Survival Food for Thought

In this blog, I don’t want to go in depth too much over “survival”. By working my homestead, I am creating a self sufficient lifestyle. It’s a simple fact that the less you depend on civilization, the less you suffer in a survival situation. Agreed?

I want to mention it now because I have been hearing a lot of talk about preparation and creating a survival food cache. This is all well and good (and necessary), but what disturbs me is that a lot of “survivalists” have a fantasy about hunkering down in a bunker eating MRE’s (Meals Ready to Eat) and beans and rice. Is this REALLY how you want to survive?

To me, the entire notion of preparing ahead of time is so that you can store what you want to eat, what you like to eat, and what your loved ones (picky kids) like to eat. This way, when a survival situation arises, there is less stress (especially among children) when there is comfort food.

MRE ‘s are easy to store and have a long shelf life, but have you actually ever eaten one? Do your kids like them? Beans and rice, while extremely nutritious, are fine, but do you want to eat them day after day? My kids won’t eat any of that now, what makes me think they would be fine to eat them in TEOTWAWKI? People think that they have to be miserable in a survival situation. Why prepare ahead of time then?

In every survival food book you will see, “STORE WHAT YOU EAT, EAT WHAT YOU STORE”. It baffles my mind that more people don’t listen to that. There are so many simple steps you can take now to not only survive, but to thrive. The whole purpose of survival caching now is to make sure life can go on as close to normal as possible. This is especially true if you have children.

For instance, we love bananas and apples. In a world crisis, you would be hard pressed to find a banana in my neck of the woods, and unless you have apple trees on your property (given we’re not talking about anything nuclear), apples would not be easy to find. In one weekend, you can dehydrate bananas and apples, and can apples and/or applesauce. Done. Good food, set for the future. Yummy and flavorful in times of stress or not.

The same goes for your survival garden. Last year, I got what I thought, was a really good deal on a survival bucket of seeds. The problem, I learned, was that most of the seeds were foods we don’t eat. Hey, if you like turnips and rutabagas great, but I personally don’t even know what to do with them. I wasted time and money on things I would never use. Plan your garden around what you love to eat fresh, canned and frozen. This year, I am only planting what I want. I bought non-hybrid seeds of things I actually want to eat again. It ended up costing me $30 less than the “great deal”.

Gardening will be a big topic of this blog, so we will most definitely talk more about that at a later time. This post is to remind you all on how important it is to use this time now to make sure you and your family can live as stress free as possible. And I step off my soapbox.

P.S. DON’T FORGET TO STORE SOME CANDY!

Dehydrating Eggs

I have too many eggs in the fridge, and since the power can be tricky around here, especially during the spring storms, I try to can or dehydrate everything. The directions I have followed for dehydrating my eggs are here: http://www.dehydratorbook.com/dehydrate-eggs.html

Since I have so many eggs, one fruit leather tray, but 5 dehydrator trays, I chose to scramble the eggs (without milk), and cook the eggs on the griddle w/o grease or butter. Then off to the dehydrator. DO NOT RUSH THIS PROCESS!!! If your eggs are not fully dehydrated, they will mold and ruin the entire batch. At this point, Abbey says they look like corn flakes. I have a small table-top dehydrator, and loaded to capacity, this takes between 16-18 hours.

(right out of the dehydrator)

(This is powedered in the blender)

Once they are fully dehydrated, put them in the blender and powder them...This should only take a few seconds. If they don't powder quickly, you may have to dehydrate them some more. The last step is to store them. The website said to store them in a jar or container. I am going to vaccuum seal them in bags marked with how many eggs are contained. And you're done!

To Use: 1 Tbsp egg powder = 1 egg....to reconstitute, mix 1 part egg to 3 parts water. Obviously you can't fry them again, but will be great in baking of all sorts.

In the future, I would like to dehydrate just the egg whites (perhaps dehydrate the yolks separately). I may also scramble both the reconstituted eggs vs. Fresh eggs to see the differences in taste and texture. Until then, Stay Tuned!