A Realistic Way to Build a Pantry

Well, not like with wood and nails and stuff.  I'm assuming that you've got a good pantry spot, are being creative by putting cases of soup and toilet paper under the bed, or can figure out for yourself that you could put some shelves under the stairs.  After all, I can't see into your house.  (Yet.)

What I'm talking about is, what should you store?

The answer depends a bit on what kind of person you are.  When you sew, do you try to make your product look like the one on the pattern picture?  When you cook, do you follow the recipe exactly?  Or are you daring enough to substitute?

If you like following lists and instructions, you can look at any of the lists I have on the sidebar.  If you're an average American, the $20 per week one will probably be the one with the most familiar foods in it.  (Although, it's an old list and will cost more than $20 per week.  Also, if you do the list, will you tell me what the canned ham tastes like?  I've been curious, but I haven't bought any in case it's textured like Spam.)

The downside with following someone else's list, though, can be summed up in two words: Mustard Greens.

That's right.  Most of the lists on the sidebar, as well as the ones you'll find around the internet or in books, contain canned mustard greens.  Which, I mean, is okay; they are there because they supply necessary vitamins and a teeny smidge of fiber, and there aren't that many shelf-stable cheap vegetables that can do the same.  But do you know any five-year-olds who eat canned mustard greens?  How about any thirty-five-year-olds?

All the lists you will find have this problem, more or less--they contain stuff you don't like, don't have access to, or don't know how to cook.  They are not, for this reason, awesome to simply follow blindly.

They are good, however, for demonstrating exactly how much food it takes to feed someone for three months.  (Hint: a lot.)

So I'm going to help you out, here, with an idea I stole from this blog.  (Disclaimer: I'm not Mormon.  Don't go to her blog and figure that I am asking you to convert.  I'm not.)

Here's what you do, if the whole concept of putting food away is overwhelming:

1. Get a piece of paper and a pencil and write down 14 dinners that your family already eats and likes.
2. Write down 14 lunches.
3. Write down 7 breakfasts.

So my dinner list looked something like this:

1. Chicken enchiladas
2. Spagetti
3. Mac and cheese
4. Black beans and rice
5. Biscuts and gravy with fruit

And so on.

Next, on another piece of paper, start writing down ingredients.  Like, for chicken enchiladas, the ingredients would look like this:

Chicken
Tortillas (flour, baking powder, salt, lard/shortening)
Green chiles
Enchilada sauce
Cream of mushroom soup
Cheese

As you go down your list some of the ingredients will start to overlap--baking powder, for instance, will be in both my tortillas and my biscuits.  Guesstimate quantities for each item--err on the side of having too much.  For instance, it's possible to make enchiladas with 1 cup or 1 can of chicken, but my family likes it better with more chicken, so I put 2 cans.

If you come across some ingredients that aren't shelf-stable (like cheese), think for a bit about what you could do to make it shelf-stable.  In my case, instead of the fresh shredded cheddar we normally use in enchiladas, I substituted 1/3 of a brick of shelf-stable Velveeta.  You could also buy the fancy cheese powder, or just have enchiladas without cheese.

So the list of ingredients now looks like this:

Chicken - 2 cans
Flour - 20 lbs
Baking powder - 1 can
Shortening - 1 can
Salt - 1 pound
Green chiles - 1 can
Enchilada sauce - 1 can
Cream of mushroom soup - 1 can
Cheese - 1/3 brick Velveeta

And so on.  What you now have is a list of ingredients and quantities for 14 days of dinners (you'll do the same for lunches and breakfasts).  Here's the beauty of mathematics: now take your quantities and multiply them by 6, and you will have how much you need for 3 months of dinners.

(Yes, this will involve rotating the same two weeks of meals, but realistically most people tend to do this anyway.  How many dinners do you routinely cook?  You might as well make it official.)

So now your list looks like this:

Chicken - 12 cans
Flour - 120 lbs
Baking powder - 6 cans
Shortening - 6 cans
Salt - 6 pounds
Green chiles - 6 cans
Enchilada sauce - 6 cans
Cream of mushroom soup - 6 cans
Cheese - 2 boxes Velveeta

And so on.

Repeat this process for lunches and breakfasts.  If your family is like mine, you really don't have to come up with as many different breakfasts as you do dinners--I came up with a rotating five, given that most days we eat oatmeal, eggs and toast, or pancakes.

There!  Now you have a pantry list adapted to foods that your family already likes and eats, and you only need to add a few things to round it out:

Multivitamins - 180, adult or children's, whatever kind you like.  You may also want to throw in a bottle of chewable vitamin C tablets.

Any other medicines you need, such as prescriptions etc.  If you tell your doctor that you want to have an extra supply of medication for emergencies, they may let you fill 3 months at a time.  (This will not work with narcotics or ADD medication for obvious reasons, but I know of no black market for blood pressure medication or fluoride tablets.)

Batteries for flashlights etc. - I like rechargable ones, especially if you can get a solar charger.

Water - you should store some in jugs (2 liter pop bottles, washed out first, work well), and probably you should also have some way to filter it.  If I were to store enough water for 3 months for my family, this would be close to 500 gallons, and that would be with just enough for drinking, cooking, and a wet washcloth to wipe off with now and again.  So a filter is useful-- in case you wind up with frozen pipes, contaminated local water sources (like in New Orleans after Katrina), or a note from the water company that they can't filter as much as they used to because they've had to lay people off.  You may not need a filter if you live where the major concern would be biological contaminants--in that case, boil your water for 10 minutes per every 1000 feet you are above sea level.  But in my neck of the woods, we have to worry about heavy metals and mine contamination--we need a filter.

Toilet paper - a roll per week per person.  For my family this is 1 roll x 12 weeks x 5 people = 60 rolls.

Pet food - if you have animals, you have to consider them, too.  My dog (a big lab) goes through about 25 lbs of dog food per month, stretched a bit by the fact that he eats a lot of kid-dropped food.

Now that you've done your multiplying, you have your shopping list already made.  Sit down and figure out how long you're going to spread your buying over, and make weekly or monthly shopping lists.  (I take it as a given that you are not going to go buy all of this at once, but if you have a tax refund in hand or something and want to get it all at once, go to Costco and load up.)

This process should at least get you started.  There is more you can do, of course--you can venture into the realm of powdered eggs, you can think about how you would entertain yourselves if you had unreliable electricity, you can think about storing some extra for your aunt who might move in with you or the little old couple next door--but we're just beginning, today.

Cheers,

Breanna

Be Smart

By which I mean that the things you try to do in order to save money or be more resilient should actually save you money or make you more resilient.

Like, for example, optimistic early potty training because you are sick of diapers trying to save money on diapers.

Take the darling of most simple living websites/messages boards, making your own soap.  Does making soap actually give you the value that you want from it?

This is darn cheap soap.

For me, I buy my soap in big packages.  When we had a Costco/Sam's Club I bought from there, now if need be I can order the same giant packages on Amazon and get free shipping with Prime.  It works  out to about 45 cents a bar when I buy soap like that.  (And yes, I am aware that what I'm actually buying is detergent.  I'll talk about that a bit later.)

The values I would want from making my own soap would be 1) cost savings and 2) less stuff in it that would cause the kids' skin to break out.

This is what you call mugging for the camera.

 If I can get those values with storebought soap, it would be the better choice for me--because homemade soap has a huge, whopping CON attached to it for those of us with little kids: lye.

Understand, I don't have anything against soap made with lye.  (Lucky, since it's impossible to make soap without lye.)  The lye gets neutralized in the soapmaking process, and it does produce a superior cleaning agent to make soap with just lye and lard (or coconut oil, or olive oil).  But in order to make soap you have to handle caustic ingredients with a fair amount of precision.

Caustic, precision, and little kids are not good bedfellows.  I mean I have yogurt that fails because of sudden child emergencies.

An example of something that really does help me save money and be more resilient: my inherited metric measuring cup. It's difficult to make German recipes with English measuring cups.  This has the added benefit of looking pretty on my shelf.

 So for our family, it just makes sense to buy soap.

Now, I could see some situations in which that might change--for instance if we discovered that the only way to avoid eczema outbreaks was to use a lard/lye soap like this really expensive one.  (It is lovely soap, I bought a couple of bars from a health food store.  It lasts a long time and doesn't dry out my hands.  Still, one can buy a lot of lotion for the difference between 45 cents and $6.)

In that case the price difference between homemade/storebought soap would be extreme enough to justify me handing the children to the Husband with instructions to keep them outside until the soap process was done, and going through the fuss of making blender soap.

What making soap with purchased lye and purchased lard would NOT do is make us more resilient to financial ups and downs.  If I'm purchasing lye and oil, how is that better than purchasing soap?  It might be nice to know how to make real pioneer soap, in case you ever have to drip lye and render tallow, but that seems like a looooooot of work when I can just buy 16 bars of Ivory bath soap for $7.99 on Amazon.

The lesson here?  Don't start up a frugal or homesteading practice just because a bunch of people on message boards think that it's cool.  Actually sit and do your own analysis.

Homemade kimchi, fermenting on my countertop.  Storebought kimchi is $4.60 for a pint, as nearly as I can tell my homemade version runs about $1.10 a quart, even with paying for the fancy Korean chili paste.

One area where I have found that doing the work myself yields values I want--savings and health benefits--is cooking and preserving food.  For instance, the kimchi I put up lately serves both the purpose of using up the ton of radishes that came in our co-op basket and allowing me to eat kimchi for less than the price per ounce of say, caviar.  Learning how to preserve extra food when you have it, instead of letting it rot and wrinkle in the bottom of the fridge, is a genuinely useful skill.

Homemade bread saves us money; we buy flour in giant sacks (which we then pour into food-grade buckets we got for free from the Walmart bakery department--you just have to ask them) and yeast in 1lb packages, and I can make very good bread for about $1 a loaf.  The bread we would buy at the store, for similar nutritional content, would be anywhere between $2.60 and $4 a loaf, depending on sales.  I've even seen it as high as $4.99.  So making bread--which is effortless for me because I have a stand mixer--makes sense for us.

A website I found the other day recommends keeping three lists when becoming prepared: To Learn, To Do, and To Buy.  I think that's sound advice.  Go down your list of things and run your own analysis on each item.  Which values does this item support?  It's okay if your values are not the same as mine--if having pure soap, where you know everything that went into it, is more important than cost savings, for example.  Or maybe you will find the time savings of buying your bread and kimchi is more important for you right now, so that you can pick up overtime at work.  That's okay.  What's not okay is just doing something because I told you to, or because someone on a frugal living forum told you to.

Do your own math.

Cheers,

Breanna

Taking Care

Something you may not know, if you don't happen to be a nurse with a taste for reading 19th century housekeeping books that are free on Kindle, is that not so very long ago being able to take care of sick people was considered a branch of housekeeping.

It was a bigger deal in the era before antibiotics, when hospitals were even more unsafe than they are now.  (Yes, I'm a nurse and I just said that.  It is almost always better to recover at home.)

The topic is apropo at my house at the moment.  As a nurse I have a few ideas that laypeople might not have.

It's actually not like you need a lot of specialized equipment.  A lot of hospital stuff is specialized in order to control the types of infections that happen when you cram 700 people into the same building, but in caring for family members you don't have to worry about, for instance, disposable staple removers.  (Even if you do wind up with four people with staples that need to be removed, just boil the tool in between jobs.)

Some things to consider:

Why even consider this stuff?

Well, there are disaster scenarios--there is a hurricane, earthquake, or other large disturbance, and the hospital is full.  This happened recently in Colorado Springs because of the forest fire smoke--people with asthma overwhelmed their ER.  A hospital that's full, with an exhausted/skeleton staff, running on its backup generator and only stocked with the drugs it had in the pharmacy is not where you want to be if you can help it.

There is also what you might think of as a personal disaster scenario--maybe you, like many many Americans, just can't afford to recover from pneumonia in the hospital because you don't have insurance.

Thirdly, maybe you believe it's better to avoid recovering in hospitals unless you absolutely have to have hospital-level care.  This is completely reasonable, given the number of hospital-acquired infections every year.  In my opinion, the hospital should be your last resort.  (But please don't avoid it if you think you're having a heart attack--deal with that right away.)

Tools you might want:

These are actually fairly few and simple, although like anything else there are equipment geeks that like to have a lot of toys.  Here is what I would recommend keeping in your home medical kit.  Mine is a plastic dishpan:

1. A thermometer - it's nice to have an alcohol version that you can shake down, so you don't discover the tiny watch battery inside a digital one needs to be replaced at 3am when you're worried your toddler might have febrile convulsions.  Trust me on this.  Learn to take a temperature.  Be aware that the standard is the oral temperature--axillary temps (that's the armpit one) run a degree lower than oral temps normally, rectal temps run a degree higher, and ear temps are so unreliable that I don't mess with them.  With my kids I generally take axillary temps.  If you have to report the temp to a doctor, be sure to tell him where it was taken (armpit, oral, rectal).  (Note: if you get the glass thermometer, do not try to take a rectal temp with it.  I shouldn't have to explain why.)

2. A stethoscope - this is optional, but I like mine for listening to the kids' lungs and reassuring myself that they don't have pneumonia.

3. A blood pressure cuff - good if you or someone in the family is on blood pressure medication; take it the same time and same way every day and write down the results.

4. A first aid manual, either standard or more serious depending on your circumstances.

5. A CPR mask - actually I recommend you keep one of these in your kit, one in your car kit (yes, I have a car kit too) and one in your purse.  And make time to take a Red Cross course so you know how to use this.

6. Normal first-aid kit stuff or more comprehensive stuff if you have the training.

7. Medicines you might want because of your location or personal issues - i.e., calamine lotion, aloe vera, antifungal medicine, psoriasis-friendly soap, diaper rash cream, tea-tree oil, etc.

Yes, I know, I have a lot of stuff in my dishpan.  I like first aid kits, it's sort of a hobby with me.

Medications are a separate issue, and there's a lot to consider about them, so I'll just list the really basic things I keep in the cupboard.  If you're family, you can email me and I can help you plan something more specific.

1. OTC painkillers - adult and children's Tyelenol, adult and children's ibuprofen.  They have different uses, I generally reach for ibuprofen.  We keep one bottle of 81 milligram aspirin in case someone has a heart attack while they are in our house or for when the dog's shoulder acts up.  (Yes, you can give a dog aspirin, but just one, and not too often.  NEVER give a dog tyelenol, or you will kill it.)

2. Antihistamines - liquid and pill form benadryl, mostly in case of anaphylactic emergency.  Claritin for my hay fever.

3. Cold medicine - Do not ever ever use Sudafed.  It isn't safe, even for young healthy people.  At my house we use:
-cough drops (I like Ricola)
-Vick's Vaporub
-Steam
-Echinacea tea
-Emergen-C
-Elderberry cough syrup
-Staying warm
-The occasional mustard plaster
-Lots of fluids

4. Creams
-antibiotic (Neosporin)
-antifungal (clotrimazole)
-anti-itch (generally has benadryl in it, good for bugbites)
-aloe vera gel

Making the Sick One Comfortable

This is common sense, and a bit of thinking.  The patient ought to be either in bed or in an improvised bed on a couch or a recliner.  A cotton sheet, pulled smooth, is nice to have underneath them.  It needs to be kept smooth--you usually need to straighten it every time the patient gets up to go to the bathroom.  Make sure to change the pillowcase if it gets sweaty or dirty.

Use as many pillows as you need to, and a blanket.  Let the patient stay in their jammies, but it's helpful to have a few sets of jammies.  If the patient is sick for more than a day, have them take a shower, bath, or sponge bath each day and change to fresh jammies.  Obviously change any pajamas that get soaked or dirty.

Brush their hair and, for ladies, tie it back.

Brush their teeth or help them brush their teeth and use mouthwash.

Change the water in their cup and keep it topped off with ice.

Put the Kleenex and a grocery sack for dirty kleenexes near them, or get them fresh hankies regularly.

You may need a drawsheet or mattress protector.  I have the one I linked to - in my opinion every household ought to have at least one.  It helps if the person you're caring for is incontinent, little, or throwing up--you sometimes don't have to change the whole bed.

You may, depending, need a potty chair for kids or a commode.  If you're helping someone to a commode, learn how to do it without straining your back.  If you can manage it at all, it's much, much better to use a commode than it is to use a bedpan.  Most people find it a lot easier to be sitting up, and it makes infections less likely.  Wash your hands, of course.  Wash the patient's hands.  Wash out the commode bowl.

Provide a book to read, a television if you have it, a puzzle, a stuffed animal, crosswords, or anything that will be distracting without being stressful.  Being sick is uncomfortable, but it's more uncomfortable if it's boring.

Serve meals on a tray.  Make them look as pretty as you can--hunting up a juice glass to put a flower in is not going too far, especially if the illness you are nursing is long-term.  Keep them light and bland, but be sure to provide calories.  And of course, if the person is hungry, feed them!

Make sure there are enough blankets/shawls for the patient, and, if at all possible, open the curtains and the window for at least a bit each day.  Humans need sunshine, and rooms need to be aired.

Here is the CDC's take on nursing someone who has influenza, and another document from the North Dakota department of public health.  If not everyone in the family is sick, you will want to keep the sick person in their bedroom (with a bell to ring for you) and try to maintain isolation precautions.  I.e., no going in and sitting on your sick sibling's bed and sharing your teddybear/toothbrush.

Wash your hands - before handling anything for the sick person, after handling anything for the sick person, any time your hands feel dirty, before cooking, after going to the bathroom, after handling raw food, after gardening, after petting the dog, after going to the store, after going to church, after you get home from work, before taking a temperature, before administering medication...pretty much if you wonder whether you should wash, do.

That's about all there is to it - except, of course, take care of yourself, if you're the caregiver.  Don't forget to eat, take your vitamins, drink your water, and take naps when you can.

Cheers,

Breanna

Recipes, Colds, and Stuff

I have this book by Sharon Astyk which tells both how to make kimchi (a spicy Korean fermented cabbage--I swear to you it's delicious, in spite of this description) and kimchi tofu soup.  I know what you're thinking: fermented cabbage and tofu soup?  And yet, I promise, it's the most wonderful soup you've ever had, if you're sick.  I used storebought kimchi (it's usually in that section of the produce area where they have fancy refrigerated salad dressing and pre-chopped apples), a can of canned chicken, carrots instead of mushrooms, and onions instead of scallions.  It was. So. Good.

We are, if you haven't figured it out, sorta sick here today.  That is, we all have colds that are annoying enough to make us whiny and lethargic, but not enough to make us lay on the couch so Mama could lay in the recliner and have a break.  It's fun.

I may have mentioned her before, but I really like Astyk's writing.  She's funny, and her stuff is very useful even if you don't pursue it for the same reasons she does.  I'm not at all sure, for instance, like she is, that we're heading either for human-caused global warming or for peak oil.  But I do think that anyone who might lose their job, lose electricity, find the cost of heating their house too expensive, need to save money on food, become trapped in their house for a few days by an ice storm, or any number of other scenarios will want to look at the two books by Astyk that I own:

Independence Days
and Making Home

They're intensely practical, and mostly "theory of anyway" stuff.  I.e., even if the zombies do not come later this week, what are some things that might be good to do anyway?  (For instance: we like tomatoes.  We make pizza, spaghetti, and chili pretty regularly.  So I keep canned tomatoes on hand.  I don't do that because I'm going to eat/throw them at zombies in the event of an apocalypse, but because I don't like having to buy tomatoes every week.)

Some of the items in the books are useful to know, even if you're not going to pursue them at the moment--like the composting toilet.  Others should probably be pursued right now if you can afford it--like adding insulation to your house or considering one of these really interesting heat stoves.  (Alas, the rocket stove mass heater won't work in our house.  I am 98% sure it would be too heavy for our floor, and I think the fire inspector would have a stroke if we told him we'd built it ourselves.  But if you're building a cabin, it makes a lot more sense than a wood stove.)  Still other items--like the list of what to put in your pantry *right now* if things start to head south--should be read and understood by everyone.

Incidentally, one of the "Theory of Anyway" reasons to have a pantry is a day like the one I'm having today: I realized last night, when the Husband was stuck working late at a mine 1 1/2 hours away, that the kids and I were getting sick.  Buddy always gets sicker faster than everybody else, and he was a puddle of feverish snot by bedtime.  There was no way I was going to take the kids out into the chilly darkness by myself and drive the half hour into town, hoping that CVS would still be open and not too full of meth addicts, and buy sick-care supplies.

Even when I lived in town, in Texas where it wasn't so chilly, I wouldn't want to haul sick kids through the store.  So it was reassuring to bundle everyone into their flannel jammies and reflect on what we had available to us this morning, because it's always available:

Canned chicken (for soup)
"Cold Care for Kids" herbal tea (I water it down/mix it with juice, it's better for them than pop and very mild)
Vitamin C gummies
Frozen concentrated OJ
Plenty of fleece blankets
Hankies
Elderberry cough syrup (the only kind, IMHO, that's safe for kids under 12 - you can buy it, or it's simple enough to make your own if you have an elder bush)
The makings for homemade pedialyte
And, you know, enough in the pantry for several meals that don't require too much thought, since thought is not my strong point when my ears are stuffed up.

None of these things are strange, weird, survivalist* crap.  They're just stuff we like having, and since I can accurately predict that we will get colds at some point future, I try to have it on hand before winter.  Your list would likely be different, but why not make one?  If you're not sick or without electricity at the moment, trust me, it's easier to stock up now.

Enjoy the last few warmish days, if you've got them where you live, and tuck aside the things you might want before winter.  I can testify to the value of a few jars of kimchi.

Cheers,

Breanna


*(Am I a "prepper"?  Well, no.  I pretty well think that if we are struck with an EMP or some other kind of nuclear disaster, we're all more or less hosed anyway, so I don't worry too much about that.  If we're hit with a pandemic, duct-taping tarps over the window and sheltering-in-place isn't going to help much, so I don't worry too much about that.  I find other scenarios even less likely, and I find that people who write doomer thrillers are generally not very good writers, not very good judges of how people actually behave, and not very good students of history.

The problem with extrapolating the future from novels is that no one would read a novel about becoming unemployed, cold, and with a low-grade UTI, having to wear crappy second-hand tennis shoes, and eating lentils a lot until you move in with your cousins and start working for them as a gardener/housekeeper.  Novels require a central conflict, and in doomer thrillers it's a lot easier to produce a conflict by having sudden collapse and a roaming gang of Zombie Mutant Bikers come tearing through Our Hero's homestead.  So don't mistake the requirements of storytelling for sober scenario analysis.)