my tastes.  I tried baking, frying, raw, and couldn't do it.  Nothing I did made it any better.

I think I'm going to try and trade someone 4 cans of spam for 1-1.5 gallons of whole milk.  If I can find that trade I will use it to make cheese, a luxury item though is something that I always crave... delicious cheesy goodness.

If I can't trade it, I guess I'll save it for dire emergencies.

[apocarev]

Breakfast of Champions, save the drippings.

When you've got limited food resources you have to think of other uses for everything you've got, especially when it comes to meat.  One thing I always do is save the drippings from any meat that I've cooked for gravy and fattening up of anything.  Here's a quick recipe for gravy with drippings (and whatever chunks are left in the skillet).

Drippings and leftover chunks gravy

After cooking your bacon, sausage, or whatever you'll want to leave the grease in the skillet, add 1 tablespoon of flour to each table spoon of grease in the skillet.  Mix up the flour and grease into a roux.  For each tablespoon of flour you'll want to add a half cup of milk (dried, condensed, or fresh).  Return the gravy to the heat source and just stir it till it's thickened up.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

[apocarev]

A couple-a-days

It's been a few days since I checked in, nothing really new to report other than I made beef stew with roast beef (with gravy), half a can of potatoes, and half a can of green beans.  Been chomping on that for the past couple days.

I'm gonna post up a couple recipes here in a little bit once I dig them out of this old brain of mine.

Cheers!

[apocarev]

A few things on my mind and a couple thoughts on luxury items

I guess I should make a few things apparent with this project... I've always been stockpiling food and it's been something that I never forget to do.  There's always times where you're stuck in a financial emergency and otherwise wouldn't be able to eat.  Self sufficiency in all manners of life is something that's very very important to me.  With this experience I'm pretty sure I can make it pretty far on this project.

The food stockpiled was only a months worth (as it's all I had at my warehouse, at home I have a six month stockpile in the cupboard) and I did have a few luxury items on hand... such as spices, hot sauce, canned butter, and baking supplies like shortening.  Without these items I'm sure it'd create a mental pitfall that'd make it very hard to get through, even in non-survival times.  We take for granted these simple things because we always have them on hand, and if a real emergency came up, how would you cope?  How would you bake bread without shortening, baking powder, baking soda, yeast, or evaporated milk?  The availability of these ingredients, and their long shelf lives means they're perfectly viable for your food stash, but for whatever reason most people don't have them, maybe it's because of space or naivety. I'd suggest that you should invest the $20 it takes to have a nice reserve spice collection and baking supplies.  This small amount of money it takes to create a larger amount of comfort during stressful times is certainly worth it.  If you don't have the $20, start an indoor herb garden, at least then your food will have flavor.

[apocarev]

Not too great of a picture but, I took the left over beans from last night, added 1 can of chunked chicken, left over rice, garlic, onion powder, some hot sauce, salt, pepper, and a little bit of chicken bullion.

Tastes awesome, should be able to get through the rest of the day on this and some fruit from a can.  Really interested in what kind of recipes I come up with to make this canned food palatable.

Day 2, so far so good.  Skipped breakfast, though that's not that unusual for me.

[apocarev]

First meal of the day (yeah, I haven't eaten at all) is rice and beans with bannock.  The bannock mix is premixed, well I mixed it and put it into baggies for camping.  The mix is... 

1 cup flour 1 tsp. baking powder 1/4 tsp. salt 1/4 cup dry milk powder 1 tbsp. shortening

Mix it up to consistancy with water (I usually eyeball it), and bake it.... eyeballed again.

Not much meat protein in this meal but, it should be okay... I'm only on the first day.

Tomorrow I'm gonna go try to figure out a problem I thought of while cooking, the lack of something tastey and sweet (I mean I could add sugar but cmon!) for my breakfast.  I think I may go tap some maple trees.

[apocarev]

Picture of my kitchen/food stores in the warehouse.  There's some not in the pictures as well.

Estimated food stores are...

~20lbs Rice

~20lbs Pinto Beans

~10lbs mixed beans

~10lbs sugar

~8lbs salt

~1 Gallon of Olive Oil and Vegetable Oil

5lbs of Oats

~10lbs flour

~10lbs corn meal

~20 cans of vegetables

~20 cans of fruit

~25 cans of meat

2 Huge Containers of Peanut Butter

4 containers of Tang

10 Ramen Noodles

Some Pasta

A couple dehydrated Soup mixes

a little cheese

a package of bacon

2 lbs of venison

2 lbs of bison

I feel like with hunting and proper fall gardening I may be able to make it through to at least december or the first of the year, we'll find out soon I suppose.  It's also a great thing that hunting season is kicking in here in Kentucky, so meat will not be a big issue, in fact every year in fall I get enough meat for the year every year since I was a kid.  I'm not touching that stuff though for this experiment.

[apocarev]

In the beginning

I sort of decided today that I'm going to do a test run of my food stores and my mental/physical condition.  From today forward I'm living off of my food stores (I will replace the things I eat solely so I don't get in trouble if an actual emergency happens, and they will be off limits, no matter how bad I want to eat them) and what's left of my garden.

I'm going to try and practice skills for self sufficiency, including hunting and fishing, and take every day as if some sort of apocalypse or revolution has happened.  I'll post on here my food stores (where they started, where they are, how I procured the food I eat,and the recipes), hunting/fishing, and any of the skills I'm working on.

There are two asterisks to this whole thing, I do have an event happening that's already planned that involves food.  I also have a job that I will be going to work though no more than two days a week just to make it by.  I'll also live at a warehouse/construction site that I lease.

So cheers! Here we go.