GUEST ARTICLE
30 days and 30 nights: A food storage marathon.
Part 2 The Finish Line.
If you didn't read Part 1 yet: http://bisonsurvivalblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/guest-article_27.html
After nearly a month of eating foods not requiring refrigeration I can see the finish line just ahead. The diet turned out to be much less of a hardship then I thought it would be. The most disappointing thing is I actually gained a couple of pounds instead of losing weight. Which probably shouldn't be a surprise since I was eating so many carbs and not the canned vegetable kind either. I did cheat a few times including buying some milk for the boys. They could not stand the powdered milk. Powdered milk taste and smells like crap but I don't drink a lot of milk. I mostly use it for cooking and cereal. I ate lots of boxed and canned foods. My case of Ramen noodles is almost gone. I did not grind any of my grains.
Here are a few notes on products that most people refrigerate.
Keep in mind the garage where I stored the foods stayed relatively cool throughout the month, about 45 on average.
Cheddar Cheese stayed perfect no mold tastes great.
Mayo no problem taste fine, I was careful not to double dip utensils
Eggs fine could not tell any difference from day one to this morning
All Tortillas flour and corn are both fine no mold or spoilage that I can detect.
Apples of course, still fine
Potatoes ditto still good firm and no sprouting
Carrots ok but dried out a bit on exterior surfaces just soak them or wash under water and tastes great, still crisp.
Big surprise of the month goes to yogurt. I bought four small containers of fit and fruity yogurt. This yogurt is packaged by Auburn Dairy of Washington State and is sold in my local Winco grocery store. It was the only brand of yogurt I could find that did not specify "keep refrigerated", although it was sold in the refrigerated section with the rest of the yogurt. So each week I opened one container and ate it. I opened and consumed the last container this morning and it tasted, smelled and looked fine. All four containers were good.
Ranch dressing in plastic squeeze bottle opened around middle of month and had some yesterday on carrots it tasted fine and I am still alive.
Butter no problem taste good, looks good, smells good.
Summer sausage roll, opened end of first week polished of by end of third week tasted great start to finish.
Pepperoni sliced sold unrefrigerated but says to refrigerate after opening, Opened on 18th and still looks fine. I haven't eaten any more of it but I might make another pizza this weekend to polish it off.
Mozzarella cheese was fine when opened on 18th and I used a little over half of it for a pizza. Looked at it today and mold has started to grow in a couple of spots. Not sure whether I will cut off the mold spots and use the rest or toss it. Need to do some more research on the matter. But factory sealed I think it could have lasted the whole month.
On the subject of pizza this was one of the cheats I did for the month. My kids were over for the weekend and we used the bread machine to make the dough and cooked it in the home oven because my propane camp oven is so small we would have had to make three separate pizzas instead of one big one. I think my flour is getting a little stale but the pizza was still good. The flour in question is all purpose flour and is almost two years old. It doesn't smell rancid to me but is probably ready for the trash.
I made lots of pancakes, biscuts, muffins, and even brownies on the wood stove. I also made peanut butter cookies once and a cake from a box mix. My preferred baking method was to use a 12 inch cast iron frying pan placed directly on top of the wood stove. I put a one inch high trivet in the frying pan and a piece of foil shiny side down over the trivet. Then I placed whatever I was baking on top of the foil and covered with a preheated 12 inch diameter dutch oven laid on top of the frying pan. It was a pain in the rear and everything took at least twice as long to bake but all the baked goods tasted pretty good.
Even after a month of virtually no shopping (except for milk) I am still loaded to the gills with food but I am looking forward to picking up some ice cream, bread and some fresh steak and chicken. The canned beef and chicken just isn't the same. And no more Tuna for at least a month.
Happy New Year
Eric of the Great NW
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8 comments:
I used to live with no fridge. (Outside) Cool rivers in summer and snowbanks in winter.
I too tried cake "baking" on a wood stove. It took all night and came out like a big cookie. Wet on the top, dry on the bottom, turning was a chore.
Thanks for the trivet idea and putting a pre-hot dutch oven over it!
Thanks.
Eric, sounds like we're practically neighbors, I'm a bit SW of you. The cheese should be fine, I'd just lop off the moldy bits. You're a braver man than I with the mayo. glad that turned out OK.
About the powdered milk issue - NIDO whole dry milk is the answer. It has a shelf life of one year, and is WHOLE milk, not fat-free or reduced fat. It tastes very fresh, and you can make up a quart or cup at a time. It is usually available in the Latino section of selected Walmarts or Mexican grocery stores.
We may learm to live without refrigerators as we know them today. I had a much smaller refrigerator frm the 50's in the early 90's for a couple of years.
Room for one ice cream and a couple containers of ice. There are now very small cheap refrigerators that cost little to run. In older times people had root cellers and spring houses.
Some people may think of Jim and many of his minions as "negative and whining"
But I see the positive in that we can all survive and even have enjoyable lives even as the economy slows.
And it may be rather amusing watching from a ringside seat as things happen if prepped well enough.
I have left yogurt in my truck in Texas for weeks by accident and had it taste just fine. It was carried in the desert for weeks in the countries of origin.
What will people like Jims exwife do? Mine behaves less badly knowing jobs are not easy to find and keep. Forget about really good jobs. She also knows to get way more money then it takes to raise children to spend on herself can only happen if I am working... at a secure well paying job. She knows she could go under the water and not come up. She was a realy mean Bitch during the booming Clinton years.
Infact almost all my my relatives were really nice with recent memories of the depression. Things changed with the entitlement society of the 1960's
Eric, thanks for the update. Did you use any peanut butter and jam? Peanut butter is one of my secret weapons regarding "easy to get " protein and should not need refrigeration if I keep oil on top of it.
Also did you use any rice? Rice and beans with another secret weapon of mine -soy sauce. Just about 1 spoon full of Soy sauce on the plate of cooked rice and you are good to go.Rice is a BIG part of my food stash - at least 50 percent. You can add anything to it to change the taste - for example ANY KIND of soup in the can. Any kind of vegetable etc.
To protect that cheese that has the mold spots, take some oil [vegetable, olive etc] and brush all the exposed to air surfaces. You should not have any problem after that.
Great job, thank again.
Thanks for the update
Jack Schitte
Anon 6:57,
I tried some of that NIDO. Better than nonfat powdered milk but more expensive. Possibly a mix of the two might be good and cut down on the cost a bit.
Anon 10:21,
I have a small dorm room type fridge and I measured the amperage it drew over a 24 hour period with 2 gallons of water in it. If I remember correctly it used about 1.5 amps (total over 24hrs, used Kill-a-watt meter to measure) on 120v. I have two 64 watt panels now but will hopefully add to that in the near future. So running a small fridge like that in the summer time would be doable
Jack,
I had peanut butter but I've never refrigerated it and haven't had any problems. I never opened the jam, probably because I didn't have much bread to use. I spread the peanut butter on graham crackers and those are fine with out jam. I had white rice a couple of times and even made fried rice with leftover white rice and spam. I had some packets of soy sauce I used in the fried rice. Stretching canned soup with rice is a good idea. I usually stretch the canned soup with some canned mixed veggies.
The powdered milk I buy from beprepared.com tastes like the nonfat milk my wife buys. A little getting used to. Adding some sort of chocalate mix makes it a non-issue.
My wife and I lived on a sail boat for 7 years, in all that time without refrigeration. The Mayo will be fine, long as you don't double dip. Rotate eggs top to bottom on a weekly basis.
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