In Trying Times A Jew Preps

 

I haven’t liked ground beef in a really long time, as long as I can remember actually, maybe 15 years atleast.

I will eat it though, I will eat a burger from time to time, especially if they are made at home. I will make tatter tot casserole and even meat loaf.

Recently in the last 6 months or so (I got a meat grinder (actually I got 2, a manual and an electric one, YAY!) I stopped buying ground beef at costco and started buying bulk meat (they sell 3 packs of eye of round roasts and rump roasts and such) so I get the eye of round roasts. Then I get them home and grind them before I freeze it.

In the last year there has been a scare over pink slime. Even when I make something like meat loaf or burgers if I post pictures on facebook (which I do a lot, and D makes fun of me for doing it) I almost always get comments like, I can’t believe you would eat that, don’t know know what pink slime is, how gross how could you even consider eatting anything made out of ground beef.

First of all, after watching a bunch of Penn and Teller Bullshit about hippies who want to inflict their idea of organic and fresh food on the world has skewed my views. America as a whole is VERY spoiled and can afford to be because there are grocery stores everywhere, there are so many safety standards and before these things were made public MANY of these same people at the very things they are crying out about now, probably because they liked them so much.

In the end. I know what pink slime is, it is beef (or another type of meat but in this instance we will say beef) thecuts of beef that are not wanted or the left over bits and they are run through a centrifuge and then the meat bits are seperated from the fat and the meat it then cleaned with ammonia and water (I don’t know they recipe of that mix or how long they are mixed or soaked for and then they are ground either into what looks like ground beef or ground into finer bits and then ground into regular hamburger, in this country up to 70% of the ground beef in our country contains up to 15% of pink slime. They don’t have to tell you or even mention that there is ammonia in the beef that your purchasing.

Honestly, I don’t think it will kill anyone, if anything it makes it more affordable and doesnt really taste very different.

The thing is, for me, I don’t like the texture of ground beef and I believe that this was before they even started adding pink slime to regular grocery store ground beef. When I order from fast food, I always get fish or chicken. Yes I have see the videos about cod and about chicken nuggets, I am an adult. I don’t need the lecture.

In the end I prefer to grind my own beef because the texture is very different to me and I like it a lot better. I cut it into manageable chunks and then I grind it, fat and all, I grind the fat because I think its important to have fat content in ground meat, it holds up better and tastes better, but since I use eye of round roast, there isnt a lot of fat to begin with.

I will post a bunch of pictures, after the jump.

I am also going to post a picture of a baby shaped meat loaf. I am going to do this because it was freaking funny, and I got a lot of jokes that will really offend a lot of people but my friend posted a picture similar several months before and he messaged me and asked me to make it for him for his b-day as his present and instead of a cake, so I did it. I figure it will be the only one I will ever make and I think it is the only one I will ever make. I am an alternative type person and I thought it was funny. I did grind the meat for that as well.

By the way, grinding your own meat (good, lean meat) is not much more expensive that buying it and the cost of a grinder is under $100 and if you don’t have the money for that, find the cut of beef you like (even at Wally World) and ask the butcher (unless its super late at night, pretty much any normal sized grocery store has a butcher)  to grind if for you, it doesnt cost any more to have it ground, it will still be the same price as it was in the roast shape. Only small groceries or specialty butchers will charge you to grind meat, and even then, not often. I have even asked the butcher at the chinese food grocer to grind pork or chicken and they do it for no more than the cost of the meats weight.

Sorry if your offended by the meat loaf shaped like a baby…. It really was hilarious, men do love their meat.

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Its AMAZING! Its like being able to share all of my inside information, everything from HUNDREDS of hours of reading books and internet research and youtube videos can actually be given to someone who has a very personal connection to me.

My sister manages a gun store, she is very conservative and shockingly we now have a lot of the same views. I never really saw that coming.

Growing up, when we were quite a bit younger there were times of not enough to eat for dinner, or very little to nothing in the kitchen, later in our childhoods we always had a plentiful pantry. While with our mothers and then later when we were older.

She watches the same news I do, sees the same things coming that I do and came to the same conclusion and honestly makes more money (between her husband and herself vs me and mine) and if she’d been able to, she would be done with it by now, but she started later and frankly doesnt have the space I do, so she’s looking for tips, and basic information, she calls often and asks me if something is a good tip or what have I learned about this or that.

Its AMAZING to have someone to tap into, to ask about “glassing eggs” or “waxing cheese” both of which have been recent research endeavors and I will get into them in more depth in the next few days.

My sister lives about 500 miles away from me, so I can’t be there to help but we are close so its really nice to have something additional in common to be able to talk about and share resources.

Organizing my spice/staple pantry became really important because I don’t have a large kitchen, we have a large house but the kitchen isnt definitely not the reason that the house was chosen.

So any how. The reason I needed better organization in my pantry was that I always had to move stuff to find what I was looking for.

I wish that I had a before picture, but I wasn’t thinking about that when I started.

since I took this picture I have been back to Ikea and actually purchased MORE organizational “stuff”  but as you can see in this picture, I have 3 double level lazy susan’s for spices and on the shelf above that there are 3 three tiered can organizers (they look like little steps) It makes it SO much easier to find things.

When you are storing food, its really important to keep track of everything, knowing what you have on hand and what you have opened.

I also really like the door unit, it doesnt pit the smaller sized door so from here on out we will have to close that door first, which to me is just not that big a deal. The door shelving makes it a lot easier to put boxed goods. Its like having a complete additional shelf that I don’t have to push things out of the way to find.

Also if you look at the top shelf you can see some cereal containers, I’ve bought several more of those for cereal and other dry goods such as dry milk. I just wont eat those things if they are stale (not unless I had to) so I like to put things in containers once they have been opened. I also love labels and today I spent my day making lists of what labels were needed, making those labels and putting them where they were needed, storing food doesnt have to make your house a mess, or disorganization.

I while ago I was watching some Youtube videos and I stumbled across one that showed a families food storage pantry room and they had these cardboard can organizers. I looked around for them, but I have always been awful at “Key word”
or what phrase to use in the search angine to find what I am looking for, even when you would think it would be easy, I will miss it. *sometimes at least*

Then a friend of mine contacts me about 2 weeks later and links me to this site and asks if I wanted to get some “with” her to share on the shipping costs. So we got a bunch (I got 20 and she got a dozen)

They are amazing, Here is a snippet of my food storage before and after:

Before:

After:

I really would LOVE to afford Shelf Reliance shelving units but I just can’t afford that right now. Even if I get one or two (which I probably will eventualy) I will probably keep them for larger cans that just won’t fit into the can organizers.  I was so excited with the turn out that I actually emailed the company and told them how amazing I thought it was.

With having children who are constantly running down to the food torage (in the basement) and getting this or that that I need, sometimes things are taken out of order even when it takes me ages to keep them in FIFO (First In Forst Out) order. So this takes the guess work out of it.

I should start by saying that I apologize, my personal blog has become the home of everything and I have stayed on top of the comments there.

I talk a lot about my food prep on my facebook and on my personal blog. I’ve considered and will talk more about possibly tarting a food Storage page on facebook or doing an internet radio show.

As far as the comments here, there were more than 4,000 almost 5. I just couldn’t wade through them all to find the couple hundred that were valid to approve them and let them through. I will stay on top of them in the future.

Food storage is important to me. I live it, it encompasses a large part of my life. I just havent been blogging about the latest finds and recipes as I should be.

I installed a plugin for filtering comments that don’t belong on my page, so it should be easier to wade through it.

You are also about to email me at info@prepperjew.com, if you would like and I would be happy to get back to you. Questions are totally welcome.

So this is a question I posed to myself about 6 months ago. I don’t like regular prepackaged salsa and the salsa you buy in the store always tastes… not so fresh.

I’m known for my salsa. Well its not mine. I will explain where I got my amazing recipe, even though I will not share it here (I’ll give it to you if you email me) My friend Inez made it for me, all the time, Whenever we had a get together. One year for my birthday, she brought a grocery bag with the ingredients in it, rather than the salsa and she proceeded to show me how to make it, for my present.

Inez learned how to make it from her ex-husbands mother (from central Mexico) her son loved it so much that she wanted  to make sure her son could have it all the time, so she taught Inez. Yay for me… right?

I’ve since tweaked the recipe – made it my own.  Not that I didn’t love Inez’s salsa, I just like more garlic,  and a little more cilantro is all.

So now, whenever we have a game night, or a BBQ, or any get together I make salsa. When I don’t I am asked why I didn’t. I normally make a big batch and keep it in the fridge.

Sometimes I am busy though. tomatoes are better late spring/early summer. What if I didn’t have all the fresh ingredients I needed. And now, I worry about the shit hitting the fan….I refuse to store prepackaged salsa, like I said before, its gross and over cooked to me.

I spent sometime online researching my question. I found a few recipes, but the salsa was so heavily cooked it almost ended up being pasta sauce instead of salsa, and to me, that’s just not what I think of when I think of good salsa. I like the fresh taste.

So D recommended that I speak to one of is friends about it and he said that with the amount of acid from the tomatoes and the lemon juice you can just heat the salsa just to the point of boiling, pack it, and place in the water bath for 12-15 minutes and there ya go.

So I tried it out. It IS a little different from my fresh salsa – but FAR superior to any prepackaged salsa I’ve ever had. You should consider canning your own salsa…. If you haven’t made your own salsa, its not as hard as you might think and fresh is fabulous!!!

Alright so I know that this blog isn’t about my cooking adventures. Who cares, its mine and I’ll write what I want. Haha.

This morning I got up and was rather  motivated.  So I didnt really want to do any heavy baking because its still pretty close to 100 degrees during the day here, but its been nice enough that we’ve turned the AC off and turned the swamp cooler on.

So I made Irish Soda Bread. I baked it to. It is pretty good, tastes kind of like rye bread, only with raisins and oatmeal here and there. Also its a little more like a beefy giant biscuit than a loaf of bread. Still I like it, and I bet it would be super duper awesome with Shepard’s Pie or something like that. Warm and hearty.

I also made 6 different kinds of cookies. I didn’t bake any of them though.

I made:

• almond poppy seed
• oatmeal raisin
• chocolate chip
• Brownie cookies
• sugar
• chamomile/lavender with almond slivers (from a base of sugar cookie dough.)

I made them. I moved each btch into mixing bowls covered them and put them in the fridge. Once they were totally cooled, I spooned them out (I’m not done with the process) onto wax paper on a cookie sheet and put the cookie sheet in the freezer. I have a deep freezer so I just set it on top. I am sure that you could find trays of varying sizes to fit in whatever type frezer you have.

Then once they are frozen solid, I take them out, put them in a vacuum seal bag with a layer of wax paper between the stacks and then I vacuum seal them and place back in the freezer. I recommend marking the bags with the date and type of cookies before taking them out of the freezer, the reason I recommend this is because, your probably much better off having  the cookies stay as chilled as possible during the vacuum and trip back to the freezer. Its okay to take a day or three on this step to let them all freeze fully so there aren’t any squishy messes.

Once I was wrapping the cookie dough adventure, I made tuna salad with boiled eggs, I actually made 2 dozen boiled eggs but I only put about 7 or  in the tuna salad.  (which yeah is about 1/3 of the salad) We’ve been having a lot of salad lately, trying to be more healthy while we can be, and D likes boiled eggs a lot. Well, I do to, probably not as much as him though, but I like making things that he enjoys.

So the tuna salad with mixed greens was lunch and I made brats, zucchini and onions saute’d, and I made friend potatoes I bought the potatoes like 2 weeks ago and I was afraid with how humid its been that they would go bad soon if I didn’t use them. Also, I got a new deep fat fryer, and it was about time I tried it out.

I want to point out here, that I am not much of a deep fried foods kind of person, I don’t do it often but when I do, (tempura battered veggies, or chicken wings) Its pretty cool to have a decent fryer around. Its not something that I NEED but it is something that makes life easier.

That’s pretty much my day of cooking. This kept me in the kitchen almost the entire day, either making, cooking, freezing, or cleaning, I finally finished cleaning the fryer out and putting it back in the box and on the shelf above the cabinets about 30 minutes ago.

When I started researching, one of the things I found is that using FOOD Grade plastic buckets are very important. I have said this before, and I will say this again, the way you store your food is just as important, if not more important than the money that you spend on the food itself.

The reason that I say that is that many of the foods you buy, you will buy a bulk of it in the first couple of years while you are gathering your greatest amounts of food and then after that you will only be purchasing to rotate. So in essence, the way you store your food may be around 10-30 years for the long term staples. Its okay to save money though if its at all possible.

D uses pickle buckets for his work, what he does is take things apart to work on them and while they are in pieces he will place those pieces into a 5 gallon bucket so that they stay with the rest of that particular machine. One of his customers brings them by occasionally, he manages a place where they make sandwiches.

So I know they are food grade, but I didn’t know how to get rid of the god awful smell. I did some research and some of what I have found works and others totally didn’t. So I will give you a running tally of what I found, what I tried and whats worked for me. There is only one method that I found that I haven’t tried and I would give credit but I found it on a forum and it was only a 3 line paragraph by “anon”

I digress.

So plastic food grade 5 gallon tubs CAN be purchased. But they really are rather expensive, and like I said D has a friend who gives them to us for free. Which is totally worth putting a little bit of effort into them.

I found this basic list with a few ideas on on how to implement (on most) on various forums, not in the same place, sometimes only one idea on a page. It probably took me 2 hours of searching for all of these ideas. I am not complaining, I just want to paint a picture. Its easy to find one or two of these answers everywhere but the biggest one I have found is to use vinegar on copious amounts or bleach.

Ideas Found:

• used coffee grounds mixed with warm water
• oxy clean with water left in the sun
• a bowl of charcoal briquettes and leave the lids on (5-10 days)
• lemon juice
• dish washing liquid
• tomato juice watered down
• news paper

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I am not a huge fan of going without deodorant. I don’t like smelling either. I don’t think that the commercially available “all natural” stuff works very well. I stock pile deodorant and toothpaste just like I do food and water, but just as I mentioned in my post about going without shampoo… Its a good idea to understand the basics of doing it an alternative all natural way with products that you will have on hand anyhow. Right?

I cant remember where I found this recipe. I have tried the recipe, and used it. It worked all right. I think that I have friends who are really much more into the Granola side of things than I am and I know that this along with a few other homemade things would be an awesome gift for them, especially if you knew what scents they really liked. This is really cheap probably $2-3 a batch.

The recipe I have used is

3 tbs Shea butter

3 tbs baking soda

2 tbs cocoa butter

2 tbs corn starch

1/4 tsp vitamin e oil (or you can puncture and drain 2 or 3 gal caps of the same)

1/4 – 1/2 tsp essential oils (Whatever scents you like)

You CAN add 1-2 tbs of vegetable glycerin or bees wax to make it softer if you’d like.

Microwave the Shea butter and cocoa butter until melted, mix in the cornstarch and baking soda, mix until smooth and then stir in the vitamin  e oil and the essential oils.

Once you’ve completely combined, place in a 4 ounce jar, which is perfect for this recipe. Put the contents into the fridge and let it set for 24 hours. If you make more than one, leave the one you will not be using daily in the fridge.

The deodorant should be melted by rubbing the amount of a pea in your hands to soften and then wiping onto your under arms. If its a warmer day they mix will already be somewhat softer but if you chose not to add the bees wax or glycerin it may be a little harder (it will still soften it you warm it up thought.

It worked for me, though I couldn’t trust it on a sleeveless black shirt. I noticed that it left a noticeable residue, but it doesn’t stain.

Sorry I didnt take any pictures of this, but you can find them if you do a search online I think, I have seen them.

It looks milky and off white, kind of like a light colored cocoa butter.

Even though this isn’t my cup of tea, it worked rather well and I would rely on it if need be. Its always good to be prepared with alternatives.