This book also stood out to me, because I often wonder *how* my family managed to get enough food to live.  My mom’s side of the family was that oft-discussed “hearty pioneer stock”.  However I have noticed that while many farmed to live, I have a long history of blacksmiths and military.  There is no hiding that this must be because I inherited a really lousy black-thumb, they took up other trades because of this family curse. I’m one of those people who has to work really hard to make part of his garden succeed.  I enjoy blaming my heritage on this, as it cannot be some failing of my own, right?  So I felt driven to read this book, and find out how they managed to live, despite my inability to grow enough of the right foods in the wasteland of Utah.

Quick Summary:

Audience: Frustrated gardeners, those looking for more season to grow, people who feel they need to change their gardening to be more useful.

Target Location: The author speaks heavily about his experiences in the mountain west/high desert regions (specifically Utah valley). Skills discussed will make farming there much easier, and everywhere else is just easy :)

Mormons Only? No, not even close. This is mentioned specifically because of the historical hardships they encountered when arriving in Utah, and attempting to farm in what was considered a barren land. The author relies on some old family journals for historical information to help understand why certain farming techniques work, and why we shouldnt’ have forgotten them.

The Full Review:

Forgotten Skills is an encouraging read, introducing people of the mountain west to the fact that they can grow food year-round, even in our crazy climate.  The author relies heavily on pioneer journals (mostly from his family) in order to reference specific practices for growing and preserving food that are completely foreign to most people today.  Granted, experienced readers of this blog might be familiar with many specific concepts, such as: non-hybrid seeds, canning, etc; the author goes into extra depth about how these practices were used to simply stay alive in not so distant years.  Beyond some more recently popular topics, there is great encouragement into practices that can be used by people with even small yards to produce and store food year-round by simply changing certain practices in your gardening.

This book in not designed however as a be-all reference. At only 145 pages, with many great photos, you wont’ find a book that teaches every single thing you need to be independent.  However it introduces a good number of important practices, provides basic reasoning as to why it was an important skill, and provides some modern usage examples. It makes sure you know enough about what the skill is, and gives you what you need to find more information if you want. Example: After a great discussion about seed hybridization practices, and their effects, he also spends time explaining how seed banks work and how you can participate in one to get useful seeds in your garden.

Major Topics:

Here is a list of some of the major topics covered that should get the interest of our readers:

• Seeds
• Extending the harvest
• Perennial food plants
• Trees
• Cellaring
• Long Keeping Foods
• Early Veggies
• Pioneer Yeast
• Modern Ideas the Pioneers Would Have Appreciated
• Eggs
• Chickens
• Forgotten Recipes

• Some currants–doesn’t matter how many
• Sugar
• A couple of pots (to cook the berries and the jelly–you really could use the same pot)
• Strainer and/or cheesecloth/jelly bag for juicing the currants

That’s all.

To can it you’ll need jars, lids, rings, and a water bath canner.

First, pick and wash your currants.  I removed the stems, some people don’t.  If you don’t, you’ll need to skip the smashing step and go straight to the pot.

After your currants are washed, you can smash them or not.  In my brain I get more juice out of them if I smash them than if I leave them whole, so I smash them.  You can use a potato masher or run them through the pulse chop on your food processor.  I’m all for quick, so I chopped them.

Then, put the chopped currants in a pot and heat them up.  You can add just a little water if you want to thin it up a bit, but you don’t want to add too much.  If you didn’t take the stems off your currants, you’ll have whole currants plus stems in the pot heating up.

After the currants have cooked for a bit, it’s time to juice them.  You’ll need 3-4 layers of cheese cloth or a jelly bag or a tight strainer.  I didn’t have any cheesecloth handy, so I made a jelly bag from some not-so-tight weave muslin I had.  I’ll be re-making the bag to fit over my strainer and end in a point instead of a square bottom, but this one worked for this time.

Pour or scoop the cooked currants into your cheesecloth and suspend the bundle over a pot. Get creative here. I usually tie the bundle to a long dowel, but couldn’t find one this time. Prop it up on chairs or buckets–whatever you have around–and let it drip. If you want really clear jelly, don’t squeeze the bag. If you want a little more volume and don’t mind if your jelly is “cloudy”, squeeze the bag to get as much juice out as you can. I usually go for volume. Okay, I always go for volume. If you’re submitting your jelly to the state fair, go for clarity.

Once you have your juice, discard the pulp left in the cheesecloth and measure the juice. (You can stop here for the night and put the juice in the fridge and start again the next day or the day after that if it happens to be way past your bedtime by the time the currants have juiced.)

Now you’ve measured your juice, put it in a pot with an equal amount of sugar. So 2 cups of juice and 2 cups of sugar or 7 1/2 cups of juice and 7 1/2 cups of sugar. Easy, right? You don’t need to add pectin because currants already have enough pectin in them to gel.

Get your water bath canner set up with water in it and start heating it up so it will be ready to can the jelly when it’s done boiling. Put your lids in a little pot and warm them up also.

Bring the jelly to a boil and then let it boil for 15 minutes. If you want to test it before canning it, put a little on a plate and stick it in the fridge to cool off. See if it sets up. It shouldn’t have any problem, but if it doesn’t set up, boil it a little longer and test it again.

When you’re ready to can it, ladle the hot jelly into your clean hot jars, wipe the rims and apply the lids. Put them in the canner and process 10 minutes.

Pull them out and let them cool and voila! Super easy currant jelly to use on bread, breakfasts, meat, and whatever else you can dream up. Enjoy!

With most canned goods, the expiration date seems to be a suggested date and the food is actually good far beyond the date marked on the end of the can.  This has not held true for the canned milk products I have stored.  You would expect evaporated milk 10 years past its expiration date to be bad (and it was), but I really expected sweetened condensed milk only 2 years past expiration to still be useable (and it wasn’t).  The evaporated milk had turned thick and brown, and the sweetened condensed milk was brown also (it is already thick when it is fresh).  So if you want to store canned milk products, they need to be rotated frequently.  I will not be storing canned milk products anymore, instead I will be making them when I need them with powdered milk which stores a lot longer than the canned milks (and is less expensive).  Here are a couple of recipes:

Evaporated Milk
1 C water
2/3 C powdered milk
Mix together with a whisk or blender.  Will replace evaporated milk in any recipe.

Sweetened Condensed Milk
1/2 C hot tap water
1 C sugar
1 C powdered milk
3 TB melted butter
Mix in blender until sugar dissolves.  Will replace sweetened condensed milk in any recipe.  Makes about 1 1/2 cups +

I used the  non instant powdered milk.  It is okay to half or double these recipes to get the amount you need for your recipe.

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.
The full name of this magazine is The Best of Fine Cooking: Big Buy. I was attracted to it at the grocery store because of a subtitle on the front: “Buy in bulk. Use it all up!” This is one of the biggest problems a prepper runs into with their food storage. What to buy? What stores best? What to make with what to buy? How do I store the rest? I foolishly expected this magazine to answer these, and other questions.

Fatal Flaws

This magazine shares many of the fatal flaws of modern journalism. It contains just enough content to look interesting, but then skimps on anything worthwhile. Many of the key concepts behind the magazine are actually quite good; but the execution is poor. Luckily, if you’re into food photography, you will not be disappointed. The photos in here are beautiful, and some even made me do double-takes. But I didn’t buy the magazine for the photos, and I certainly didn’t buy it for the recipes. I bought it hoping for tips and tricks to help with my food storage scenario.

There are tips and tricks inside. For instance, there is a quick freezing chart that lists a few common foods, and the length of time that they can be frozen for. This is key information, not only for one buying in bulk, but also for one growing their own fruits and vegetables, yielding an unwieldy crop. The chart is short, but it is a nice starting point. One section suggests keeping specific items in stock for easily-made soups, based on the season. This is not bad advice, since it helps you rotate your food supplies.

But the next section, on how to throw a (really) big party reveals the magazine’s fatal flaw when it comes to preppers: it is designed for people who buy a lot of really fresh food all at once, and then suddenly find themselves wondering what to do with it all before it spoils. The bulk of the magazine takes a group of individual foods that can be purchased in bulk, spends a page briefly talking about that ingredient, and then follows that page with a short collection of recipes focused on that food.

Each ingredient overview is a double-page spread with large, pretty pictures, and a mere smidgen of text on the side, in fonts large enough to keep from providing too much useful information. The section on canned tomatoes recommends specific Italian varieties, which are likely outside of your budget. Some items, such as the Grana Padano (it’s a Parmesan-like cheese), only seem to store for as long as 3 weeks. The section on fresh salmon is laughable when it comes to long-term storage. Most items listed store anywhere from 1 to 3 months.

What to Buy Instead

In the end, if you’re looking for a beginner’s guide to handling large volumes of food, this might be a good buy for you. Take a look at it at the newsstand first, to make sure it’s what you want, but hurry: the front cover says “DISPLAY UNTIL NOV 30″. For the rest of you, your $9.99 (cover price) could be better spent elsewhere. Look for resources that cover several food items, and have in-depth information about them; not just a 2-paragraph blurb. Recipes are nice, but be more concerned with technique. If you have an excess of canned tomatoes that need to be used quickly, and only three recipes and no other knowledge, you may be in trouble.

Beware of recipe collections. Some do have useful information on techniques, but many (especially in the prepper world) are little more than collections of old family recipes, many of which the “author” has never personally tested. If you do buy a recipe collection, start testing the recipes yourself as soon as possible. If you find yourself in a dire situation with large (but limited) supply of food and a few recipes that you know nothing about, you may find yourself wasting a lot of valuable resources on something that you won’t, or can’t eat.

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!

My wife and I have been using the oven pretty frequently and are very pleased with it. When we first got it, we did a side by side comparison of it and my neighbor’s Global Sun Oven which costs just a bit more. Without getting into too many details, I think that the build quality of the Global is better, which translates to faster heat up times. The Sportster oven on the other hand is a bit larger and can handle two small pots where the Global is restricted to just one. Since a meal often consists of more than one dish, cooked in a different pot, this can be a real concern.

My suggestion? Buy both! At least, that is what I plan on doing. When it comes to prepping, redundancy is often a good thing.

You’ll notice that the price for many solar ovens can be a bit steep. From $290 to over $340. I received an email from a friend that a dealer has agreed to provide these ovens AT COST + shipping for a total of $205.

If you are interested in purchasing a Global Sun Oven, contact Mike or Becky Sego at 801-616-8800 or email them at beckysego AT gmail. She will tell you where to mail your check and you’ll have your oven on your doorstep in about a week.

If you already own a sun oven, now is a great time to practice with it. Sun Oven International (the maker of the Global Sun Oven) has issued the “Solar Cooking Challenge” to harness the power of the Utah sun to cook 50,000 meals between June 25th and July 1st, 2009 .

To participate in the challenge, each time you cook in the sun, go to UtahSunOvens.com and register how many meals you cooked and what you cooked. Each time you register, your name will be entered into a drawing. The more often you cook in the sun, the better your chance to win. For each photo and video you submit you will receive another chance to win.

10 Prizes will be awarded:
2 grand prize will each receive a sun oven (it’s good to have several if you have a large family or several items you’ll be cooking for your meal)
3 second prize winners will receive a pot and pan package including a 3 qt Granite Ware Enamel Pot, a 4 qt granite ware stock post w/steamer insert, and two bread loaf pans.
5 third prize winners will receive a “Month of SUNdays” cookbook.

Some Solar Cooking Basics:

No energy costs, no pollution, just fresh, moist, luscious sun-cooked food. Sun oven cooking is easy, fun, natural, and nutritious, while helping the environment. Food can be baked, boiled, steamed at temps up to 400+ degrees with the power of the sun. Sun baked foods stay more moist and have less shrinkage than conventionally cooked foods and the food will not burn or scorch. Sun baked roasts are tastier and more succulent, and sun-baked bread has unparalleled taste and texture. The aroma of food sunning itself in a sun oven is sure to please your senses.

There are 2 ways to cook in a sun oven. If you refocus the oven to follow the sun about every 30 minutes, cooking times and methods will be very similar to cooking with a conventional stove or oven.

Or, a Sun Oven can be used for slow cooking, much like a crock-pot. You can prepare the meal and put it in the sun oven. Point the oven toward where the sun will be approximately halfway through the time you will be gone. If you’ll be gone 6 hours, point it to where the sun will be in 3 hours. You’ll come home to a tasty, slow cooked dinner. If you run late, there is not need to worry, the sun oven will keep your food warm, moist and fresh for hours.

Have you been dying to learn how to utilize your pressure cooker to the fullest? Join Kellene as she teaches an Easy Gourmet Pressure Cooking workshop at the Orem, Utah Macey’s.

* Macey’s Food & Drug @ 880 N State St, Orem, Utah
* Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 from 7:00 – 8:30pm
* Call (801) 225-6010 to register
* Cost: FREE (Priceless)

Making some stock

Who knows the reason, but usually that means I’m going to stop by Costco to pick up one of their roasted chickens.  Then again, we tend to pick up one of these pretty often.  Getting a whole chicken works out well, giving us several meals already largely prepared.

But whether you are like us, and just addicted to that rotisserie chicken, or you like to cook your own.  There lies the question of what do you do with the *rest* of the chicken that you don’t eat?

The chicken (turkey, any fowl, or any other bone) leftovers still contain a lot of nutrition just waiting to be tapped.  But like most people my age, we’ve never really learned, or just stopped doing the work that it would take to extract the goodness lying within those leftovers.

Making a stock is really just the process of using water and heat to dissolve out special nutrients from whatever you decide to put in there, and keep just that liquefied flavor to use later.  Many of us have used recipes that call for an occasional use of some brand of chicken or vegetable stock, or even stepping down to a bouillon cube, giving some form of flavor, and a lot of sodium to fit the general idea of what the finalized product should taste like.  But what about making your own, just how hard is it, and how long does it take?

Well, it’s actually absolutely easy.  At it’s heart, you really are just going to simmer your desired products until all the goodness comes out.  How long is that?  Well, from all the places I’ve read, you’re looking at about 4 hours simmering to get everything out of a pot with a chicken carcass and some veggies.  Just look online at some of the possible examples for recipes describing the process of making stocks.  How could something with that many examples be as easy as what I just described?  Well, it is, and the reason there are so many variations, is that each small flavor you put in to your pot to start with will come through the end product giving subtle (or not so subtle if you add a lot) flavors to you stock, and thusly to whatever food you  use it in.

As an example today I took one old chicken carcass, two onions, one small bunch of shallots, some parsley, bay leaves, black pepper, and three dried cayenne peppers.  Added enough cold water to completely cover, brought it to a boil, then backed it down to a low simmer for 4 hours.  At the end I strained it out with some cheesecloth, and now it’s in the fridge, ready to skim off any last fat that congeals on the top.

All I had to do was dump in the food, most of it was just some veggies left in the fridge, and a few herbs.  Not much trouble at all.  And how does it taste?  Well it knocks the socks off anything you’d get in a commercial can, with that touch of spice it’ll go great with some of my food.

Just imagine in these rough economic times, if you’re laid off and having to eat that white rice stuffed in cans under your kids bed right now.  After a few weeks you’ll be pretty desperate for some flavor.  Why not cook that rice with a touch of this to give it a kick, and a bit of extra nutrition?  Most anytime you go to cook something savory and it calls for water, use some of your stock instead, because as we all know, water doesn’t exactly bring a lot of flavor to the game.  Not only that, it gives you the ability to get one more meal from your old bones and gristle.

Other ideas to help grow your ‘stock portfolio’.  As a kid, I can always remember anytime we cooked veggies, especially any that were simply boiled, or heated from a can, that water was added to a freezer tub.  Layer upon layer grew, on it’s own it could be used as a basic vegetable broth itself.  But it could be combined with the above method to create some amazing stocks, usually the start of our mom’s stew.

Which really, to me is the best use for the stock.  Stews and soups based off a stock such as this are the way old soups all started.  Not only do they become thicker, and more flavorful, but they become far more nutritious.

And of course, a highlight of stocks from my favorite cooking instructor:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s some seriously nice prizes too:

• 1st Place = One (1) Harvest Food Rotation System ($459 value)
• 2nd Place = THRIVE Fruits and Veggies Essential Package ($283 value)
• 3rd Place = Three (3) Cansolidator Pantry systems ($135 value)

Entries can be emailed to contest@shelfreliance.com.  For more information, such as the rules and details, go check out their page.

Also, go ahead and send along your favorite recipe to me, and we’ll post them up on the site here.  Of course, just watch out because I’ve got a few recipes up my sleeve, and I’m gunning for that #1 prize myself :)

One of the best reviews I read was by Cook’s Illustrated based on the number of models, the breadth of tests and overall quality of the written review. My wife swears by their advice and their reviews are generally spot on, so I ended up going with the model they recommended most highly. I’ll freely admit that it didn’t hurt that the oven was similarly priced with its closest competitors but also included two pots, a water pasteurization indicator and a cookbook.

A post reviewing the performance of this model (SOS Sportster Solar Oven) as well as a comparison with the Global Sun Oven is on my list of projects. If all goes well, I will be able to perform those tests this coming Saturday.

So without further ado, Unboxing the Solar Oven Society Sportster Solar Oven:


Here is the box, as I received it.

Opening the box. The oven appears to be shipped securely with foam and cardboard to protect it from a rough journey.

The insulated lid to the oven. It comes with a white protective covering on one side. The other side has a thin polyester film creating a one inch sealed air gap to help insulate the oven.

The oven has a piece of cardboard covering the inside portion of the oven. On this rested the folded reflector panels and some initial instructions for using and setting up the oven.

The oven interior with the carboard removed. No, those aren’t speakers, they are the two pots (with lids) that are included with the oven.

Inside the oven with the pots and cardboard removed. A small SOS product pamphlet was at the bottom.

Cardboard container that held the pots. Under them are some more goodies.

The goodies. Recipe book, instruction manual, oven thermometer, and water pasteurization indicator with instructions.

To completed oven with reflectors.

Solar ovens are a great complement to your preps. Think of them like nature’s slow cooking crock pot. They don’t require that you store any fuel, they don’t create smoke or other dangers and are basically set it and forget it devices. As I mentioned above, I am hoping to cook a dish in my solar oven while concurrently cooking the same dish in my neighbors slightly different Global Solar Oven.