My Preparedness Calling

Brian and I have a new shared calling in our church. We have been wanting to do this ever since we were first married, but I guess the Lord had different plans for us then. We have been given the preparedness calling of the church. We can have an open curriculum. My husband and I are gearing up for teaching classes, disseminating helpful information, and planning ways to get our ward members more involved in the community to get people more prepared in case of any emergency that comes our way.

My church, The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter Day Saints (LDS/Mormon Church), have been very vocal about how being prepared is so very important. We as members of the LDS church have been counseled to have a year's supply of food supply and life's necessities for every family member, just in case. On May 21st of this year, before we were called to this calling, there was a Preparedness Fair at our church. I attended, but didn't demo anything because I wanted to see what would be offered and be a student instead. We were taught about Canning Beans & Potatoes, Smoking Meats, Food Storage, Preserving/Sprouting Foods; Water Filtering, Storing, & Alternative Sources; Ham Radio, Alternative Heating Sources, Sanitation, Fires & Alternative Ways to Start Them, Alternative Methods and Sources for Cooking, Sources and Storage for Fuel. They also had displays for a 72-Hour and Basic First Aid Kit. I hoped that we would have had more come from the community, non-members and members alike, but we still had a good turnout. I brought home a packet of information and some notes I wrote. These were helpful demonstrations for the novice beginner and even I learned some things while I was there.

Our background: 
Brian and I are both Master Gardeners. We have been to Soil School taught by Oregon State University (OSU) and other mini courses taught by the local extension service. I have also taken a course in Permaculture, sustainable landscape design also taught by OSU. I am currently in study about wilderness foraging, organic gardening, cool season gardening, gardening year round, companion crops, herbal/natural medicine, etc. I have been volunteering at the Rainier Oregon Community Garden, Hope Gardens, to give food back to those that are in need of it. Brian is learning about aquaponics, a system where you raise fish or other aquaculture (aquatic animals) and the waste produced by them supplies nutrients for plants grown hydroponically (in water) that in turn purify the water. We are placing a aquaponics system at our farm. We are also preparing our farm to be more self-sufficient as well so we can showcase ways of doing so. I will be posting more about preparedness and updates on our farm as well. In the meantime, please see my post on Planting a Fruit/Nut Orchard and Edible Garden with Food Stamps (SNAP EBT).

Some other helpful links:

• Provident Living - Self-Reliance and Welfare Resources
• Prepared LDS Family - A blog on Practical Food Storage and Preparedness Ideas (not just for LDS/Mormon)
• Emergency Preparedness - LDS page about how you can prepare both spiritually and temporally for an emergency.
• 32 Preparedness Quotes from LDS Church Leaders - from the Purpose Driven Motherhood blog
• Emergency Preparedness Family Home Evening Lesson - from LDS Daily
• If Ye Are Prepared Ye Shall Not Fear - October 2005 Talk by Gordon B. Hinkley
• LDS Preparedness Manual - a collection of information from different authors compiled by Another Voice of Warning

Preserving Everything by Leda Meredith

We received this product free to facilitate this review. Affiliate links may be in this post. Thank you for supporting this blog.

Since we now have a farm and a homestead we are in the process of up-scaling our food production. We have already planted a small orchard and garden. Next we want to build a greenhouse and put in aquaponics. We would love to grow our own plate-sized fish with herbs, vegetables, and fruit to make a whole healthy meal for our family. Combine that with chickens and quail for egg/meat production and bunnies for meat, we will soon have a sustainable and healthy way of producing food. With the Preserving Everything book by Leda Meredeth we can preserve the foods we produce as well.

Leda Meredith is an acquaintance of mine that I met through some of my herbal, foraging and foodie groups on Facebook. She is a delightful person that also owns a blog called Leda's Urban Homestead and posts regularly about foraging and preserving foods. She also teaches food preservation classes and hosts foraging tours for the NY area. Not only that, she is also a highly accomplished dancer and dance instructor.

Preserving Everything: Can, Culture, Pickle, Freeze, Ferment, Dehydrate, Salt, Smoke, and Store Fruits, Vegetables, Meat, Milk, and More (Countryman Know How) is Leda Meredith's 4th book. This book is a gem to add to your library. It covers so many food preserving methods! If you want to know how to keep your harvest throughout the year this is definitely the book for you.

Here is the online description of the book:

"The ultimate guide to putting up food. - How many ways can you preserve a strawberry? You can freeze it, dry it, pickle it, or can it. Milk gets cultured, or fermented, and is preserved as cheese or yogurt. Fish can be smoked, salted, dehydrated, and preserved in oil. Pork becomes jerky. Cucumbers become pickles. There is no end to the magic of food preservation, and in Preserving Everything, Leda Meredith leads readers—both newbies and old hands—in every sort of preservation technique imaginable."

I have canned, froze, dehydrated and stored foods so far. I really want to get more into fermenting, smoking, culturing, and pickling foods. I have a Big Chief Smoker and I am ashamed that I haven't put it to use yet. When we are set up better I am sure we are going to put it to good use smoking the fish we grow with the aquaponics. I have made milk kefir, but that is the extent of my fermentation that I have done so far. I would love to try Kombucha (although this isn't in this particular book) and my own sauerkraut and then expand upon this from there. I love Feta cheese and would also love to make it as well as my own yogurt too. There are so many more things that I would love to try from this book!

Preserving Everything is well organized and easy to follow. The book starts with a great introduction and the gear you need to gather up for the preservation processes. Then it has chapters that are specific for each method of preservation with wonderful recipes in each. Lastly it has troubleshooting, appendix: approximate pH values of various foods, useful resources, index, acknowledgments, and a page about the author. I love that on some of the pages there are boxes of white text on a dark background. These are tips, tricks, and notes that need highlighted. There are also green pages with important information to know as well. This makes it incredibly easy to find the important information that you probably shouldn't skip or skim over. The recipes also seem like they fit well into the category they are under and aren't something that are too difficult or too gourmet. I felt like I wouldn't have any problems doing any of the recipes or methods in the book and I am not a professional cook by any means. Everything is very clear, simple and understandable.

I am so glad I have this concise guide and recipe book. It will certainly help my family and I with our food preservation. The recipes all sound so yummy. I certainly want to try my hand at the methods I am least familiar with so that I might become more of an expert in the field of food preservation. I believe that we would all do better with learning these methods and getting back to our roots a bit.


DISCLOSURE/DISCLAIMER: I received this product for free to facilitate my review. My thoughts are mine and my family's own opinion and have not been altered by anyone else. I did not receive any other compensation for doing this review. This post contains affiliate links which means I may receive a commission if you click a link and make a purchase.

The Harvest - September and October 2012

During the month of September and October we were very busy picking, harvesting, foraging, gathering and wildcrafting. We picked apples and pears off our trees and grapes off our vines. We picked plums from the neighbors trees that they wanted us to help ourselves to and I gathered up fallen walnuts from both our many Black Walnut and English Walnut trees. I have also been trying to educate myself about the flora and fauna in and around Portland and Rainier Oregon, where I live. I am learning a lot about canning and dehydrating too.

We made Golden Plum fruit leather in my dehydrator and it turned out a to have a gorgeous stain glass look to it. All I did was wash them, peal the skins off, pit them and mush up the plum fruit in a bowl or if they were really ripe I just mushed them with my fingers and spread the mush out on the fruit leather tray somewhat. It is fine if it has juice in the tray with it because that will get dried also. So yummy and without any additives or extras.

We canned pear sauce and dehydrated pears too. I don't have a proper water bath canner or a good canning rack, but we used what we had and got the job done. The dried pears turned out really chewy, but still really good.

I have a handy dandy Pampered Chef apple peeler that gets the job done quickly if I want apples peeled and cored. My Nesco American Harvest Food Dehydrator is perfect for making yummy apple chips! The kids helped load them onto the trays and then they were dried. We like to bag them up and freeze them. They stay crispier this way.

We have different varieties of grapes that grow on our grape arbor. The grapes are really good straight off the vine too. We made both white and red grape juice. After we plucked a bucketful of each variety off of our grape vines we washed, sorted and de-stemmed them. I used my Vitamix to blend it a little in batches then we placed it all in a big pot on the stove to boil while stirring. Then we strained it all through our strainer (we don't yet have a food mill) and bottled it.

We gathered and foraged loads of walnuts from our trees that had fallen to the ground too. I don't have pictures of the walnuts yet, but I will get some.

We also love to visit local orchards, farms and "u-pick your own" places to get things we haven't yet grown at our place. Since I am still learning I love to take photographs of plants and identify them to see if they are edible or medicinal or useful in another way. This is a fun hobby of mine that I want to soon get really good at.

What have you picked, harvested, foraged, gathered and/or wildcrafted this year? Have you made anything special out of the things you got? How have you preserved your harvest?

Cooking with Canned Foods

TwitterMoms and their RAMBO, "Reach A Mom Blogger Online" ALERTS told me about a video called "Canned Food Field to Table" made by the Canned Food Alliance.

You Can Watch It Too:


I learned quite a bit about how foods become canned foods by watching the video. They don't loose as much nutrients as I previously thought would happen during the canning process and seem to retain most even compared to their fresh, cooked counterparts...some even retaining more when canned. For example I learned that: canned tomatoes contain more lycopene than fresh, cooked tomatoes; canned pumpkin contains 3 times more Vitamin A than fresh, cooked pumpkin and canned blueberries offer more antioxidants than fresh or frozen blueberries. Also, canned foods have a longer shelf life than fresh, bagged, or frozen foods. Fan the Canned Food Alliance on Facebook. Follow them on Twitter.

I would love to share a recipe that I made up from a lot of different ingredients I had lying around the house including some canned foods I had in my pantry. It is a Tortilla Soup that I just threw together one evening for dinner and it turned out really tasty. Even though I like to experiment with ingredients I usually come up with something that turns out yummy. Most the time I just eye a whole bunch of different recipes for the same thing and pull together what I like from each of them and then from there I don't look at the recipes again...I just cook. So, here it is in my own words. I hope that it makes sense...


Mexican Tortilla Chip Soup

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons butter
2 celery stalks (washed and diced)
1 onion (peeled, washed and diced)
1 sweet red pepper (washed, de-seeded and diced)
1 spoonful of garlic (peeled and minced)
1 can of whole kernel corn (drained)
1 can of tomatoes and green chilies (diced)
1 can of kidney beans (drained and rinsed)
1 can of black beans (drained and rinsed)
2 cans of chicken broth
2 Tablespoons lime juice (can substitute lemon juice)
2 pinches of crushed chili pepper
1 dash of ground cumin
1 dash of garlic powder
1 dash of seasoned pepper
1 dash of red pepper (cayenne)
salt to taste


Additional Ingredients If Wanted Per Bowl:
1/2-1 avocado (peeled, sliced and pitted)
1 handful cilantro (washed and snipped)
1 handful cheddar cheese (shredded)
1 handful tortilla chips
1 dollop sour cream

Get out a large pot. Melt butter in the bottom of the pot on medium-low making sure all the bottom is coated. Place diced celery, onion, sweet red pepper, garlic, and corn into the pot and stir to saute in the butter. When the onions start looking see through or when sauteed to your liking add the can of diced tomatoes and green chilies to the pot and stir together. Then add kidney beans and black beans. Let simmer on medium-high until bubbling. Then add both cans of chicken broth and lime juice. Add crushed chili pepper, ground cumin, garlic powder, seasoned pepper, red pepper (cayenne) and salt to taste. Stir until it comes to a simmer. Dish out in bowls. Add avocado, cilantro, cheese, tortilla chips and sour cream to your bowl of soup if desired. Enjoy!!

DISCLAIMER: I received this information free from TwitterMoms and their RAMBO, "Reach A Mom Blogger Online" ALERTS. There is a partnership between the Canned Food Alliance and TwitterMoms for this campaign and blogging contest. My thoughts are mine and my family's own opinion and have not been altered by anyone else. I did not receive any other compensation for doing this post, but have been entered into a blogging contest for posting.