Super Easy Currant Jelly

• 20 Jul 2010
• angela
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Our currant bushes finally put on enough currants this year that the kids couldn’t keep up with eating them all, so we had currants left to make some currant jelly.
This is super easy jelly to make and one of my favorite flavors because it’s a nice combination of tart and sweet.  Here’s what you’ll need:

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2 Food Storage Classes in Spanish Fork, April 15th

• 13 Apr 2010
• ekim
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There will be two classes on Food Storage taught in Spanish Fork on Thursday evening.

Debbie Kent lives in the Southern California. She has been married for 30 years. She and her husband are the proud parents of 6 beautiful children, and grandparents of 3. She has been an advocate of food storage and emergency preparedness since her early teen age years. She enjoys giving emergency preparedness lessons each month at her church. Much of the resources found on this website are the culmination of hours of preparation for these lessons. She sincerely hopes that in sharing this information, other’s may benefit from her efforts. http://peaceofpreparedness.com/

Spanish Fork, April 15th, 2 classes by Debbie Kent
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Beginning Bee Kepping Class in Utah County April 17th

• 29 Mar 2010
• ekim
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Beginning Beekeeper’s Class

Bee Keeping is fun and relatively inexpensive.

I took this class last year and obtained my equipment through Maple Mountain bees. It has proven to be a fun and rewarding experience for my family and I. The 60lbs. of honey we got our first year wasn’t bad either!

Bryan Esquivel of Maple Mountain Bees authored a guest post for us in May of last year about how he got started in bee keeping. You can find the article here.

When:

April 17th (2pm-4pm).

Where:

1475 North 900 West Mapleton, Utah.
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Instructables Paracord Contest

• 18 Mar 2010
• ekim
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One of our favorite DIY sites, Instructables.com is hosting a Paracord Contest. The grand prize is a Leatherman with a custom laser etched message of your choice. Paracord is one of the best gotta-have-some-with-you preparedness items. The inner strands can be used for fishing line while the outer shell on its own provides a strong shell for wrapping or weaving other objects. Really, the possibilities are endless.

Have a look at the Instructables Paracord Contest here.

Social Preppers

• 21 Jan 2010
• Jayce
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Interested in a little more discussion with the preppers here, and elsewhere?  In our association with the American Preppers Network, you now have several ways to interact with other people that like to talk preparedness.

Forum

For people interested in forum discussions, we have two available places to talk.  The APN forums will allow you communicate with the other utahpreppers, as well as other state prepper groups.  Also available is the new LDS Preppers, a similar concept but geared for the LDS readers.  By keeping with the rest of the groups, you can participate not only in the Utah discussions, but also any other regions, or specialty topics you wish.  It’s a great resource to communicate with other preppers, without having having to come out of your well-stocked mountain retreat (ok, a little humor there).  If you need to understand a little bit more about what a forum is, check out the wikipedia description.

Chat

If you like real time discussions, you can now join us in our chat rooms.  These chats are accessible to computer novice, as well as the geeks among us.  For the novice, you can easily go HERE and join the chat rooms in your browser (no software to install).  Just click the link, and you will be prompted for a nickname to use, then it’ll log you in and you will have a page to  There are several rooms available, the most important ones being the #preppers, and the #utahpreppers rooms.  Chat rooms are an ‘always-open’ type of room where you can go in and interact in real-time.  Just clicking that link will open a page with a small bar on the top that lists which rooms you can listen in (just click on one to see the activity in that room).  On the right hand side will be a list of people currently in the room, and at the bottom, you can type in a message, and just hit enter for everyone to get it.

For the Geeks, we’re all using the rizon IRC network, and you may use any IRC client (such as XChat, WeeChat, or others) to connect.

Making Canned Milk Products from Powdered Milk

• 05 Jan 2010
• angela
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When I started storing food, I thought it would be a good idea to store forms of canned milk like evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk.  I bought quite a few cans and have used most of them over the years.  However, I only have two recipes I regularly make that call for evaporated milk, and one that calls for sweetened condensed milk, so I did not use every can I purchased before they expired.  (more…)

Magazine Review: Big Buy

• 19 Nov 2009
• Joseph
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Magazine Review: Big Buy

I’m going to be honest with you: this isn’t what you’d call a glowing review. Think of it as more of a warning, not just against this magazine, but other books and magazines like it.
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Survival Food: How to Make Parched Corn

• 02 Oct 2009
• phil801
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Dried corn ready to be parched

Corn – You can boil it, toast it, roast it, parch it, eat it raw, grill it, steam it, stew it, cream it, grind it, feed humans or animals with it.  You can eat it fresh, freeze it, can it,  dry it, drink it or burn it in your vehicle.  It’s a diverse food that can serve a prepper well if they know what to do with it.

Parched corn was eaten regularly by American Indians warriors and hunters as an extremely lightweight, high energy trail food long before European explorers showed up and was a typical food or treat for the pioneers as well.  It is the original “trail snack” and can also be ground up for stews or soups.

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Liquid or Powdered Pectin

• 24 Sep 2009
• Jayce
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This year has been a big experiment in new canning recipes, and foods.  In doing that, my wife especially has been learning a lot as she has stretched beyond some of the basic recipes we’ve used in previous years.

Well, over on her own blog, my wife made a comment about something she’s learned this year.  Go check out what she’s learned on the difference between liquid and powdered pectin.

And boy has she been using that a lot this year.  I’ve been grabbing pictures to post up here, hopefully I can get to it soon.

Dehydrating Peppers

• 09 Sep 2009
• angela
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Peppers courtesy of the garden

Harvest season is upon us here in Utah, so I’ve been pretty busy preserving the harvest.  This year I grew pepper plants from seed and have LOTS of peppers in my garden.  Some are hot and some are mild.  This is a good thing if you like peppers a lot, but I do not.  Thankfully my husband does, but even a pepper lover like him can only eat so many peppers.  So what do we do with all those peppers?  We eat a few, put a few in salsa, and save the rest for later by dehydrating them.

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Store zucchini in bread

• 14 Aug 2009
• wade
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I have been searching for the best way to store zucchini and have found the answer: in bread. Instead of trying to freeze the zucchini itself, make it into bread first and freeze the loaves.

Other options that I am trying are freezing the shredded zucchini pre-measured in individual bags and as bread dough, pre-measured in individual, disposable baking tins. Freezing the shredded zucchini allows for convenience as you only have to thaw exactly what you need and it’s already measured for the recipe. The frozen dough is even more convenient as it only requires baking, saving you time and a messy kitchen. The most convenient option of course is pre-baked loaves though as they come out of the freezer ready to eat. I’m going to do some comparisons through the winter to see how much of a difference in taste and texture there is between bread baked from frozen dough and the pre-baked frozen loaves. If it turns out that the frozen loaves are just as good as freshly baked bread, then I will stick with that. It’s much easier and saves a lot of electricity to have a baking day where you cook it all at once. (more…)

Making Better Char Cloth

• 27 Jul 2009
• angela
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When starting a flint and steel or striker type of fire, char cloth makes all the difference in being able to actually get the fire started or just making a bunch of sparks that never catch anything on fire.  Char cloth (sometimes also called charred cloth) is one of those amazing mountain man items that is still very useful today.  Char cloth is pieces of blackened fabric that easily catch a spark and burn similarly to the way steel wool burns–no big flame, but a nice ember burn that doesn’t blow out once it’s lit.  The spark lights the char cloth and the char cloth is used to light the other tinder.  I’ve been wanting to add char cloth to my fire kits and having used all my char cloth made by others, I decided to make a batch of my own.

100% cotton jersey fabric

I had some basic directions to go off of, but had never made it myself, so here’s how the first round went.  I got some 100% cotton fabric–I used jersey fabric (an old T shirt) and cut it into approximately 2″ squares.  Mine was kind of a natural color, but you could probably use any color you have, just avoid screen-printed designs, etc.  I cut the ribbing off from the neck and sleeve ends as well as the seams.  You just want the fabric.

Next, I got a metal can–I used an old cookie tin.  I punched a vent hole in the can lid with a hammer and nail.  You can use whatever metal can you have–I’ve seen it done with smaller tins as well as cleaned out food cans with foil for a lid.

Char cloth cooking tin

Cut cloth in the tin

I put the cut up fabric squares in the tin, put the lid on, and put the can on my grill on low and let it cook.  You definitely want to do this outside–burning fabric doesn’t smell all that good.  My instructions said to cook it until it stopped smoking.  I had the tin fairly full, and cooked it close to 3 hours before I decided to turn it off.  It never smoked a lot.  When it cooled, I opened the can and only the bottom 3-4 layers were black, the rest of the fabric was brown.

I turned the pile over and put it back on the grill on Medium this time and cooked it another close to 3 hours.  This time it was all black when it was finished.  However, it didn’t catch a spark very well.  I could light it with a flame, or an occasional large spark, but it was very frustrating to work with.  Nothing like the char cloth I’d had before that a friend of ours made from terry cloth (old towel).

Cooked jersey char cloth

So I put it back on the grill again, this time I only filled the can about 1/3 full and cooked it on high another 3 hours or so.  Now it was a little more fragile and easy to tear (as char cloth generally is), but it still didn’t catch spark well.  I had no more ideas to make it better, so I decided to start over.

Cotton monks' cloth (quarter for scale) and smaller cooking tin

The second and far better batch of char cloth I made started with 100% cotton monk’s cloth I got at Walmart.  Notice the loose weave and air holes.  Those made a huge difference.  I cut it a little smaller this time–about 1 1/2 inch square as 2″ was a little larger than necessary.  There is some shrinkage as it cooks, but not that much.  I wanted to see if it would work straight from the store without washing the fabric first, so I only cut 5 squares of it.

I put it in a smaller tin which also got the hammer/nail air vent in the lid.

Feeling like I’d spent enough of my grill gas on this project, I opted to do this round real mountain man style and build a fire and toss the tin in the fire.  I pretty well buried it–it’s in there somewhere.

Real mountain man char cloth cooking method

It did not cook long in the fire–maybe 15 minutes (of course it was in a smaller tin than the first round, but I’m guessing even a large tin wouldn’t take 9 hours in the fire).  I couldn’t tell when it stopped smoking since it was in a fire with all the rest of the smoke, so I just guessed at when to pull it out.  It wouldn’t matter if it stayed in there until the fire burned out as long as no sparks got in the airhole and caught all the fabric on fire in the meantime.

Cooked monk's cloth char cloth

I fished it out, let it cool, and opened it to nicely blackened monk’s cloth.

This second round of char cloth lights up with minimal spark from a firestarter or flint/steel.  It is more fragile than the jersey char cloth, but works much better.  I’ll have to post on flint/steel firestarting another time :)

Char cloth burning

So, to recap, to make better char cloth, start with a 100% cotton fabric with texture and a fairly loose weave.  Use a fire pit if you can to save on gas.  Cooking on higher heat and cooking a smaller batch help speed up cooking time.  Happy firestarting!