Skills

There is this trope in story telling of the vagrant, hobo, bum, or cartoon character steeling a pie from a windowsill.

It is good story telling. But, in my opinion, we forget what is actually happening.

We can go to the supermarket and buy a decent, almost edible, pie for 5 dollars or so. We are going to put that price at 15 umms.

Let’s take a step back in time. It is the late 1800s in the rural outback. It is a 20-mile trek to town to get supplies. But you have your homestead, there is food in the larder, there is food in the pantry, and there is food in the root cellar.

While you are out working the fields, your wife is baking an apple pie for the family.

The basics going into that pie are flour, lard, water, apples, sugar, some cider, butter, salt, and spices.

She starts with pairing the apples. The apples are from last fall when she and the children spent a couple of days picking apples in the orchard, all three apple trees. Those apples were preserved and stored, they look ugly, but they will taste wonderful.

The cost of those apples is the cost of picking, cleaning, storing, and preparing them. Call it 45 umms.

The lard came from the pig they harvested last fall. There were many hours of tending the pig, feeding it, caring for it, then the slaughter, processing the pig, and rendering the lard. She’s only using a palm full of lard, so about 30 umms.

The flour came from the store. They grew their wheat. While the total labor that went into growing that wheat was in the 1000s of umms, again, she is only using a couple of cups worth of flour. 30 umms.

Sugar was purchased, the cost was 5 umms.

The spices were expensive, but because she is only using a small amount, 5 umms.

The pie is going to bake in the oven. That oven is heated with wood that was chopped from a tree they harvested. Total of 15 umms for the wood to heat the oven.

In total, excluding the preparing of the apples, she has 30 umms invested in this pie.

The total cost of that pie? 45 + 30 + 5 + 5 + 30 = 115 umms.

An umm is a Unit of Man Minutes. So that 115 is 2 hours of labor. At $20/hour, that is a $40 pie. When that vagrant steals a pie, they are stealing at least 2 hours of labor from that family.

This doesn’t even touch the cost of not having the pie for themselves. That might have been the last of their apples.

It could have been a meat pie instead of an apple pie. If it was a meat pie, it would represent meals for the family for a couple of days, at least.

As an aside, why did they put pies on the windowsills to cool?

Because it was hot in the kitchen!

You want the pie to cool, it isn’t going to do that as fast in the kitchen, plus, all that heat from the pie goes into making the kitchen that much hotter.

Of course you want to cool that pie outside.

Honey is one of those items that many people have laying around the house, but not too many of them know its amazing properties. Used for sweetening, bug traps, wound repair, topical antibacterial, fighter of disease, and dozens of other things, honey is worth its weight in gold. From a prepping standpoint, honey is something I will always have in my “get home bag” because of its many uses.

I’d like to start with honey’s sweetening properties. Many people love the flavor of a bit of honey in some tea. It tastes great with peanut butter, or even alone on bread or crackers. You can use honey in the place of sugar in any recipe (though there are some rules to follow, and it isn’t a 1:1 trade off – Blue Flame Kitchen). Honey is popular when mixed with other herbs and spices, such as honey garlic spareribs, and honey and cinnamon french toast, or even honey mustard dressing. Use honey wherever you’d normally use sugar or other sweeteners. If you’re diabetic, there’s a few studies out that suggest using honey may allow you to use smaller amounts because it’s sweeter than sugar, and therefore you’d be reducing your glycemic index, but there’s nothing definitive at this point.

This weekend I was at the Fort at No. 4 again, and I ended up using honey to catch flies. For whatever reason, 18th century kitchens always seem to gather flies at this time of the year, and they’re a real nuisance. Unlike at home, when we’re playing in the 18th century, we can’t use electronic bug zappers or even fly tape, because neither existed in 1750. We have glass jars that you put honey or sugar water into, and the flies can get into them but not out. That works very well. One of the ladies suggested we coat a strip of linen with some honey and hang it out of the way near the flies, and hopefully they’d get stuck on it. It’s an interesting idea! I also had out a shallow bowl filled with honey water, with drops of modern dish washing liquid in it. The soap forms a coating on top of the water, and if flies go into it, they’re not able to get out. It all worked passably well, though the old fashioned method of attacking them with a wrung out wet dishcloth seemed to work best.

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Wait, don’t leave! They are REALLY good! And not as odd as they sound.

I really love burgers, but I also am trying to lose weight. Those buns are not great for me, but a plain hamburger patty on a plate is boring. I went looking for something new, and found this recipe, and we tried it out recently. It was delicious! The fat from the ground beef infuses the cabbage with a lot of flavor, but doesn’t leave it feeling overly greasy. I walked away from the table quite pleased with myself!

Ingredients:

• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 egg, whisked
• 2 to 3 tbsp panko or breadcrumbs
• green onions and parsley, minced
• 1 head cabbage, cut into thick “steak” slices
• olive oil, drizzles
• spices – oregano, thyme, salt, pepper to taste
• cheese slices (optional)
• 1/4 cup tomato or pizza sauce (optional)

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We talk a lot about SHTF and how we’ll bug out or in, what foods we have, how to make fire. All these things are important, definitely. But I want to talk medications.

There are categories of medications that need attention. First, we have “first aid” meds, things taken to help with an emergent medical situation. Then we have daily meds, things taken to help with physical problems that are long term. After that, we have what I’ll call helper meds, things we take because we can, but that aren’t necessarily on a daily basis.

When it comes to first aid meds, the most common ones are:

• pain relievers (ibuprofen, acetaminophen, aspirin, etc.)
• cough medicines (dextromethorphan, guaifenesin, etc.)
• antihistamines (benadryl, Allegra, etc.)
• decongestants (sudafed and the like)
• tummy upset meds (tums, laxatives, motion sickness meds, and Imodium)

I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but those are the common ones I can think of. I tend to keep a rotating store of these meds, so that if an emergency were to happen, I could use them sparingly for a long time. I might not be able to take them as often as I currently do, but I’d have them as back up. Because these aren’t meant to be taken all the time, you can live without them. It might be uncomfortable (literally, in the case of the pain meds) but you’d survive.

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There is nothing I love more than gazpacho soup on a hot day. It’s refreshing and cool, flavorful and filling. This is a recipe that I adore, and I hope you’ll enjoy trying it out over the hot August nights. I like to serve this with fresh salad shrimp just popped in, right before serving. Bonus points if they’re just shy of frozen, keeping the soup chilled as it hits the table!

Ingredients:

▢ 1½ lbs red heirloom or beefsteak tomatoes OR 1½ lbs canned whole tomatoes
▢ 1 cucumber, peeled, plus more diced for garnish
▢ 1 orange bell pepper, seeded and cored
▢ juice of half a lemon
▢ ½ shallot
▢ 2 cloves garlic
▢ 2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
▢ 1½ tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
▢ 1 tablespoon kosher salt
▢ fresh cracked pepper, garlic salt, dried onion, Worcestershire sauce, to taste
▢ fresh basil, parsley, cilantro, jalapeno peppers, and lemon slices (optional)

If you prefer skinless tomatoes, you can blanch them in a pot of boiling water for about 40 seconds, or until the skin begins to peel off. Remove the skin. If you like the skin on, simply skip this step (this is my preference).

Dice tomatoes, bell pepper and cucumber into similar sized pieces. Place half of them in the blender with the shallot, garlic, olive oil, vinegar and salt. Liquefy until smooth. Pour the liquid into a glass container, and stir in the remaining diced vegetables. If you want to use the fresh herbs and jalapeno pepper, they can either be minced and added into the blender, or put directly into the soup, depending on your preference. If you find that the soup is not “soupy” enough, you can add some plain tomato juice until it is a good consistency. Refrigerate the soup for at least 3 hours, or overnight if you can. This allows the flavors to blend.

Serve in chilled bowls, topped with fresh minced herbs, lemon slices, jalapeno pepper rounds, and/or croutons. A splash of high quality virgin olive oil in each bowl will add a depth of flavor as well.

I wanted to talk about fire, today, because it’s one of those ubiquitous things. It’s just there. We don’t really think about it, in our world of Bic disposable lighters and all-weather matches. But fire is one of the prime things that makes us human. We harnessed it. But if we lost access to our modern methods of starting fire tomorrow, I think most people would be shit out of luck. That means no heat, no ability to boil water for purification, nothing to cook over… It’s an “end of civilization” issue.

I have many levels of fire making tools in my personal kits. With my ren faire kit, I always keep disposable lighters for their ease of use. I also have strike-anywhere matches, just in case I have issues with the lighter, because it does happen. In my cutlery box, I keep a second disposable lighter, as a backup. I also have a tin that contains flint, steel, charcloth, and tinder. Back when I had a very old gas stove in my kitchen, I used to have a sparker, which looks like a giant safety pin.  You pull on the sides of it, and a metal bit goes over a flint, and you get a big spark every time. It’s much easier than flint and steel, for sure, but works best with gas of some kind.

Let’s look at the various types of fire making we have, starting with easiest.

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My father’s side of the family is from Communist Hungary. I grew up on Hungarian foods, and learned several recipes that I have passed on to friends and family today. This recipe is straight from my Nagymama’s (that means “grandma” in Hungarian) kitchen, this recipe has the flavor of Hungary throughout it. The meat is tender, the broth tasty, and on a cold, winter day, nothing beats it! Remember that the delicate flavor of good, traditional goulash comes from a fine quality Hungarian paprika – look for the Szekezed label, which comes in a metal cannister in the spice sections of many grocery stores. There are usually two types available: hot and sweet. Both have a sweet flavor to them, but the hot one is QUITE hot. For this recipe you want the sweet one, although if you like your goulash to have a bit of bite, you can mix in some of the hot paprika, too!

Ingredients for goulash:

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I know that “taking heat” means something different to 2A people, but I’m talking about temperature heat today. I’ve heard a lot of people whining (and yes, I’m using that term on purpose) about the heat, of late, and I want to address it from a prepping perspective.

So, over the past several weekends, I’ve been at a variety of reenacting events. None of those events were “modern” or had A/C. Very few of those events had even an electric fan, never mind anything more cooling than that. During the events, temperatures have ranged from 86*F to 104*F, with humidity in the 75% or higher range. One particular day, on July 12th, it was 104*F and 95% humidity where I was. I had no modern means for dealing with that heat.

When talking about the heat, several people (not on here) have told me…

• I’m just better at dealing with the heat than most people (which is laughable considering I am sodium deficient at the BEST of times, which is a dangerous thing in high heat situations)
• the heat has killed people and I’m not taking it seriously enough
• some people require air conditioning just to live
• people in the past didn’t have heat like this

I do agree, the heat has killed some people. I am not the sympathetic ear most people expected when I was told that. I feel bad for the elderly or very young when intense heat happens, because they’re not cognitively able to do the things necessary to not suffer from it. Then again, we more able bodied folks can certainly do things to make their lives easier, and so I don’t consider it a big argument. It’s also a very small number of people. In a major disaster, those people are frankly going to die. I don’t like saying it, but it’s true. If you’re celiac, prone to medical issues, elderly or very young, the likelihood is that you’re going to die. While I work very hard to mitigate that fact in my own prepping, it’s still a fact, and I have dealt with it to the best of my ability. If I die, I die, and I’m not going to whine about it.

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Bread is often called the “staff of life,” and that’s because a man can survive on bread and water. We think of this, in today’s world of Wonderbread and fake food, as a cruel punishment. In medieval times, bread and water was fairly standard fare for a person. In the 1750s, bread was 60% of the average colonist’s daily food intake. Today, that would be considered outrageous and possibly dangerous. Then, the wheat was whole, and even when finely ground (very doable along the many rivers in water-powered mills), it contained all of the natural protein and fat of the kernel.

This recipe is one that I’ve developed on my own. It’s a blend of several recipes that I’ve worked on over the years. It combines a pain de mie recipe, a no-knead recipe that I love, and the “beginner’s loaf”  from a book of Chris’s, Bread Alone. It’s the culmination of about 20 years of practice, learning, failures, successes, and surprises as I learned enough about bread baking to casually consider teaching myself to use a wood fired beehive oven at the Fort.

This is not an easy recipe. It is a simple recipe, however. The beginner bread recipe I mention above is the best place to go for instructions on how to bake bread. If you do what the authors tell you, you will eventually make amazing loaves of bread, every time. It will take a few years of practice, though, and you will probably make up new swear words as you go along. This recipe here, is not as difficult as the beginner loaf, but will not teach you as much about baking as you make it. I heartily encourage you to make it entirely by hand at least a half dozen to a dozen times before indulging in the use of a MixMaster or other bread making machine. Getting your hands onto fresh dough is good for you mentally, and the resulting bread will feed you physically and spiritually. There’s definitely something “more than human” about creating a loaf of bread.

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One of the most interesting things I’m currently discovering, is how to move back in time. What happens when there is no electricity? What can we do, how can we do it?

One path is to learn how to live off-grid. This is part of where I am. This is why I spent the time learning how to make a steam expansion engine, learning how to run it, and then learned how to build a 2 HP boiler.

That steam engine is intended to run a generator or a lathe, depending. Yes, I have some generators, but water and wood will be easier, in some situations, to get than other fuel.

But there is another entire type of skill set, that of taking a step back in time.

Let me discuss just one part of this, I want to make some items, such as a table-top. That’s easy, just drive to the lumberyard and buy the lumber, do the glue-up, feed it through the plainer, sand it and a bit more. Easy stuff.

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