The Prepping Thread - A Newer Beginning ;)

maisie_cat

MingVase said:

I've just found out that our local council  are taking the £150 off the full year's CT total so I wont see any benefit at all. Isnt it funny how TPTB always seem to score? I was hoping for £150 being paid into my bank so I could buy food with it. Silly me.

Do you mean that you'll be paying £15 less for the 10 months? The £150 is designed to help with increased bills so can be offset against your monthly direct debit increase in that way.

MingVase

It would have been a hell of a lot more useful in one lump sum! The monthly payment will stay the same, taking into account the 3% increase.

LadOnTheHill

I am hoping to start,  pretty soon, a full inventory of our food stocks. We have everything put together, as in bags of rice are all on one shelf, tea/coffee/sugar on another, etc, but I want to work out how many actual calories we have on hand.

What I'm going to do is take a 25kg bag of rice and work out how many calories that is. How many calories in a bag of sugar, a bag of lentils, etc. Add it all together, then see where we are at right now, and how log we could live on what we have, should the bomb land tomorrow. It'd make for some interesting meals, certainly, but at least I'd know how long we could last.

Then I'm going to see where the gaps are. If we have 25kg of rice, what am I going to cook with it. Rice on its own will provide calories and stop the grub from biting, but it's too plain to enjoy eating every day without some kind of flavouring. What flavourings do I have on hand? How much cayenne, garam massala, etc. How many meals could I make with that, before the flavourings ran out and it was back to plain boiled rice? How many actual meals will I get out of a given bag?

Shepherd Book said:

"The important thing is the spices. A man can live on packaged food from here 'til Judgment Day if he's got enough rosemary."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEEhEdI0220

If the bomb lands, we'd have to change our eating habits a bit. Meat would (I reckon) shoot up in price, which would mean substituting with another form of protein. We have lentils and other pulses on hand, but we don't eat them regularly. That makes it difficult to work out how long we'd last on what we have - a 200g bag might be a year's supply if you only eat lentils once a year. "Store what you eat and eat what you store" works great if you can store food that lasts for ages. Not everything I like to eat lasts for ages, though. Biscuits go stale (or so I hear, having never given them the opportunity). It's not going to be much help to wait until it's too late to find out you don't like something you've stored.

We need to make sure we have sufficient calories to give everyone ~2000 per day, for as long as we think we'll need to. Two adults will need ~4000 calories a day, which means six months worth is 730,000 calories. That's a lot of food. Storing bags of rice will enable you to do that relatively easily, but eating nothing but rice will lead to various deficiencies, not least protein. How am I going to avoid eating rice and beans every meal?

I'm trying to think in terms of caloric staples, protein, flavourings and treats, and varieties of those things. I also need to think about how I'm going to cook those foods, because mains gas or electricity might not be available. Any bottled gas might be needed for heating, come winter. It might be a case of using thermos flasks, wonder bags, solar cookers, etc, to make food.

Karmacat

grace68 said:

Thriftygifty said:

I just wanted to apologise if a post that I posted 28th Feb upset anyone, MSE have messaged me and removed it for going off the "saving money topic" although I presumed asking about stoves was saving money.  I guess it was me briefly mentioning I was getting nervous about the current world situation. Anyhow if you've reported me I apologise again and I shall be keeping quiet from now on.  (This post will now also probably be removed) 

I had my reply to you removed as well for same reasons so wouldn't worry. I wondered how much about prepping is about saving money compared to being prepared for anything that might be thrown at ones life in the future? And our plans for future are often shaped by current anxieties.
 I do think as a prepper we are looking for good value, what's on offer, what has a lasting value so would think there would be some crossover.

I had two of my posts removed in the same tra-la-la, but I've given up trying to contact those in charge of it, no matter the effort I make to be detailed and polite and short, they never respond.  I considered I was helping a forum member find an online reference, but opinions obviously differed.  Thrifty, stay around - I'm getting some picky reactions on here, and I deleted a later post, but I'm staying, and reading,  Grace phrases it very well - plans for the future are often shaped by current anxieties - and as long as the plans are legal, I don't see what the problem is.  Other people's mileage obviously varies, but we can't win 'em all 😎 

herbily

How am I going to avoid eating rice and beans every meal?

I've been thinking the same, and my staples to go with the bag of rice and the bags of lentils and dried beans include: tinned tuna, a big bag of soya protein chunks or TVP (texturised vegetable protein), several tins of chili, stewed chicken etc from supermarket, and a lot of tinned tomatoes (plus several tins of ratatouille). I figure that if I have enough different alternatives, then I'm only eating beans or lentils and rice half the time, and if you have plenty of potatoes as well, there are multiple variants on a baked potato theme. Plus my current secret ingredient for making random things edible is a jar of gravy granules - boiled weeds from the garden are much nicer with gravy on!

Karmacat

Ooh, I see euronorris and nargleblast also had it happen - well respected members all  

Karmacat

And LadOnTheHill is another Firefly fan 🌟 my life is now full of 🦄 and 🌈 hurray  

Toonie

I love it when someone quotes Firefly, gives me warm fuzzy feelings.

We're limited with storage (and funds for buying things to store) but I'm doing my best to plan for things which run out quickly, so any painkillers (which are used often) and the like. At this time of the year as an early hayfever sufferer I'm also thinking about antihistamines and I noticed today that the use by date was 2024 on the packs in Lidl so I got a couple extra. And whilst DP and I usually eat the same food, we would eat different things if SHTF as he can eat rice and pasta whereas I can't so I'd use the potatoes and pearl barley therefore we do have some stocks of both. I definitely need to up my flavourings though as the good Shepherd reminds us (thankfully I have a rosemary bush in the garden) and I have other herb seedlings getting started.

RAS

I recall a comment made to an author who lived in northern Italy; regarding olive trees and more importantly olive oil.

In WW2, the German PTB regarded these as peasant oddities and they were left out of ration calculations. Those who grew up then were adamant that as long as you had them you wouldn't starve; you could turn weeds into a meal. It also made more of dried pulses and more rarely (given the low flour ration) pasta sauces.

A litre of oil is about 900 calories, and seems to keep better than hard fats, although I suspect that's because oil is often in well sealed bottles rather than less well sealed packs. 

So a useful calorie dense food product that can make uncooked or tinned foods edible, and keeps 2 years or more sealed and another 6-12 after opening.

-taff

There is a great tradition of foraging in Italy, so while they may appear to be weeds, they'll be similar to spinach or herbs, fungi, asparagus substitue [ shame I've never seen that here] etc.

We don't seem to have the same tradition since we all went through an Industrial Revolution I expect. Maybe a foraging course would be a good investment.

And to all the Firefly fans...That advert still sings it's way into my head regularly...Shiny...