A Very Long Conversation

A couple of posts came up lately, one mine, one over at Mayberry's. In a way, the both of them kinda got me thinkin'. So I went and talked to my mom and Aunt's and uncles and the old folks back in the Italian rural ghetto I grew up in.

What I talked to them about was how folks ate. I didn't talk to a person who was less than 79 and I listened harder as the folks got older. What I talked to them about was their eating habits and how they used things like clothes.

They ate low on the food chain. Even I remembered that part. Gardens were big. Canning was a fact of life. Meat portions were small and you got one piece.  Potatoes and polenta was used as filler.  Green beans in a mason jar were a fact of life.  Sweets were simple like cakes and cookies and were used as bribes for children and when visitors came over.

But they remember having a good life.  That is the key to the whole banana.  Try stopping the fancy crap that you see on restaurants and TV cooking shows.  Try eating basics.  You will find that by stopping your pretensions and your striving and just eating simple good food you might start a process of simplification that will make you a better person.

Canning beef

In the town I live in, there is a "Cash and Carry" store that caters to restaurants but will sell to anyone that comes in with cash. Well, they have the best deals on meat that I have seen. So yesterday was spent canning fifteen pounds of beef that I bought for $2.02 a pound. The stuff was beautiful, not an ounce of fat on it and boneless. It was called "special cuts" or something of the sort and it looked like flank steak ends.

So, dredged out the canner and the fry pan and started the process. I have a big non-stick pan (Yes I know, I know, but I love the easy clean up) and I started frying up in 2 pound batches. Each batch got two teaspoons of kosher salt, a teaspoon of pepper, a tablespoon of dried onion, and a teaspoon of dried garlic.

Browned each batch and then pooled them in my 3 gallon pot to let the juices run off. After I finished, I took the juices and added about 4 cups of water and 5 bouillon cubes and brought it to a boil.

While that was boiling up, I packed the meat into seven wide mouth quart jars, each with a bay leaf in it. I also reserved about 2.5 pounds of the browned meat for tomorrow's dinner. So each of the bottles got around 1-3/4 pounds of meat. I then topped off the jars with the juice/bouillon mix (leaving 1 inch of head space), put the tops on, screwed the lids on tight and stuck them in the cooker.



Cooked for 90 minutes at between 10-12 lbs (I have to have the gauge tested at the local extension soon, but it seems OK for now, I won't break into these until it's tested though) and Voila.....Stew concentrate to add to fresh veggies from the garden.

Now, the reason that I am writing all this boring stuff down, is to talk about how life might not be all that bad after TEOTWAWKI. You will just have to do stuff like this quite often. You will have to "make hay while the sun shines" whenever you can. Drying and canning will happen when the harvest comes in. When you get some meat you will prepare it for storage. You will eat from your garden and hopefully get some eggs from your chickens (my town lets you have three). Brew your own beer and watch the world instead of TV.

Life will be substantially different, but that does not mean bad. Work on what you need to live, not just survive

Now this I like

Foreclosure Nation: Squatters or Pioneers?

I love the way that the country has been an incredible collection of dumb-asses for the past 8 years. The banks and mortgage companies and homebuilders have taken off and built way too many big, shitty homes and people will be leaving them in droves as they start defaulting on their mortgages.

A portion of the blame has to be placed at the folks who took out the loans, but for my money, the bulk of the blame has to be heaped on the banks and Wall street. The greedy bastards did everything to line their pockets. I say up against the wall with the whole lot.

These folks here are doing the sensible thing. They need a home and living on the street while a goddamn bank squats on an empty property is just plain silly. This has my wholehearted approval.

Good job.

Making due

One of the day to day issues that folks are going to have to deal with is diet. Let's face facts folks, our love affair with meat is probably going to come to a tear-filled end soon. I am really going to be sad when it gets priced out of the range appropriate to a pound or so a day.

Breakfast is bacon or sausage, eggs. Lunch is a sandwich with a big old bunch of meat and cheese. Dinner is roast beef or pork or chicken. God, I can go on for hours about my favorite meat dishes.

Raising meat is expensive. It takes a buttload of perfectly good resources to grow up a steer to slaughter weight. It takes huge amounts of fossil fuels to grow the corn that we use to feed them, Transporting and frozen storage burn through energy like nobody's business. Maintaining stock in a store is difficult. We just ate that much meat because the whole damn country was that rich.

I hold no truck with the animal rights types. If a critter is prey-eat it. They have no fucking rights and if some puke tries to tell me otherwise I usually start fantasizing about cannibalism. My issue here is that the energy inputs required to maintain our current level of meat production and that our current levels consumption is not sustainable.

This will lead to a lot of other issues that folks don't usually think about. Leather goods will start becoming a lot more expensive. If you are an adult, buy some high quality shoes/boots that can be resoled. The cost of fertilizer in a lot of farms will go up, as the shit from the feedlots starts to decrease.

In real terms we will probably be more healthy. We (I) really do each too much meat. We need more greens and raw foods in our diet. We need to eat lower on the food chain. We will be better for this.

But I for one will always long for a good, well-marbled ribeye.