While the above picture did come from Pixabay, those could have easily come from my garden. I've been picking an average of six zucchini about every other day.
One of my favorite ways to enjoy zucchini is sliced thin, tossed in seasoned flour and fried in butter Crisco. I do my green tomatoes the same way... nice and thin so they come out of the oil like a veggie chip. YUM!!!
I can only eat so many fried zucchini. I also love shredded zucchini in Morning Glory muffins. I didn't want to take up freezer room so I went in search of whether or not they could be dehydrated.
Yes! Those thin slices will dehydrate nicely. Not sure how they'd reconstitute and fry but I'm going to try. I'll keep you posted.
However, the ones that have become quite large, I'm going to shred and dehydrate. From there I can either reconstitute the shredded for those muffins or grind up to a flour for all sorts of fabulousness! Might even be able to sneak some in to things so Bob will get more green veggies. :-D
I dropped the ball on this last fall. For some reason, the fall season just ceased to exist for me. I couldn't seem to get footing. I just wanted to sit and veg.
Not so this year.
As I approach 60 and Bob's retirement only a couple of years away, I've decided I need a two-year plan to lay in as much supply of non-perishables and paper products as possible. I'm also gradually adding home-canned/ preserved/ dehydrated to the pantry.
With parts of I-70 still under clean-up as well as other natural disasters and a shortage of quality drivers, there is still the issue of getting product. I don't think this is something that is going to resolve any time soon. I don't like to be a fear-monger, but this has to make us think about supply and demand down the line. They are still touting variant strains of the virus as well as the potential for non-vaccinated people allowed in some public places. Seriously? This has to stop somewhere.
In the mean time, we have to take control of our own well-being. That means taking stock of three areas:
1 - What we use on a regular basis
2 - How much of those items we have on hand
3 - How to break our purchases down into financially manageable chunks.
Take a note pad and pen and go through each room in your home. For me, that would be:
Bathroom
Kitchen
Laundry room
Living room
Dining room
Bedroom
Office
Basemement
I recommend at least one sheet per room.
List what you have on hand that you USE
Pitch everything that is out-dated or that you no longer use
Next, go back through your USE list and determine how many you have on hand AND how many you need to sustain you for 1 year. For now, I'm talking dry goods/ non-perishables. We'll get to the actual FOOD items in a future post.
I'm working on a PDF that I can offer as a Beta test for a book. You're input would be invaluable.
For now, get reacquainted with your home and as always...
Since the onset of Covid-19, there have been a lot of people joining the prepper forces. 2020 will go down in history as the Great Toilet Paper Shortage... except for those of us who've been stocking up on necessities for years.
I purchase stock-up supplies on a rotation, many of the items I buy from Dollar General. They are closest to me and while they are a chain store, they put money back into my small community of around 650 people. Every penny counts.
We often have a $5 off $25 coupon to be used on Saturdays and I take advantage of that extra $5 to buy a couple extra things. While not in any particular order, one week is all paper supplies, another week, personal hygeine, the next week might be canned good items and the final week fills in the gaps or holiday items. We can't be totally practical, after all. :-)
Many of the newbies on this journey began buying willy nilly and panic buying bulk items they'll probably never use because someone on YouTube said that's what they should stock-pile.
I thought for this week, we'd go back to another post from February 2014.
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Anytime someone wants to start something new, their first question is usually something to the effect of 'how do I start?' or 'where do I begin?' My Mom always said any project is best started at the beginning. So I'm going to start this whole Prepping series at the beginning.
Start with DECLUTTERING a space to use as your new storage area. For us, that is in our utility room. Even with the wood burner cranking in the middle of winter, our utility room is the coolest room in the basement with two exterior (while well ground-insulated) concrete walls. One West and one North.
Aside from shelves on the West wall, we turned a wall separating the Man Cave from the shower room into a rotating can storage similar to this one on My Family Essentials. The link will take you to the page where she talks about food storage and the picture of her can rotation system. For a quick look, I have a pic on my Pinterest Board - Emergency Preparedness - CAN STORAGE I really like this and wish I could turn more of the walls into this system.
We use this cabinet to store our bath necessities as there is a shower in this room as well. But we also store the overstock of personal, beauty and paper products here.
A storage area can be one location in your home (ideal) or have zones throughout your house. Under the bed for instance, is a great place to store cases of bottled water. Think about repurposing various pieces of furniture such as an entertainment center (most people don't even need these now with the flat screen now a common household item. Can you put shelves on the wall above the toilet area for extra rolls of toilet paper or personal products. While having them in plain view may not be the prettiest, how important is pretty when you need to have those items on hand? A wooden chest doubling as a coffee table, end of the bed seat or even a hassock that has an opening top can be used to store canned goods.
If you have a garage, how much can you declutter this area and add shelves for bulk items such as toilet paper, paper towels, detergent, etc.
Your assignment this week if you choose to accept it is to take a tour of your home. What can you get rid of and what necessary emergency supplies could you store there instead.
Start a blog about your Prepper journey and link me. Sharing ideas could save numerous lives!
That was a rough ten days. Right after posting on the 14th, I got hit with a serious sinus infection and did a lot of nothing and very little of anything else.
Friday's will continue to be Prepper Posts - but more regimented than in the past. As you'll see from today's replay post, I began talking prepping in 2014. I've always been someone who prepared for any situation. I was raised my a step-mom who lived through the Great Depression. I consider myself a 1950s housewife. Often times, blog posts don't go up because family and home always come first for me.
I'm still not completely over the sinus issue, thanks to all the autumn leaves beginning to fall. There's the last of the garden to take care of and we're redoing the green house these last two weeks Bob is home. I can spend days in October reconfiguring how I'm using the inside as far as seed tray placements and that type of thing.
While I try to get things caught up here I thought since I have new followers/ readers, I'd go back to early posts and shine new light on them. In coming weeks I'll be sharing what I'm doing as well as introducing you to some of my favorite YouTube preppers.
One thing I will not do is ACTUALLY SHOW my space. To me, that is just inviting trouble should the SHTF. So let's take a step back to February , 2014:
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Prepping is nothing new.
People have been preparing since the beginning of time. From the first man killing/ preserving food for winter to the Cuban Missile Crisis and more recent. For generations people have planned for a 'rainy day'. They kept their food stock in root cellars in case of long winters when what they preserved might be all they had to hold them until Spring. How many families prepared for 'the big one' like our folks in Blast from the Past. Though the movie was meant to be a comedy, there was nothing light about the importance of how prepared they were to live below ground.
Bernie breaks prepping down in to 101 manageable tasks to having everything you need for any emergency that might arise. Disasters, like tornadoes, will knock you off your game if you are not prepared. My plan to kick-start this blog is to take you on my journey as I work my way through the booklet and prepare our home for an emergency and put our Prepper Plan into action.
In the mean time, I recommend you order Bernie's book and join me on this journey. If you are already a Prepper or know someone, link me to their sites. I'd love to share what others are doing.
As an added bonus, I thought I'd share this video from Dionne Warwick. Is this Prepping sitution really for the moment we live?
