Rest assured, the house and home are fine. This is more about the macro environment, not so much about micro.
Well, except that we had a freezer failure. That stunk. Not literally because we caught it in time to prevent things from getting stinky, but we did lose some stock.
Our old upright freezer was first purchased in 2007. No complaints on its length of service by any means. We use it mostly for the dog food that we make every couple of months. We didn’t lose any of that, but the other things in the freezer, primarily that which was stored in the door shelves, went into the compost pile. We don’t have meat (except what is in the dog food, or is destined for the dog food) so the waste from the thawing that could not be salvaged into meals and frozen again was all compostable.
Aside from that, I have been concentrating on “stacking” my pantry. I have about 40 pounds of flour (half is bread flour, half is all purpose) in the new freezer, 20 pounds of rice is vacuum sealed in mason jars, some freeze dried food that I processed myself since I bought a freeze dryer the first time we made the mistake of letting a madman in the WH, and a little bit of tomato powder and freeze dried vegetables (what can I say, it was on sale and I needed to reach a free shipping minimum - gets me every time lol) I bought a few weeks ago. And I always have dried beans. More on the beans later.
The new not-so normal is a reflection of the fact that every single thing we consume is impacted by the looming energy crisis. And since we have effectively curtailed the use of renewables in this country, it will hit us all rather wickedly. Both in the obvious places like the fuel tank and heating/cooling, but also at the grocery store. And, anything else we use that has to be transported, which is, well everything. I keep telling friends to buy meat at the local farmer, same with veggies. Recognize that off-season produce will be outrageously expensive. Much worse than prior years. Example: green leaf lettuce locally runs as low as $1.89 a head in the summer here, but is $2.59 or a little more in the winter. (I have been tracking item costs in a database from my own shopping). By this winter, we could be wishing for lettuce under $4 a head.
Fertilizer shortages have already impacted what is being grown for this season. The plants would already have been fertilized by now, and a survey of over 5,000 farmers in May revealed that 70% of them could not get enough fertilizer to adequately cover their fields. Some decided to just reduce the fertilizer they used, others reduced the crops they will raise.
Shelves won’t be empty, but they are likely to be lightly stocked and expensive. So, I am stacking my pantry with staples that I actually use and rotating things as I go. When I shop, I buy two of shelf stable things I would normally plan to buy one of, and try to make it so that come October, I am eating at today’s prices.
I guess what I am talking about is get ready to shop for more than a week. Waiting until you need something might mean a higher price or not being able to find it so stock up reasonably - if it is something that you can store appropriately and it is something you actually already use.
Now about the beans.
I have some dried beans that have gone past their use-by date. They are fine to use, but they can become “HTC” (hard to cook) and thus needed to be cooked up. I thought about canning them, but the pressure canner is one challenge I haven’t faced yet - to disastrous results for some cabbage soup I canned last fall, that was a bummer because that soup was hella tasty - and even when you have canned them, it only adds one year to the shelf life. That’s a lot of effort to buy one year. So, I decided I would just start using them regardless of their color or type of recipe.
I pressure cooked some Great Northern beans for a cool recipe that I found called “Skillet Pizza Beans”. The recipe looked tasty, and so I soaked the beans overnight, gave them a whirl in the pressure cooker and....they were mush. Went a little hard with the pressure cooking, there. So those became a bean spread that I am quite proud of. For the Pizza Beans? Well the recipe called for Cannellini beans, of which I had one can. So I subbed kidney beans. Dang that stuff is tasty. Over rice, it is a complete protein, and helps me rotate my stock.
The bean spread was just the beans, some garlic and onion powder, salt and parsley leaves, and some apple cider vinegar. That stuff was hard to stop eating. I had to put it in the fridge before I filled up on it.
PS: I have found a lot of dried beans in discount stores. That seems to be a good place to look if they are not on sale at the local grocery.
Loading comments...