Home Front: camp cooking staples

I took a solo camping trip a few weeks ago and in doing so got to try out some camp cooking without he worry of the fussy or more gourmet members of my household that I might have otherwise needed to cater for. Wanting to keep it simple and easy to pack I pre-packed some of my food, using the Dead Person Jar Pathopak's. My primary pre-packed meal I set up was porridge. I raided the baking shelves and made up a jar of rolled oats (for quick cooking) to which I added a handful of currants, almond slices and crystallized ginger. I also packed a jar of powdered milk and sugar for both my cups of tea and to add to my porridge. They worked out great. I used a cup of this mix, and made it up with a cup of boiling water, before adding a spoonful of my milk-sugar mix. Delicious, sustaining and warming on a cold damp morning.
My other campfire staple is chilli. This may provoke disputes among aficionados, some of whom insist that the word "chili" applies only to the basic dish, without beans and tomatoes but when i camp, I take cans of baked beans, chopped tomatoes and pre-mixed sachets of seasoning. A couple of onions in my cooler bag, and some frozen diced pork, this time. If I'd been camping longer I might have taken cured, dried sausage or salami as my meat component. Diced the onions and braised it in my cast iron pot over the coals, then the same for the pork. Seasoning went in next before adding the two cans of tomato and the three cans of baked beans. and some slow cooking with the lid on to reduce it all. I ate mine out of my Optimus-Terra solo cook set mug and shared my meal with a couple of friends who came up to join me in the evening. Five cans, one packet of frozen meat, a couple of seasoning sachets and two onions. Pretty simple. Not too heavy for a drive-in camp, and probably not that bad for a hike-in either, especially if those cans were shared around a little. We had plenty to eat with heavily seasoned leftovers I ate next next day too. After serving I added a dash of water, put he lid back on and put it back over the fire to heat up again to a low roil to kill off any germs introduced during serving up.
Porridge and beans make two excellent staples when camping, but some other items can find their way into your larder easily enough. Things that add both variety and value. Eggs. Eggs are great, self contained, long lasting and generally not requiring of refrigeration. In an austere setting, if you find yourself in an egg-glut, there are a number of traditional methods for preserving the quality of eggs. Packing in salt, wheat bran or cool clean ash. Eggs packed in box and buried in ash are reported as remaining fresh after 8 months in 80% of cases. Not only does it give the eggs shock and crush protection but having leftover wood-ash at a camping trip once you've eaten your food is no drama, just dump it into your fire pit and off you go. That said, cardboard egg cartons make good fire starters. When I pack eggs, its usually because I plan to make pancakes and then pack them in my flour mix, again, in a sealable jar. They stay safe, insulated and ready or when i'm ready to cook.

Not so much cooking as snacking, I also like to take hard cheese, like a block of Parmesan and salami  or slab of salt cured meat like Prosciutto. They keep well un-refrigerated and are a very tasty addition to an al fresco snack-plate after a hike or as an addition to most meals.

Review: Savoury Tooth - Not-Sweet bars

Whilst getting ready to get back to work, I went and got some new pants, as I'd lost enough weight that my pant-size had changed. Whilst in Kathmandu looking or suitable pants, I came across some interesting snack-bars and thought I'd give them a go. Given that my job entails me sitting at my desk tapping out code and putting out electronic fires, I eat a lot of food-bars as it's fast and easy. However, mindful of my diet, I was intrigued to see these are not sweet-candy bars like many trail snacks are, I've covered some in the past. The Bounce food-balls and the Blue Dinosaur Paleo Bars which are both good products, but both pretty sugary.




These protein bars are primarily made of a whey protein concentrate purported to lower blood sugar levels when consumed before a high glycemic meal and is the most complete protein.


They feature a polydextrose binding agent, where something like treacle or molasses might be used in other food. The one used in the Savoury Tooth bars is a low GI soluble fiber with prebiotic properties.

It helps to slow down the digestion process alleviating blood sugar spikes. Reducing sugar rush effects.

Heavily spiced, with woo-seeming ingredients like turmeric for its active polyphenol known as curcumin purported to help provide an ideal intervention for type 2 diabetes. Ginger, chilli, cinnamon, coriander, lemongrass and garlic have also been shown to help lower blood sugar levels.




Importantly, these bars taste amazing, and had a really nice texture: Not too hard to bite or chew, but not mushy or pasty. Dense and rich. The seeds included gave each bite a variety of texture. Food fatigue is a real thing, and having some variety makes a lot of difference, remember that when you're loading up your bunker or bug-out bag.

The Svoury Tooth bars come in "Thai Green Curry" and "Thai Peanut Stay". Both really do taster like they are described. For me, after a few chews, and rolled the bite around in my mouth, the flavours emerged and I found myself recalling street meals I had in the streets of Bangkok and Singapore I had growing up. I'd go as far as to say these were authentic flavours, from my non-native pallet. Jut a hint of spice, certainly enough to get the mouth juices flowing, but not so much as to drive me to rinse my mouth out or reach for he milk. Certainly enough to satisfy the Texan in my culinary history. Not Jakarta Crazy-Wings hot, by a long shot, but not Vanilla thickshake either.

From a nutritional perspective, the

Savoury Tooth protein bars are great after any workout. Each 50g bar offer s 870kJ of energy, or 10% of a 2000cal daily diet. 21-19% of the protein intake 13% of the fat and 6% of the carbs. There is quite a lot packed into these little bars, but the heavy seed and spice content, the bars come with a reasonably short best-before dates, ofonbly a few months as the rich aromatics would age poorly.

I've found the couple I bought to be very tasty and fun to eat and a perfect break from other sweet snacks. Not as satisfying as beef-jerky, but still, a good pre-packaged snack.

The advertising was great too, these post-cards made me chuckle even months later when I pulled them out.



Low in sugar, with complex carbs, high in protein, and dietary fiber, Gluten free these seem to be really viable healthy alternatives to other candy-like sports and protein bars. I'm not a big fan of woo, and straight edge vegan, paleo lifestyles, but these healthy bars don't wrankle me as soy-based, cruelty-free fair-trade hippie-bars might, they are more the granola eating, merino-wool beanie mountain climber food. plenty of bang for your mass!

Review: Street Kitchen spice set

This is one of the spice mix packs that my parentals-in-law sent me for Giftmas last year that I am finally getting around to covering. They know I have a love of exciting kit foods, cooking, camping and the like, so it's ace that they think to send me tasty treats to try. This is one of them. You might ask yourself, what is the point of putting spices and spice-kits into a blog about Apocalypse Equippedness?

I know it's not the same as me covering the MRE-style Mainstay Survival rations, or the just-add-water dehydrated meals from Back Country Cuisine or Outdoor Gourmet but there are some good reasons. One is morale. Food fatigue is something we can all avoid day-to-day, but in a disaster situation, where resources are limited, having something to spice up an otherwise boring meal is a much needed booster. The other aspects of having a pre-packed spice kit like this are that they can be used to improve otherwise unpalatable foods. I certainly don't advocate eating contaminated or tainted food, and the dangers of eating spoiled foods are well documented.
However, it is commonly held that heavily spicing meals can mask and even possibly improve the spoilage rates of food by killing microorganisms responsible for food going off. These studies however don't suggest anything more than heavily spicing food -may- assist, and that for the most part, the effect is to improve the taste. Be safe. Don't come crying to me if you give your self Bali-Belly, Tutankhamen's Curse or Masai Malaise.

So with that in mind, I'd like to tell you about one such spicing kit, the Street Kitchen "North Indian Butter Chicken" kit, which comes in three sealed plastic retorts, one for a dry-spice mix, one for the ginger and garlic marinade and the third is the tikka simmer-sauce.

These are all contained in a very easily packing flat pack with instructions.

You marinade 600g your meat (chicken, donkey or rat, what-ever) in the garlic and ginger, till it is well infused, softens, or as long as you can manage.

The spice pack gets flash fried in hot oil, to release its aromatics, and then the meat goes in the heat as well. Once browned, the simmer sauce goes in over the top and cooks down for even further softening. The recipe states this is a 3-4 serving kit, which will cook in 20 minutes, but you could stretch that if you're luck enough to have more main-protein than that. You could also substitute meat for beans, potato, rice or other dry-storable staple that comes in long-term survival bunker stores.

I used chicken, and fed the family of four adults and one Tactical baby happily with several chicken fillets and rice.

It was delicious and really easy to use. At 225g (8oz) it was a really lightweight way to significantly improve a meal that would otherwise could have been "grilled/boiled chicken" and white rice.

You can imagine the difference this would make after having to contend with basic rations for a while, and perhaps aging and degrading flavours in stored supplies, or at the worst, less than ideal meats, be they from unpalatable sources, or not as fresh as you might otherwise be used to.

People in hot climates have been spicing their foods for millennia. People have been fighting against microbial spoilage of supplies for even longer. With these long shelf-life spice kits, you can make use of those advances on the go and make an enjoyable meal!

Review: Bounce food nuggets

I'm always on the lookout for not only snacks to eat on the go, as I often spend a long time behind the wheel, but also have a pretty demanding work schedule these days and occasionally have three or four back to back hours long meetings, so being able to grab a nutritious and energizing bite can make all the difference from keeping me flying into a hangry rage.

There are lots of energy bars on the market, and body-building type supplement bars, but sometimes you just want something smaller. We had three boxes of these locally produced snacks come our way, and I've loved them. Bounce was founded in 2004 by an Aussie couple, Paula and Andy Hannagan, who they are proud to admit, had the balls to pour their savings into bringing their idea for the Bounce balls to fruition.

Both Paula and Andy have backgrounds in health and fitness and this was their first foray into the nutrition supplement world. If the stories can be believed, in the early days, they used their garage as a warehouse and Andy would travel from retailer to retailer, offering to sell his balls! Puts a very Australian spin on the product, which is something I can really get behind. More products, made locally, means cheaper supplies which in turn means more supplies I can stockpile, an excellent preparedness technique!

There are seven flavors in the Bounce Ball range (they also do a line of protein powders) but I have tried three of them. Here's what I can tell you about them:

I'm not a big fan of coconut, I over-indulged on several S.E. Asian and Pacific islands (I'm a mean hand with a machete and spike) but I was pleasantly surprised by the Coconut & Macadamia Protein Bliss ball which is packed full of high-quality protein which is easily assimilated by the body. Made from a combination of coconut, macadamias, cashews and whey protein, it's also high in fiber, and its primary binding agent is agave syrup, which gives it a good texture, as well as a sweet boost. Texture is pretty important in this kind of thing, and even with my personal feelings about dehydrated coconut, it was quite pleasant, and I went back for more.

The Spirulina & Ginseng Defence Boost is designed to keep you on the bounce, alert and ready for action, it's also power-packed with vitamins and antioxidants for good health and bolstering immune responses, espeically important in high stress and challenging environments.

Again, it is an easily digestible blend and provides slow-releasing energy to help keep you fit and active, to perform the tasks you need to be doing. Unlike the Coconut and Macadamia balls, these are held together with a propriety binding agent, Fruitrim (grape juice, pear juice and brown rice starch), which has a caramel toffee like taste and feel. I found the mouthfeel much more enjoyable than the coconut one, and was trilled with the dark rich flavours the Spirulina added.

The last of the three balls I had to sample were the Almond Protein Hit flavour. These contains what Boost considers the optimum balance of high quality protein and carbohydrates. With a slow-releasing energy formula, this ball is pitched as the ideal food to help satisfy your hunger between meals or as a pre- or post-workout snack. Again it has the Fruitrim binding base, which is delicious. It has protein flakes and the nut elements add a delicious crunch to each sticky bite. This is even better than the Spirulina & Ginseng ball, and my favourite so far.

I think I will be stocking up on these as a back-up food supply, as they are a lot nicer than the Mainstay Emergency Food Rations they are quick, easy, simple to store and pack. You could do a lot worse than getting some of these and stocking up on high-density, high nutritional value foods.

Review: Mad Millie - Italian cheese kit

  

 For Giftmas I was lucky enough to receive this very spiffy DIY cheese kit, good for over 10 batches of cheese (approx 6kg in total), as produced by "Mad Millie". This is the Mad Millie Beginners Italian Kit

With recipes and all the ingredients you need (apart from the milk) to make some of the following:

Fresh Italian Mozzarella and Bocconcini (approx 600g/batch),
Ricotta (approx 400g/batch),
Ricotta Salata (approx 100g/batch),
Burrata Mascarpone (approx 700g/batch).

I recently rediscovered the kit on top of the refrigerator and I had wanted to make mozzarella as my first attempt. We sourced some UN-homoginized milk (as some reading indicated that would work better) I got ready to make some delicious cheeze!

Included in the kit are the  vegetarian rennet tablets (the enzymatic agent that causes the milk to coagulate), cheese salt (which is iodine-free, so as not to inhibit bacterial maturation),  citric acid (to acidify the mixture, allowing the rennet to act more effectively), calcium chloride (to re-introduce calcium often lost in milk-processing)  as well as the cheese cloth  measuring pipette, and thermometer needed.

With my 2L of fancy un-homoginized milk, and the added backup of my fancy new digital Range iPhone thermometer I made my attempt, and ended up with ... ricotta. 

After the process, which may have been less delicate than it should have been, I balled my finished product, and let it hang to drain off the last of the whey.

I ended up with a mass of cheese that yielded 450g, and I let it sit for  a few days to settle, before breaking open my ball, and seeing what I had wrought.

It had been obvious in my preparation that the coagulation step didn't ever really happen. I had curds, but never the solid custard-like phase that needed cutting.

My mozzarella failed, but I ended up with a pretty decent, if crumbly, fetta type of cheese.  

At this stage I am putting it down to poor technique on my part, and not the kit. Whist I am fairly confident that the temperatures and times were right, as I had the digitally controlled and timed Range to fall back on, I have a feeling that the initial combination of ingredients, and stirring may have been heavy handed on my part.

So whilst this first attempt certainly didn't result in the delicious creamy and plain ball of mozzarella that I had anticipate, I did manage to turn a volume of milk into a storable bulk of cheese.

I felt that it had sufficiently dehydrated to retard bacterial spoilage in the short term, and over the space of a few days, I broke it apart and sprinkled the product over a variety of dishes, like these patties.

I have successfully made cheese with this kit. Now to work out how to make the cheese I want to make.

Home Front: ANZAC biscuits

Today being ANZAC day, I wanted to share something that perhaps some of my international readers might not be aware of, but certainly fit with the other offerings I've made around both recipes and cultural observations. A key component of ANZAC Day observance, and Australian culture in general are   ANZAC Biscuits. 

Made for turn of the 20th Centuary shipping times and wartime frugal living, the ANZAC biscuit is a solid, long lasting and nutritious supply that would be just as fitting in a Diggers chow bag as in a Preppers long term supply. 

The main trick is not eating them right away!

I used the http://www.taste.com.au recipe, many variants exist, but this worked out well. Ingredients combined in a bowl, balled and flattened on baking paper, baked for 10-15 minutes at 170oC.  

• 1 cup rolled oats
• 1 cup plain flour
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 2/3 cup desiccated coconut
• 125g butter, chopped
• 2 tablespoons golden syrup
• 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

I hope you have a go at this iconic Australian snack, and see how they might supplement your own long term food cache, care packages to troopers overseas and snack packs for prospective scouts, rangers and foragers.

Lest we forget. 

Home Front: Alternate dwellings

I have always fantasied  about building or repurposing my own bunker. So much so that we have "you're allowed in the bunker" conversations with guests.

Obviously we don't have any ex-missile silos to convert into a SiloHome or the like, which would be most awesome; secure, rugged, self contained to a large extent and usually significantly removed from built up areas.  Perhaps still listed as a strike-site, so that's a drawback...

Then there is the thought about what kind of every-day structures would actually provide protection from a radiological/nuclear  attack as postulated on Gizmodo in their Where to hide in case of nuclear attack article, which is the kind of thing I am always interested in reading.   I can't think of a single house I've lived in, or visited that has a cellar in Australia. They just don't do that here, which is silly, considering the heat in summer ...

Then there is the concept of living inside the box which I've been keen on for decades, having seen shipping containers being both discarded and re-purposed.  I think it would be most excellent to build a home from these. Research has suggested however that they don't bury well. Which leads me to think of a complex castle like arrangement of many stacked and interconnected units. There are even online resources for floorplan suggestions.  

Dreams and hand-waving plans only, at this stage. I'm a long way off being able to do anything like this, but its a fun mental exercise.

Wish-Lust : Survive2Thrive - 40 Days and Nights food

I had two different friends point these out to me, and thought it would be well worth sharing.
I've covered the Mainstay ration packs
in the past, and whilst they are great high-density survival food, they really aren't intended to be hold-out food, rather than room-filling stocks of long term supplies. That's where a product like these come in.

This is the Survive2Thrive - 40 Days and Nights
preparedness pail, which is packed full of staples. Full of 15.8kg (35 lbs) worth of staples to be precise. This 33cm x 33cm x 40cm (13" x 13" x 16") tub is designed to stack securely, meaning you can stockpile and store them effectively.
 
The kit is filled with individually vacuum sealed in 6 & 7 mil. food-grade bags, purported to give their contents a 10-15 year shelf life, 

• Rolled Oats: 5 lbs 
• Brown Rice: 4 lbs 
• Millet: 4 lbs 
• Garbanzo Beans: 3 lbs 
• Green Lentils: 3 lbs 
• Black Beans: 2 lbs 
• Pinto Beans: 2 lbs 
• Quinoa: 2 lbs 
• Sprouted Buckwheat: 1 lb 
• Sprout Blend: 1 lb 
• Gluten Free Pancake Mix: 1 lb 
• EnerFood Green Superfood Powder: 7/8 lb 
• Chia Seeds: 1/2 lb 
• Fermented Miso Powder: 1/4 lb
• Cajun Spice Mix: 1/16 lb

Everything in the bucket is purported to be raw, uncooked, certified organic, non-GMO, and even vegan. The supplies are not dehydrated, freeze dried, nor have any added preservatives. There's only the small packet of seasoning, though, and all the contents require extensive cooking, so it's certainly not eat-on-the-run food. But if you were hunkered down in your bunker, it would keep you fed and healthy, that's for sure.

The shopping list of items would be pretty easy to replicate at any whole-foods supplier, and both vacuum sealers and buckets are also available. It wpould be possible to whip up something to this effect, and avoiding the massive shipping costs to Australia, but if you're on the Continental US, well worth adding to your survival cupboard.

Guest Post: Grat's Amazing Pickled Eggs

I recently saw a post that I felt I just needed to share as widely as possible. My friend Gareth and I share many self-sufficiency and Kickstarter-gadget loves, so when I saw this recipe, and marveled at not only the way it was written but the way it must taste, I knew I needed to get it out there. 

Pickling is an age-old form of food preservation that I have covered before and is an excellent means to make good use of a bumper crop, for trade or tribulation.

Without much further ado, I will bring you (with only minor annotations, added by me) Grat's Amazing Pickled Eggs:
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[Or: Breaking Wind, the story of a high-school chemistry teacher who decided to get rich by making obscure home produce.]

This makes 3 dozen eggs, so alter proportions according to your needs. You need 3 dozen of these AT LEAST, right? 3 doz. is the basic unit of pickled eggs, also known as an Eggmouthsplosion. I have, in my gloriously wild past, made 4 Egmsplns at a time. EPIC

You will need:
- A very large sealable jar, or several smaller ones. Enough to hold all this stuff, obviously.
- A trip to the shops because you overestimated the size of the jars you already had.
- 1 small onion, chopped roughly
- Several large sprigs of fresh rosemary [dried is ok, fresh is better]
- 3 dozen eggs, or one Pre-Eggmouthsplosion [Smaller eggs are better if you don't want to wait ages, larger ones are good if you like lots of pickled egg in your mouth all at once which you do.]
- 1 head garlic, loosely chopped
- 2 tsp mustard seeds
- 1 tsp cloves
- 6 bay leaves
- 2 tsp cardamom pods
- 2 tsp whole peppercorns
- 1 tsp whole allspice
- 2 tbsp Tarragon
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 3 tsp salt [I prefer sea salt or rock salt to the refined stuff]
- 6-7 cups White vinegar [You can use apple cider vinegar or some other deluxe kind, but it gets pretty expensive, and all the flavour comes from the other stuff so you only need this for preserving the eggs and for the characteristic bite.]
- 2-3 cups spring or filtered water [Or at least, not Adelaide Tap water]
- Tweezers to get the eggshell out from under your fingernails. It will happen.

First, put the raw chopped onion and 2 of the rosemary sprigs in the jar. You can be fancy and arrange the sprigs up the sides so that it looks all food-artsy on the shelf if you want. I won't judge you.

Next, hard-boil your eggs. However you like to do them. I won't tell you how, if you don't know how to hard boil an egg, google it. Set them aside to cool.
This will take way longer than you expect, but they need to be cool so they're easy to peel, and trust me, after the first dozen eggs you're going to want them to be easy to peel. You *can* leave them in their shells and let the vinegar dissolve them, but that uses up the amazing power of the vinegar on dissolving shells rather than making your eggs taste like explosions, and leaves a gritty silt layer at the bottom of the jar that is just weird.

If you decide to take this easy path, just use vinegar and no water, to make up for the acetic acid lost to eggshell dissolving and your apathy.
So, assuming you peeled all your eggs, plonk them in the jar. Don't pack them tight, just put them in. Unless you want pickled egg-hexagons, which I did once. Because the whites go stiff and hold their shape. You could probably experiment with this bit and make d20-shaped pickled eggs. If so, I want credit for the idea and pics.

Now comes the fun, smelly eye-watering bit. Take everything except the eggs (and the tweezers) and put it in a big pot. Bring it to the boil, then let simmer for 15 minutes. Take it off the heat and let it cool to the point where, when you inevitably splash it everywhere, it's just annoying rather than a medical crisis.

Now pour this astringent nectar over the eggs. You can strain off the bits, if you're the kind of person who doesn't like to see what torment their food has been through.
Otherwise, just slop it on in there, seal it up, stick it in your fridge. You can keep it on a shelf out of the sun instead; I've done both, and it doesn't seem to make much difference except to how cold your eggs are when you eat them.

Now wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

No, don't check them after three days, that RUINS EVERYTHING! Why would you do that?!
If you went with small eggs, give it a week, and in the interim fill a spare jar with tears of weakness and desperation as you are obviously ruled by your cravings for delicious vinegary eggs.

If you went with large eggs you are a hero and my champion, so wait two weeks for double the XP and a Pickled Egg Medal.

Once opened, scoff half of them in a few days and then hide the jar and don't look at those hideous yellowish-brown ovoids for a few months. Then get cravings and eat the rest.
Enjoy!

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If you'd like to get in touch with Gareth, perhaps to spur him to write up more recipes,  you can find him on his Facebook, as Gareth Hodges, or via email.

Home Front: Cherry Harvest

This past solstice weekend, I took my whole family up to a cherry orchard, and we spent an hour or so, three adults, and late teen and two little ones, running about, foraging and feeding, till we had 10 kg of cherries picked, (and who knows how many eaten in the process).

This particular orchard was selling them at $10/kg so whilst we did spend a lot, it was massively less than the $20-$30/kg that they are, at the shops currently.

This is my partner Anstia helping Triceratops Girl collecting cherries (from every ladder they came across).
We aimed to take only the good fruit, and as few stalks as possible, because that sped up the prepping time later on, but does also speed up the rotting process (its an open wound ...).

Here is a bowl full of this years harvest, served chilled on a 30oC evening. However, 10 kg (22lbs) of any fresh produce is a lot of organic matter for even a tribe like mine to consume, especially a rich a source as these cherries were. So, it was time to can and jam!



My family (mothers side) is Danish, so we celebrate a Danish Giftmas, on the 24th, and one of my favourite deserts is the dark cherry soup, Kirsebærsuppe. We used 4 kg of cherries to make a giant pot of the soup, which left us with 2L (0.5gal) of leftover soup, which we jarred up hot in an old olive jar.

I wanted to try a few other ways of preserving the cherries, without making jam (we have the last two seasons of fruit windfalls as jam still and are just finishing off jars from the first year we did it. Some went into the duck-stuffing for example).

We candied (boiling in 1:1 sugar:water by mass), then dehydrated one set of pitted cherries. This worked out really well and we filled two trays of my dehydrator with them, and two jam-jars as a result.

I also preserved a jar's worth in simple syrup (which has a terrible leaking habit, seemed to bypass the seals on its jars every time I make it). These were unpitted and I expect them to take a while to candy up, and slowly leach flavour into the syrup.

Here's a side-by-side of the cherry soup,  beside the one of the jars of pitted cherries in Glögg. Glögg is a spiced, sweetened red wine (in this case) with an alcohol content of 12% vol which always seems to have more kick that expected. Perfect for preserving fruit and will make for a welcome treat come winter.

We used the similar sized olive jars as for the soup, and filled them with the pitted cherries, followed by a 750mL bottle of Glögg in each. Perfect size!

A welcome side effect from doing the candied cherries was that the syrup that remained was infused with the cherry juices that cooked out, and I was not going to let THAT go to waste. So, we found some swing top bottles that I had been keeping (always prepared), and funneled it in.

This home made cordial was almost black, it was such a dark red, and tastes amazing diluted with water, soda water and poured over ice-cream. I imagine I will make use of it in constructing boozy cocktails in the near future.

All of these preservation methods (candying, pickling, canning in syrup and reducing to cordial) are all super simple, cheep and will result in a long lasting commodity and resource, for trade, and off-season boosts to our table.

Lots of preppers recommend having tradable items, and this is a great example of one we're only too happy to produce and stock.

Here's the one tool that made the whole job SO much easier (and praise be my partner Omega, who used it to such effect). A cherry pitter!

This little tool took so much trouble out of de-stoning the 8kg or so of cherries we needed pitted. If you plan on doing a big load of cherries, you would do well to pick one or two of these up. Here's a cool link for a person who made their own!

Home front: vertical gardening

I have been wanting to make better use of the resources at my disposal for a while now, and grow more veggies at home. The problem being, we live in a very sandy location, and a lot of things that we like to eat just don't grow well. That or the possums, and snails, not to mention tiger slugs eat them before we get a crop out.


In order to avoid these pitfalls, and make better use of our bright sunshine, the water barrel I have out the back, and a lot of recyclable bottles I had had ready to go, I wanted to use the same kind of design as seen in a Kickstarter I backed in 2011 (but haven't yet seen) : Windowfarms.


The idea is pretty simple, plastic bottles, 1.25, 2 or 3L bottles, with the bottom cut off, have holes punched around the base, and then strung together in a stack.

Here is the top of my stack, and you can see the potting mix is already sporting some growth, sunflowers for Triceratops Girl.

I used just simple potting mix in my bottles, beccause it's what we had on hand from seedling planting to stock up the front veggie patches. I am hoping to keep building up our collection of these and get the most from the summer sun. I think a vermiculite substrate would be awesome but until I have a cheep source, its potting mix already-on-site for this project.

The line I used for these was the 2.4mm star sectioned trimmer line from Ryobi that I had on hand from my mostly unused line-trimmer. This thick, strong and sharp-edged line seemed ideal for stringing these up, bot for stability, but also giving the creeping vines something to hold onto, as well as possible deterring unwelcome mouths.

Below the sunflowers, are a mixture of carrots and onions. Yes,  I know that being root vegetables, hanging gardens will become packed with them, but my thought was to germinate and establish in the hangers, then transfer and replant as needed. All going well, I'll do this in the next batch of bottles we collect.


Next down the stack are daikon radishes.


Again, a big root vegetable that will need to be thinned out in order to get the best crop, but we go through a lot of plastic bottles, and I have lots of surfaces to hang vertical gardens from. One great thing about Daikons are that you can eat the leaves as well as the root, and both tops and bottoms pickle really well, which I hope to do with as much of the crop as I can manage to make successfully.

I strung the bottles before filling them, from top to bottom, knotting the trimmer line as I went and adjusting the tension to ensure that the spout of the bottles pointed directly down to the bottle below. Once filled with potting mix, I poured a quantity of water into the top bottle to moisten it, and add weight to gauge the tension. Some minor adjustments to the knots leveled everything up, and I loosened the cap, just enough to allow water to pour through, without being in danger falling off and washing my soil out.

After a few days of hanging and watering, without any catastrophic failures of bottle, cord or lids, I got the family together and we planted the seeds.

You can see in this shot that the sunward side of the bottles have developed a lovely green moss carpet, and there is a clear divide between the dry inch on top and the moist lower soils, even after 40oC days of summer sun here in Melbourne. This was a big test, and I'm pleased to say that not only is there life in these hanging gardens, that the system is sound. I only water the top bottle, every other evening or so, and each bottle below gets its fill, from the dribbling through from the bottom above.

The water than comes out of the bottom bottle is brown and peaty, so i know i'm loosing some nutrients along the way, but its hardly worth worrying about at this scale. I have a number of bottles of carp-based fertilizer  to bolster my crops, when it comes time to do so.




Here is the crowning (can you say this, when it's the bottom rung?) jewel of our hanging gardens, the peas.

We've tried growing sweet peas in the front gardens for the last few years, and have managed the sum total of three pods, before snails, slugs and possums have killed the plants. This time it will be different!

Our hope is that the peas will climb up the cords, and give us five sets of four cords worth of climbing pea-laden vines.

All in all, this was a really good project, the kids love looking at it, it made use of useless space, recycled materials on hand and otherwise being thrown out, and will hopefully start putting food on our plates in the next couple of months.

More planned, possibly with other crops, and I also have an old cargo strapping net to use as a watermelon vine trellis!

Home Front: Summer Harvests

We've had good fortune with our crops this summer, the front veggie patch has had good light, and we've been keeping on top of the watering when it has been hot. The reward has been a bumper crop of tomatoes, and some edible corn. Last years corn turned out to be the actual variety used to make popcorn. Looked great, couldn't be eaten after boiling. (To be fair, it does pop really well, we still have some of it left).

However, last years crop of tomatoes, those that survived the Triceratops Girl arrival cull (she would pick and gobble several each time she came through the gate) and our own cooking needs, we dried and eventually bottled in olive oil and herbs. This jar however was met by Tactical Baby's early display of evil, when after accidentally knocking off a jar of herbs from the bench, she grabbed my glass jar of precious dried tomatoes, tossed and smashed them too.

Lesson learned, this years produce will be canned into one of the small Dead Person Jars.



I use an electric dehydrator, for the speed and simplicity that offers, and the Fowlers Vacola - Ultimate Dehydrator 4000 is well suited the the task. This batch filled two of the four trays, and filled a third of a 1L DPJ.

We have another couple of meals worth of corn, if they haven't dried out too much in the heat, but even if they have, the rabbits and chickens will enjoy them.

Home Front: Brewing

One of the things I love doing over summer is home-brewing. Humans have been brewing for millennium, and it is a really good way to make use of simple raw materials and make something special. The fermentation process (if done well) will produce sufficient ethanol as a waste product of the yeast doing the fermenting, to kill a significant proportion of potentially disease causing microbial contaminants that may also exist in the water and produce.

Ethanol as many of you will know has a pleasing effect on the human physiology, and I heartily enjoy it, and the carbonation that can also be achieved. This is the home-brew kit that I have, (this is a similar kit, my original brand lost to antiquity). It has served me well. Honey & water mead, ginger cordial, ginger pulp & water beer, ginger beer kit beer, apple cider kits have all worked well for me, but this time I wanted to give it a go with more raw-materials.

I

I went with the $2 2L bottles of apple juice and $2 jars of apple sauce I saw at Aldi
and regular dried bakers yeast (gasp if you will, brewing aficionados, but its never done me wrong), which I "started" in half a pint-mug of warm water with 3-4 tablespoons sugar dissolved in it. I cleaned the fermenter, and all the parts, with the manufacturer approved sodium metabisulfite steriliser. Be aware, this produces a very irritating gas, and will set off asthmatics, but it does a really good job at giving a food-grade clean to your kit, bottles and also to act as a medium to fill the bubble-valve. I have also never bothered to measure the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_%28alcoholic_beverage%29of the mixture I am brewing with, to determine the fermentation end point and to calculate the alcohol content, preferring a more rustic "it stopped bubbling much, and tastes good" method. Not very scientific, but in this instance, I depart from my scientific training as a microbiologist, and go with the spirits of my ancestors. Once it is done, I'll be bottling it in the recycled Grolsche bottles that I've been collecting for years.

Home Front: Vegie Garden update

Perhaps I am overly proud of my little veggie patches, but it's something I've always enjoyed doing, and for as long as I've lived in places with enough plot to plant in, I've done so. Let me be the first to admit, I'm not very good with germinating seeds and keeping them alive to "seedling" size, although I planted sunflowers for Triceratops Girl last season which grew happily.
Here's an update on our main vegetable patch (as opposed to the  more herb-filled bed).

This first shot is of the "first quadrant" and hosts three variates of tomato, two of chilli and three garlic plants.The stringy grass is pervasive and a real pest to remove, it roots deeply.


This is the second quadrant, recently weeded, and plays host to green-red kale (the big leafy thing), reclaimed leeks (the bright green on the left, which sprouted from the discarded cut rooty-ends of supermarket leeks. The two big green shoots on the center left edge are more garlic, sprouted from gloves that germinated on our shelf. The long spindly looking thing is the remains of the broccoli that went to seed. I wanted to let it go full term so we could maximize our chance of getting a second season out of it. Some potatoes can be seen poking through the top right of the shot. Need to replant those to save them from going green.

Quadrant three hosts celery (top right), which is shooting up, spring onions shoots through the middle and matured, "gone-to-seed" plants along the top of the frame, and spinach all along the right of the shot. Retired kendo shinai slats make great garden stakes. Recycled futon planks make my walkways. More potatoes throughout. They are invasive but a welcome find when they aren't stifling other crops. The pumpkin is the same way.

Here are the new additions. two punnets of sweet corn (NOT popcorn variety like the last rather unsatisfying crop we grew, accidentally). I also planted basil, in between the rows of corn.In the process I dug in a bucket of chicken poop and old nest-hay, harvested from under the chookens. Digging it all in gave me the ability to clear out a bunch of grass-toots, and other detritus, as well as find and re-home some more potatoes.

I'm really hopeful that these two will be good "companion-plants"  and I may even rish another set of beans, once the corn-stalks mature. So far we've had zero success with beans.