Portable Pantry

I think that folks have to get a little more put aside.  Cash in the mattress is a good idea.  Food in the pantry is better.  Gardens are great.  Again, this is a bastardization of the quote of Phineas Freak from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (lordy,lordy the seventies were fun).

I think that the LDS church guidelines are a touch on the excessive side, but they are definitely something to think about.  The big trouble with the plans that they have is that it is so damn bulky and user-hostile.  90% of the folks that I knew in Utah didn’t really plan to use the stuff, it was just there as a shrine to their faith.

I think that the best approach for most folks would be developing their pantry first, then decide just how far they want to venture into the fell domain of “food storage”.  Pantries aren’t intimidating things.  Just buy more of what you usually buy and put it aside.  Use it up in the day-to-day of your life and try to keep a month ahead.  Nothing too complicated.

But by trying to keep a month ahead in the house, you will naturally gravitate toward stuff that you can keep on the shelf.  You will probably notice that your fridge use will drop off and it will become more of a storage area for leftovers, thawing meat, milk, and eggs than what you are using it for now.

The next step will be to begin using dry milk and dried eggs in your recipes.  These are shelf stable and in recipes they are nigh on to impossible to tell from fresh.  

Then you will have to load up your freezer with a month of meat.   This is easier than it looks.  Buy on sale or the stuff in the closeout bin in the grocery and freeze it down. 

Have cheese squirreled away in the back of the fridge.  It stores well and if you are careful, it just gets better if it gets older. 

So, if you are trying to help folks learn.  Don’t try and bomb them with “food storage” and “preparedness”.  Just sing the praises of your pantry.  As things proceed, if they are worth anything, they will figure out their own master plan for prepping on their own

OK...Done with Chili

Now I am off in search of an ox to gore.  The trouble is, the field is so rich with crap right now, the ability to winnow down the field to the thing that offends me the most is difficult.

So, I'm gonna spend today thinking. 

Have fun, and don't get down...keep hanging in there.

An Extended Fugue in the Key of Chili; Part Five

Pork

Pork has always been the meat for us low-lifes.  Beef is great, but putting it into recipes where it is smothered with sauce and spices just seems a bit of a waste.  If you can afford beef, you eat it as meat, not as an ingredient.

Chicken is cheap now.  But that is a function of the massive industrial methods used and the odd breeds used to manufacture meat.  Use it all you want, but I think that cheap chicken will go to the way of the dodo.  I still laugh when I was reading an old cookbook from 1913 and they were giving a chicken recipe.  The upshot was that they understood chicken was expensive, so if folks wanted, they could substitute a cheaper meat like veal.

Anyway, back to piggies.  Buy the least processed pork you can find.  I have found that sirloins from the restaurant store are cheap and can be cut up and put away as you need.  You can also core out the good bits for grilling and leave the lower quality cuts for cooking.
 
Don’t be weird about fat on the pork.  Make sure you get your pork from the cheap cuts and you can render the fat yourself for come killer cooking oil.  Cut off the fatty bits from the pork, chop it into small pieces(less than 1/2 inch) and put it in the pot that you are going to be cooking the chili in.  Set the temp as low as your stove can manage (or just use a crock pot) and give the mess a stir every five minutes.  Over the course of an five to eight hours or so, you will get a clear oil in the bottom of the pot.  If you are feeling really adventurous, toss in whole garlic cloves and some onions and let it cook with the fat, this flavors the fat in a very good way.  When you have this all cooked down, toss out the chunks, strain it though a fine sieve, and store it in the fridge for cookin'.

This is the start of the chili-making process.

The rest of the pork needs to be cut up into the size chunks that you want in your chili.  My rule of thumb is that the size of meat chunks in my chili directly reflects my financial condition.  I keep the number of my meat chunks pretty constant.  If I am feeling rich, they are big.  If I am poor, they are small.

An Extended Fugue in the Key of Chili; Part Four

Onions and Garlic

These two members of the allium family are the heart and soul of the kind of cooking that floats my boat.  

Now the best onions and garlic come out of your own garden.  They are a pain to grow in this part of the clear cut (too damn wet) but it can be done and it is well worth the effort.  This year they will be the boys responsibility along with the taters and the green leafy’s in the back yard. 

What I am getting sick of is sweet onions.  If you are a salad fan, these are great.  But when you are cooking food with some flavor, they absolutely suck.  The trouble is, the sweet onion seeds and sets are crowding out the older, pungent varieties.

Pungent onions and garlic are what make good Mexican, Asian, and Mediterranean cooking.  Sweet onions merely turn it into a blandish ghost of good chow…suitable for the pre-processed palates of good boring Canadians.

So, try and get the most pungent onions that you can find for your food.  If you are growing your own, I am trying these this year for onions from Heirloom Seeds

4014 - AUSTRALIAN  BROWN  110 days - Dating from 1894, this Aussie heirloom produces medium sized, flattened, dark brown skinned globes. The crisp, yellow flesh is extremely pungent. Stores well.
PKT. - 50 seeds - $2.00

Now, since this is a prepper rant, you should also have back up positions in your preps.  I tend to steer away from the onion powder in stores, preferring instead #10 cans of this in the basement.

Garlic powder I get from Costco with the other spices there like black pepper.  Good stuff.  Try and keep some of this stored away in your preps as garlic makes every bland thing worth eating.

An Extended Fugue in the Key of Chili; Part Three

Spices:

The main spice in Chili was discussed earlier.  But there are other spices which you will have to have around to make a decent chili.

1. Garlic Powder  (yes, yes, fresh garlic is preferable, but you would be wise to keep some of this around. BTW, more on this tomorrow)
2. Onion powder (same caveat as above)
3. Cumin
4. black pepper
5. white pepper
6. Cinnamon
7. Cocoa
8. Cilantro
9. Oregano
10. Salt

Now, there is a discourse on spices. 

Simply put: Don’t go spending a lot of money on snobby-ass yuppie spices with their stylish bottles and tales of the huge efforts that they went through to pry these tasty things from the jaws of the lesbian Siberian tigers who diligently guard the virgin forest where these grow naturally and are gently encouraged by free-trade peasants who curl around the delicate plants to warm them at night.

Its a load of bullshit, for the most part spices are spices, and anyone trying to tell you any different is trying to get their hands into your wallet.  I buy most of my chili spices at the mercado where I buy my peppers, there are also little Russian and Indian markets who sell really good stuff.  The only thing that is lacking is the packaging and yuppie-foodie snob appeal. 

Another good idea would be to buy big packages at your local restaurant supply and actually put some aside for the cold times.  I routinely sing the praises of my little pump sealer.  This thing works great on mason jars with new lids.  if you toss a oxygen scavenger in a clean mason jar, put in the bulk spices, put on a clean top and then pump down the air out of the bottle, these things can last quite a long time.

The final thing to talk about is salt.  I think that a lot of folks don’t think about adding this to their preps.   A big bag of salt is cheap, cheap, cheap.  you will also be surprised how desperately useful this stuff is.  I heartily recommend reading a book from your local library:  Salt, by Mark Kurlansky

The latest tizzy fit

OK, I am going to take a break from the important things like chili to comment on a chart that has the folks out there wailing and gnashing their teeth.  Before I get too far, I am admitting up front that I am a government employee (GS-5 with the princely salary of 32K a year for busting my ass as hard as I have ever worked).  I admit that there are problems with how the guvmint works us wages slaves (I think that some of my co-workers are the laziest pieces of shit I have ever seen), but there are a lot of us there trying desperately to fight the good fight.

Anyway, here is the chart

omg…WE ARE SO FUCKED.

But, being the geeky dweebie kinda of guy that I am, I noticed that the red line for guvmint employees is pretty smooth and up-trending.  Odd that.

So, rather than digging for the raw data (which would take time, effort, and a desire to not keep the Alabama/Texas game in sight) I did this quick chart from the data and the historic population figures from here.  The chart data is where the govmint scum crossed major lines and then I took a guess at what the factory worker number was at that same year.  So precision is not that great, but the idea is sound.

Year	Guvmint Workers	Factory Workers	Total Population	Percentage Guvmint	Percentage Factory
1940	5,000,000	15,000,000	142,000,000	3.5	10.5
1966	10,000,000	20,000,000	197,000,000	5.1	10.2
1977	15,000,000	22,000,000	220,000,000	6.8	10.0
1999	20,000,000	23,500,000	273,000,000	7.3	8.6
2009	22,500,000	18,000,000	304,000,000	7.4	5.9

So it appears to me that the hard data is a little suspect in the way that they present it.  I am not saying right or wrong, good or bad, but it appears that there are trends here that defy the simple rants of ideologues.

So my questions are:  Why is there a pronounced fall off of percentage of the population employed in goods producing?  What is the breakdown of guvmint workers (state, federal, local, schools)?  What will happen to a damaged economy when we start purging the government jobs?  Will reducing the government sector cause an increase in employment in the production sector.  Why is there such a profound shift in the ratio in the last ten years?

The questions I have are many, the answers provided by shrill and screeching ideologues few.  Take care.

(Monday, back to my Magnus Opus on Chili

An Extended Fugue in the Key of Chili; Part two

beans

The main mass of chili is its beans.  Yeah, I know, when you are flush, it is OK to look down on beans and go with a straight-meat chili.  But that isn’t for most of the time.  Beans are good for you, cheap , high fiber, all kinds of good stuff.
First thing you got to do with your prep beans is to go over them and pull out all of the broken pieces.  These can impart a crappy taste to your beans(the picture above is what came out of a two-pound batch of prep beans).
So, after you sort out all the cull beans and rinse them off.  Soak them for at least 24 hours in the fridge.  Dump off the water after the soak and rinse them off well.  Then they are ready to go into the sauce mix that you will be making in the next installment

An Extended Fugue in the Key of Chili; Part One

peppers

The beginning of a decent chili has to start with the chili powder.  Yeah, yeah, when it is summer you can make chili using freshly roasted and peeled peppers out of your garden.  Yeah, it makes a mean chili that way, but the great bulk of the year you get to make chili using powder from the store.     So, there are two ways to go about this.  The spice companies make a fair to middlin' chili powder. You can make a wicked chili out of it.  So if you are lazy and don't approach chili with the purist bent, go to the store and try one out, hell try them all, there is enough difference between the lot of competitors that you will find a brand that you like better than the others.

The next step up is to head to the local mercado.  Around here, they euphemistically call them "international markets", but you know what I mean. 

This will allow you a step from the simple gringo chili powder and into the good stuff.  They have sacks of the spices for dirt cheap.  They are true-blue mexican stuff, with five or six different levels of hot.  Do your homework and figure out what works for you.  I either buy the pre-made (the regular is fairly tame, the hot is pretty hot).

Better though is the access you get to the ground chiles of different heats and flavors.  I have my blend that works really well for me and suits my tastes just dandy.  I tend to keep to the "Mojave" brand.  It is dirt cheap and gives you great results. 

• 1 x one ounce bag of paprika
• 1 x one ounce bag of ground chipotles
• 5 x one ounce bag of anchos
• 1 x one ounce bag of cheyenne

    This makes eight ounces of some pretty fine pepper mix.  Enough for quite a bit of Mexican food, which is the reason we should be eternally grateful to our neighbors to the south.

The last method is for the true purist.  I prefer doing it this way, but I don't always get around to it.  In this case you buy the whole dried peppers from the mercado.  You have to be a little careful with these.  Don't buy the dried out leavings.  The dried peppers that you get should still be pliable.  If they are breaking in your fingers, don't buy them, they are too old.  Anyway,  when you get your bag of peppers, you cut the stem off, take out the seeds and toss anything that don't "look right".

When you get them sorted and ready, get your broiler fired up and run them through under the boiler in batches.  They will need about 5 or six minute per batch and when they look properly "roasty", take them out and put them in a blender and reduce them to powder.

When you get your mix set, no matter how you arrive at your chili powder, make sure that it is kept in a sealed jar and preferably in the freezer.  That way you can depend on it for quite a while.

A side note
I always have some fresh, frozen or canned green chiles for the last hour of cooking.  As usual,fresh grown from your own garden and roasted on the BBQ is the best, but that is for when time is freely available in the summer

Cream of Walk-in

One of the areas where I think that folks have to get their heads straight is the way that they eat. Now, I am not talking abut health, or obesity, or anorexia or all of those strange things that we currently worry about in this age of excess, no I am talking about cooking what you can get.

When I talk with most folks about dinner, they come up with a menu and go to the store and pick up the ingredients. This is predicated on the idea that the food that they want will always be sitting there on the store shelf, at a price that they want to pay, when they want it.

Now, just between you and I, one could venture a guess that this ain't the way that things are going to be in the future. I don't see anything in the way of food shortages in the near future, but I do see gaps that will begin to grow in what we want and what is available. I think that you had better get used to seeing what you have and, then, when you have established that part of the process, start figuring out what it is you can make out what is available.

So today is soup, this is another thing that you had better get used to. There is nothing like a soup with some bread to make a complete meal, especially in the winter. The summers cheap meals come from your garden (oh, you don't have one?...well, get off your ass). Soups can make a good meal out of some pretty odd companions. One of the best soups that I have ever tasted is a pork-apple curry with swiss chard and rice. Gotta give that one another go.

So, as I have stated before, make sure your spice cabinet is up to snuff and get out there and practice. Remember cookbooks are general guidelines, not the letter of the law.

What worries me

We have a tradition for honest cops in this country (ok, maybe not in the big cities; Chicago, Boston, LA, New York, and DC have a somewhat different history). I think that the next couple of years might find some stress being placed on this ideal.

Cops have gotten used to a pretty sweet deal in this country. As a rule, they get paid pretty damn well. In a sense, this pay structure supports the ideal of good cops. They have also got pretty sweet deals in the retirement end of the pay structure.

With the serious shortfalls we are facing and will probably continue to face, the cops pay, benefits and retirement will probably come under attack. Therein lies the problem. I kind of doubt if the police in the US are a set of plaster saints. When they have something taken from them that they see as their due, they will make up the lack elsewhere.

The corruption that we see elsewhere in the world is not a function of the people there being somehow less than we are, it is a function of perceived unfulfilled needs of the functionary class. While we have a lack of that same corruption here, it is a function of it not being sufficiently profitable to have corruption rampart on a retail level.

I think that we will see quite a bit of difference in how local government act towards its constituents in the near future.

Boomers want to get gone

The biggest issue facing us in the next couple of years is that the boomers want to retire. Now you are probably saying to yourself, "what's the matter with that?"

Well, the way that I see it, us boomers got us into this mess with our greed and grasping, we should work through to the end and help us pull it out.

Second, they are heavily invested in the stock market and when that overpriced mess starts tanking, they will pull every little AARP sleazy trick to make sure the fedguv spends good money supporting the stock market so that they can loaf around with the proceeds from their 401-k.

Third, they will demand everything that they can lay their hands on from a social security system that is woefully underfunded. Medicare is going to be absolutely innundated.

So what we are looking at is that the generation that led the charge bankrupting the economy is going to try and retire and then bankrupt the country with their endless "needs" and "rights".

It will be interesting if anyone has the balls to say piss off.

Boeing losses, human gains

Other than the desire to see my friend Locutius retire the way that he wishes, I really wish the McDonell-Douglas company (now laughingly being referred to by the idiots in corporate America as "Boeing") every conceivable failure.

This really has nothing to do with them as a company, or as individuals. It has to do with what they have done and propose to do in the future. They have made the poisoning of the upper atmosphere and the frivolous waste of petroleum their corporate goals. All of this is done to promote the two biggest wastes of time and riches in the known universe, tourism and corporate travel.

I also cheer every increase in airport security made mandatory by the TSA. Good on them, I think that every air traveller should be required to have a full cavity search and be forced to be strapped into their seats with a catheter installed. That way we will be safe.

Fuck the airlines, lets bring back the trains.

Since Predictions are fashionable

2010....well maybe things will get better, the "oughts" have been bait and switch.  

1. Stock market will stay the same for a bit then start moving down, lets call it an S&P of around 800.
2. Residential prices are going to head south to the tune of around 15%
3. Banks will continue to head south....maybe 175 this year.
4. The health care plan will not be quite as terrible as we thought.  It still won't be good, but it won't last either. 
5. Rolling over our 4.5 trillion we need in new and old bonds will go quite badly.  Debt service will increase.  Government programs will lose.
6. California won't get bailed out this year, more states will follow her down the toilet.
7. Republicans will take the 60-member majority away from the dems.  But rest assured they will begin fucking up as soon as they walk through the door.
8. Mexico will get a lot worse.  Bad time to live close to the border.
9. EU monetary Union will start to go under
10. In other words, all the big issues that are going on now will continue heading south.  We are in no way near the end of the party.