In addition to the Ready or Not articles, the kits, and the $10 will do it, we’ve started adding some recipes.  On the left-hand side of the site under pages, you will notice that there is a recipe link.  The recipes you will find here are just a small beginning. Keep checking back because in the days ahead, we will be adding more.

Also, there is a page for cooking.  Here, you will find all sorts of information that will help you in your cooking endeavors (e.g. emergency substitutions, measuring equivalents,  food quantities for large groups, etc.).  Check that out to see the new information that is posted there.

I have a friend that works out in the hot sun everyday so he makes sure that he drinks lots and lots of water. The problem is, because he is hot and because he drinks lots of water, he doesn’t feel like eating a lot and that can cause problems, like loose bowels - or diarrhea. I know, unpleasant subject, but real life. The good thing is that he doesn’t need to go running to the medicine cabinet for relief. Instead, he can head for the fridge and make himself a sandwich. Yep, that’s right, a sandwich, but more specifically a blackberry jam (without seeds) sandwich and it will take care of his immediate problem.

This is an old time remedy that really works, I have tried it first hand and so has my family and they love it. Not only that, but blackberry jam tastes so much better than any over-the-counter remedies that I have ever tried.

The more I talk to people the more I realize that we need some of these simple, yet effective, homemade remedies. Instead of running to the store and paying a lot of money for something that may cause side effects, you could just go to your spice cabinet instead. Now, I’m not an “all or nothing” person. I am a big believer in doctors and prescription medications. I also think that holistic medicine (acupuncture and massage therapy) have their place. You, as an individual, need to learn what is best for your body and what is the least of these things you can use before heading for the “hard stuff” (i.e. OTC which is over-the-counter or prescriptions). Please take what I am saying in context. I am not a medical professional, just a mom that has found what works for her family - like blackberry jam.

When my son was three years old, he got a really sore throat on a Sunday. I didn’t have any throat lozenges (he would have just chewed them up and not sucked on them anyway) or throat spray. I looked in one of my books and it suggested that I make sage tea. Take ¼ tsp. rubbed sage and steep it in 1 cup of hot water. Strain, sweeten with honey (for older children and adults) or sugar (for younger children). This does two things: 1) the sage numbs the throat (who knew) and 2) it helps your child to not get dehydrated because it hurts to swallow. This would also be good to use after a tonsillectomy so the patient doesn’t get dehydrated (a really bad thing). My son is now 15 years old and he still loves sage tea.

If you are coughing a lot, but you have already had too much cough medicine, suck on Jolly Ranchers^TM instead. It is not always the medicine that is fixing the problem. Sometimes it is the saliva that is soothing your throat instead. My mother, who has a mechanical cough from chronic bronchitis, got this tip from her doctor.

Ginger. Ginger is a wonderful thing, especially when your stomach is queasy or you are nauseous. If you will either sip on some ginger ale or nibble on some gingersnaps or candied ginger, your nauseousness will go away. This is good when you are flying, pregnant or taking medications that make you nauseous. Also, peppermint tea is good for a sick tummy

I used to have horrendous sinus headaches, sinus pressure and a stuffy nose all the time. My doctor, who was a good doctor, would give me prescription drugs that would help dry me up and would seem to alleviate the problem, but only for awhile. It was a vicious cycle.

One day I was reading in Prevention Magazine © and it was describing me, or at least my symptoms. It said that by using decongestants that I was not allowing the body to flush out the yucky bacteria and that I would just dry them up and they would come back to haunt me again and again. Their solution was to eat spicy food with hot peppers in it so that it would loosen up the yucky stuff in my nose and sinuses and encourage my nose to run and get everything out. It worked like a charm. I have not had a sinus infection, or sinus congestion problems, for more than 17 years now.

The science behind it is the capsaicin, found in hot peppers, which is a colorless, pungent, crystalline compound that is a strong irritant to skin and mucous membranes. It encourages the nose and eyes to water more, and with more fluid, it helps to break up the “stuff” in your nose and allows it to flush bad stuff out. Also drinking hot drinks and hot soups will help (it’s the warmth and steam that helps). I also add cayenne pepper to my soups. Whenever I feel that I might be congested I just bring out the cayenne pepper or the Tabasco^TM sauce and use it liberally on my food. A little Tabasco^TM sauce in my tomato juice works every time.

Have I talked about water lately?

I have a tale of sorrow and woe (mine). Actually it was my parent’s problem, but I shared in their misery, even if it was for only a day and a half.

Recently, my parent’s house, in Saint George, Utah, developed a BIG plumbing leak out by the road. But they were leaving for a week and didn’t have time to take care of it and so they just turned the water off at the road and left. They were planning on coming back the next Wednesday and having a plumber come out and fix it – no problem, right? Wrong!

The problem started when my cousin, my daughter and I took a last minute sales trip to Saint George and Mesquite and were going to stay at my parent’s house from Thursday to Saturday. I mean after all, my parents went back on Wednesday and got the water fixed, right? The only problem was that on our way down, I saw a truck pulling a trailer on the side of the road getting hooked up to a tow truck and it looked suspiciously like my parents rig. Then I saw another truck pulled over on the side of the road with somebody that looked just like my dad!

My parents had gotten a late start on Wednesday and so they decided to go back on Thursday instead, but then one of their trucks died just past Beaver. (Just as a side note, this is not the first time that they have had car trouble in the Beaver, Utah, area and I just have to let everyone know how wonderful and helpful the police in that area are. Thank you, Law Enforcement personnel in the Beaver for taking care of my parents). Long story short – we got to my parents house just about the same time that they did, late at night with NO WATER.

Thank goodness that my parents had taken my advice and stored a lot of water. My mom has been storing water in emptied out 2 liter pop bottles for quite some time and has built up quite an impressive water supply, which was a good thing because I found out that it takes a minimum of eight 2 liter bottles of water to flush the toilet – EACH TIME! (There were five people at the house and you can do the math as to how much water we were going through.)

It takes at least one 2 liter bottle to wash my short hair and I was too tired to worry about anything else that night. It was a big inconvenience not to be able to shower because, well because we were in Saint George in the summer and that translates to a lot of sweat (the temperatures ranged between 110 degrees to a high of 117 degrees). All I can say is that I don’t know how the pioneers did it without air conditioning and running water. I still had the air conditioning, but not the running water and I felt like I was going to fall apart.

The moral of the story is STORE LOTS OF WATER! You never know when you are going to need it. It could be a personal disaster, like my parents, or it could be just the block that had a mainline rupture or a community wide disaster and no water is flowing to anyone. If worse came to worse and if my parents had not stored water, they could have gone to a motel (very expensive) or imposed on a neighbor (notice the word “imposed”), but because they had water they were able to tough it out.

Remember, water is life. Please make sure that you get your bottles, containers or jugs filled today. You can even wait until this coming weekend to work on it, but just make sure that you DO IT!

Lucky for us there is a happy ending to the story. The nicest plumber in the world (Don Lowe) or at least in Saint George, came out and fixed my parents plumbing and showers were able to be taken and toilets were able to be used and life was able to continue on.

I know that my mom is re-filling her 2 liter jugs even as I write (two gallons, per person, per day for a two week period).

I want to hear your taps turning on and the filling of water jugs this weekend!

Everyone has to have baking powder to bake the really good stuff. Here is a recipe to make your own baking powder just in case you run out and can’t run to the store.

Homemade baking powder

1 lb. soda,
1 ½ lb. cream of tartar
¼ lb. Cornstarch

I’m sure that you could make smaller batches. Everything in this recipe is done in pounds so just change the pounds to tablespoons or even teaspoons. This recipe is supposed to be double the strength of anything on the market, so you might want to experiment with it. Who knows, you might like it even better.

My other suggestion for this posting is to get Tang.  This is an excellent way to provide vitamin C into your storage program along with a tasty drink.  If you have not-so-good tasting water, Tang (or Country Time Lemonade) will mask the flavor and make it palatable.)  Under optimal conditions, Tang will keep for up to 2 years.  It will also be comforting to young children to have something that tastes sweet and good during times of stress.  To use it, you will need water — which brings me to one of my focal points:  water.

Most of the culinary water in where I live comes from wells. If the wells were to dry up or if there were a disruption in the electricity and the powers that be weren’t able to pump the water, we would be in a very difficult situation.

We need to make sure that we have enough water on hand in case of an emergency. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) recommends 14 gallons of water per person for a two-week period. Even though that sounds like a lot , it is only a gallon a day for drinking, washing and cooking. (Don’t forget your pets.  They will also need water.)  People who have been in an emergency situation were asked what three things they needed most were and they said, “water, water and more WATER!”

There are a lot of different ways to store water. The easiest way to store water is to buy it already bottled. You can also store water in empty 2-liter pop bottles. It is not a good idea to store water in bleach bottles or milk jugs (the milk jugs are engineered to deteriorate). Some people store water in empty bottling jars until they are needed again. This is a good idea as long as the problem that we are going through isn’t an earthquake or tornado.  You need to store your main water source in a container that you don’t have to worry about breaking. You also need to take in account whether or not you can move the container when it is full OR if you have a siphon pump for the very large containers.

Also, store some bleach or water purifier tablets. I would also suggest having a whisk on hand to incorporate oxygen into the water to give stale water a fresher taste.

A few years ago, I would have laughed at the thought of buying bottled water, but now it seems somewhat logical. I would suggest that if you are going to buy bottled water that you buy the brands from the larger bottling companies because their water has been shown to be safer and higher quality than some of the lesser known brands. Bottled water goes on sale all of the time so watch for a sale and pick up a case or two each time you go.

You can also store sports and fruit drinks. Soda pop can be stored, but I wouldn’t rely on it to keep you hydrated in a crunch. That and it tastes terrible when it is warm and so unless you know you are going to have refrigeration, buy it to enjoy during good times, but not to keep you hydrated in a crisis.

I hope that you are starting to see how easy it can be to start building your food storage. Last week, I took advantage of a chicken sale. I bought 100 lbs. I bottled 80 lbs. of it and got 28 pints. Twenty-four pints actually made it into my storage room.  The rest of it was made into sandwiches and a chicken pie. I also bottled the chicken broth that was left over when the chicken was all gone. My storage shelves are starting to fill up

This week’s suggestion:  Red Star Baking Powder. for $4.99, Tang - 20 quart for $5.99 Or Countrytime Lemonade – 32 quart for 5.99.  Again, prices may vary according to your location.

I hope that you were able to try some of your new recipes using your popcorn. This week I am suggesting Crisco shortening, oil and cocoa.

It is so important to have shortening and oil in our storage. I know that we have some concerns about oil, but unopened Crisco shortening will store for a very long time if you store it in a cool dry place. Also, just as a note, powdered butter doesn’t work well in cakes and cookies and neither does powdered shortening. The powdered shortening does, however, work well with mixes such as pancakes, muffins, etc. (Also, a woman at the USU Extension service said that if a cookie recipe calls specifically for shortening you can substitute wheat flour instead of white.)

Other oils store for about one year, so you will want to rotate it. I have had sealed oils for longer than a year and they haven’t gone bad, but I imagine that if the seal were to be broken that it would eventually turn rancid.

I am including cocoa because I think that it would be such a shame to be stuck without chocolate. It is hard to store chocolate bars. From personal experience I don’t know if chocolate bars go bad or not, they never get stored long enough for me to find out. (My family likes to keep this item rotated.)

Chocolate has been proven to be a stress reliever (duh) and during stressful times a plate of brownies or a chocolate cake can be just what you need to make things seem a little better. Chocolate is also a wonderful item to barter with. Oil, cocoa and cinnamon are especially good items to have on hand for this reason.

During the depression and when times were tough, these items were as valuable as gold. Cocoa and cinnamon are grown outside of the United States and so they have to be imported, hence their increased value. Also, it is always more pleasant to cook with oil or shortening than rendered fat (lard) or drippings.

I also wanted to pass on an additional idea. If you watch the grocery ads, you can sometimes find chicken quarters (legs and thighs) for only .28 cents a pound. You can buy 100 lbs. for only about $28.00. You can either take the chicken and re-wrap it in individual servings and freeze them or you can bottle them.

Bottling is a really good way to preserve meat and it is very simple to do. It is also very handy to have on hand to make meat pies, sandwiches, soups, etc. If you have never preserved meat just buy a “Ball Blue Book” which has just about everything you need to know about bottling – including meat.

When you pre-cook the chicken to bottle it, keep the broth, strain it, and bottle it also. It makes a wonderful base for soup or anything else that you need chicken broth for.

This weeks suggestion: Crisco shortening – 6 lbs. for approximately $6.00 or Ambrosia Baking Cocoa – 5 lbs. $9.00 and/or 160 oz. Crisco oil for $5.00. (These prices may vary depending on your location.)

I am so happy with the response to the “$10.00 Will Do It” club. This week I’m suggesting 50 lbs. of popcorn.

Yes, I know you are thinking “how could my family possibly eat that much popcorn?” Easy, my family of four goes through 50 to 100 lbs. of popcorn a year. The reason that I store popcorn is that it is high in protein and fiber and it is delicious popped. There are other corns that are higher in protein, but they don’t pop and you can only use them for cooking.

I grind my popcorn to make fresh cornmeal and it makes the most delicious cornbread. You can also make a fine enough corn flour for corn tortillas. I don’t know if there is something more added to the corn masa that is sold in the stores to make corn tortillas, but I think that it would work just fine.

Just a note: You need an electric grinder to grind popcorn because a hand grinder is just not fast enough and the corn gets too hot and it starts popping.

Mom’s Cornbread
1 ½ cup flour
¾ teaspoon salt
1 ½ cup cornmeal
3 eggs
2 tablespoon baking powder
¾ cup oil
¾ cup sugar
1 ½ cups milk

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Mix all ingredients until well moistened. Pour into a sprayed 9×13 pan. Bake 18 to 20 minutes at 400 degrees. Serve this with a bean chili and between the beans and the corn you will have a complete protein, not to mention a really delicious and easy meal.

Instead of putting the batter in a pan, I like to bake my cornbread in muffin tins for 16 to 18 minutes. I find that they are not as crumbly and they are easier to work with. My family prefers it better this way and it is easier for small children to handle.

This weeks suggestion: 50 lbs. popcorn for approximately $8.49

As most of you know, food storage is very high on my priority list. I’m hoping that I can help you get enthused about stocking up your food resources, too. My theory about food storage is that you are only as prepared as your neighbor. I would never let anyone go away hungry.  If we are all prepared as we have been instructed to be, then we would be a help to our neighbors and not be a burden in times of need. “… if ye are prepared ye shall not fear.”

I would like start some new ideas that will hopefully help you see how EASY, FUN and AFFORDABLE building your food storage can be. One ideas is the “$10.00 Will Do It” club.

Each week I will recommend very specific storage items that you will be able to buy for your food storage that will cost no more than $10.00 (or really close to it).

Now, by no means is this the only way that you should build up your food storage, but it will help you to get started. Or, if you have already started, it will help you increase your storage.

This weeks suggestion:
25 lbs. of white rice for $5.49 or 25 lbs. of sticky rice $5.99
Ramen Chicken soup - 36 count for $3.69

I hope that you were able to enjoy the recipes that I shared last posting. I thought that it would be fun to share a few more of my quick and easy, food storage friendly, recipes. I promised recipes with rice this time. My first recipe is another family favorite. After all, what would be the purpose of having recipes that your family doesn’t like?

First, cook up twice the amount of rice that you need to feed your family (you will use it tomorrow). 1 cup of rice to 2 cups of water, add a little salt to the water and boil on medium heat until water is gone (I usually cook three to four cups of rice at a time.)

While you are waiting for the rice to cook, make Rice with Refried Beans. Open one or two cans of refried beans, depending on how many people you are feeding, and warm up in a saucepan. Add just a little bit of water so that it isn’t so thick and season with granulated garlic, chili powder, cayenne pepper, powdered onion, black pepper, salt and cumin (you have to have the cumin – it just isn’t the same without it) to taste. When the rice is done put a good size serving in the bottom of a bowl, put another good size serving of the seasoned refried beans on top of that, top with shredded cheddar cheese, salsa and sour cream. This is a very hearty and healthy meal.

OK. It is the second night and you have all that left over rice. Life is so easy. Just make Refried Rice with Ham. Cube some ham (however much you want) and fry it up in a large frying pan. When it gets good and golden brown on the edges, add a little bit of olive oil and the cold leftover rice. Fry the rice and ham together and season to taste with black pepper. I add just a dab of butter at the end of the cooking process to add a little flavor, but it is not necessary.

Serve up with a side of corn and season the rice and ham with soy sauce. My family requests this one, but remember that it tastes best with day old rice.

If you don’t have any ham, don’t worry, just add a bag of frozen oriental vegetables and have Oriental Vegetables with Refried Rice. I like the oriental vegetable mix because I like the baby corn and snow peas. You can use any frozen vegetable mix you want. The only thing that I would do different from the ham and rice is that I would re-fry the rice up separately from the vegetables so that the vegetables don’t get all smooshed up. Flavor with a little bit of soy sauce.

I like soy sauce - no, I love soy sauce. My favorite is Kikkoman. I buy it by the five gallon bucket for only $35.00 (at least that was what it was the last time I bought it.) Soy sauce is not just for oriental cooking, it is a highly versatile seasoning. Try this recipe for Beef Soup as an example. I think that you will be surprised.

Take a very large pan and brown your stewing beef or beef chunks, add onions at this point and let them start to sweat. Add approximately 16 cups of water (in my pan that fills it ¾ of the pan). You really don’t need to measure, just make it approximate. Add about 1 cup of soy sauce (now you know why I buy it in five-gallon containers).

Add your cut up vegetables: celery, carrots, potatoes and whatever else you want. To make this recipe even faster, less than 10 minutes or about the time that it takes to heat the water, use canned meat and canned vegetables and dried onions.

Flavor your soup with garlic granules and black pepper. I also like to add a touch of cayenne pepper. You can also put in a touch of sage or Italian seasoning. It is all about the taste, just experiment with the flavors you like. If there is too much soy sauce, add a little water. Not flavorful enough? Add more soy sauce.

This recipe becomes a favorite of anyone who tries it. It is one of those “comfort” foods that people always talk about. If you have any leftover rice (of which you won’t) you can add it to the soup. No bouillon cubes here!