Make Your Own Survival Bread

Have you ever looked at your food storage and thought “I hope I don’t ever have to eat any of this”! I do all the time! The fact is, survival food doesn’t always look good or taste great! Often it’s dehydrated, canned or preserved in some way. What if you could have normal food, like fresh baked bread even when the SHTF? Well if you’ve ever thought like that, then here is something that will fit the bill! It’s an age old recipe that has withstood the test of time, filling bellies and putting smiles on faces for centuries, if not longer.

In an emergency fresh eggs/milk may be hard to come by and you certainly won’t be able to drop by your local market to pick up a loaf of sliced bread! So what do you do? Tuck this away, practice it and use it when/if needed. We have had a lot of requests for recipes like this so I will dig out my Grandmothers old recipe book and see what I can find. If you have any you would like to share, please send them to me via message and I will post them for everyone.

Indian Fry Bread/Navajo Fry Bread

4 cups flour

2 tsp. sugar

1 ½ cups warm water

2 tsp. salt

4 tsp. yeast (some use baking powder instead of yeast)

Vegetable Oil for frying (you can use a small amount or larger amount to deep fry)

1) Mix water, sugar, salt and yeast together – let stand 5 minutes.

2) Add flour and knead until the mixture is smooth.

3) Heat the oil in a fry pan.

4) Form dough into small balls, then flatten into a tortilla shape about ½ inch thick.

5) Fry bread on both sides until golden brown.

Tip – if dough is sticky, use a small amount of flour to coat your hands while handling the dough.

Real Indian fry bread is deep fried in a fair amount of cooking oil, but this is not necessary. You should use the dough immediately without allowing it to rise first. This is not like the traditional bread recipe that is baked into a loaf and rises beforehand.

Enjoy, you now have a recipe for bread, it can be used for sandwiches, eating with meals, with honey, cinnamon, tacos (my favorite – called Navajo Tacos)!

via Survival Bread – So good you’ll want it anytime!

5 Gallon Bucket Storage Tip

Here’s a handy tip when you are stockpiling your survival and prepper supplies, store charcoal in 5 gallon buckets.

1 Bag of Charcoal Briquettes will make it possible for you to cook 1 Meal a Day for a whole month.
5 Gallon Bucket with lid.
(Optional) Add a bottle of starter fluid and some matches/fire starter to each bucket.

It’s a great storage item to have on hand during any crisis. Now you’re ready!

Save And Share This Infographic: What Is The Shelf Life Of Your Food?

Wasted food

According to a survey by the Food Marketing Institute, such confusion leads nine out of 10 Americans to needlessly throw away food. The survey found 90 percent of Americans “at least occasionally throw food away prematurely because they mistakenly interpret the date label to mean their food is unsafe” — and 25 percent say they always discard food on or before that date.

Related: Long Term Food Storage

The researchers blame “a lack of binding federal standards, and the resultant state and local variability in date labeling rules” for the inconsistency in date-labeling practices.”

In 2012, one national study estimated that 40 percent of the country’s food supply goes uneaten. The cost of that wasted food is about $165 billion, including $900 million in “expired” food.

A family of four, the study found, spends an average of $455 a year on food it doesn’t eat. The researchers recommend making “sell by” dates invisible to the consumer, and have the food industry establish a standard, uniform labeling system.

Types of FOOD dating

There are three types of dates on a food that is purchased. If the package says “Sell By,” be sure to purchase the food before the date listed. The “sell by” date tells the grocer how long to display the food. The food should remain good for a period of time once you get it home.

The “Best if Used By” is not a purchase or safety date. The date stamped after that term is the date the food should be used by for best flavor or quality. A “Use-By” date is the last date recommended for peak quality of the product.

All three terms are guides to help a purchaser determine the quality of the food. The food can be safe and of good quality after any of the three above open-dating terms are used.

This Infographic below explains a bit more:

[source]

How To Make A Brick Rocket Stove For $6.08 [video]

If you can stack bricks, you can make an effective biomass rocket stove. The materials are affordable, and readily available. Most important, it is a very simple survival skill to learn.

Someone’s Got To Be The Cook When The SHTF – Why Not You?

Big Baby Double-Barreled Cooker

This design is from the book “Real Barbecue” by Greg Johnson and Vince Staten. Their philosophy with the Big Baby is to take stuff that’s more or less lying around and turn it into a smoker that works on the same principles as the $1,600 models that the pros sell.

The essential function of a top-notch barbecue smoker is to keep the meat entrusted to it comfortably separated from flames and direct heat and yet in the path of the hot air and smoke that give it its flavor. Big Baby does this by burning a hardwood fire in her bottom barrel and using the top barrel to contain the meat and direct the smoke. The top barrel also serves as a big, self-contained drip pan that catches meat juices. And the vents and dampers located all along the air path mean that the fire can be precisely controlled, keeping it from dying or flaring up.

Besides two 55-gallon drums, the “trick” to the smoker is in making use of wood-stove kits designed to convert such drums into cheap stoves for heating storage sheds and such. The kits come with a cast-iron door, cast-iron legs on which to mount the smoker, cast-iron supports to connect the bottom drum to the one above it, plus flues to connect the two drums. From a hardware store or wood-stove shop, you toss in some dampers and a couple of neat little smokestacks for each end to let the smoke escape from the top drum.

Building Big Baby

Before you get started, make sure you have the stuff you’ll need.

The drums you should be able to find for about ten or twenty dollars; the stove kits (it takes two) are available at hardware and wood-stove stores or by mail order from Northern Hydraulics, 801 E. Cliff Rd., P.O. Box 1219, Burnsville, ME 55337, for less than forty or fifty dollars.

The two twenty-two-by-fifteen-inch grill surfaces can be had at a barbecue supply house for twenty-five dollars or so.

Add some bolts, brackets, hinges, smokestacks, fire bricks, paint and such, and you’re up to a total expense of about a hundred and fifty dollars, more than the price of a simple covered grill but considerably less than the cost of a B1 bomber, which, by the way, does a simply horrible job on a rack of ribs.

The steps are simple: Paint the barrels first, then start cutting them with your saber saw. Use a fresh metal-cutting blade (ask the guy at the hardware store or tool rental place for one), and prepare yourself for a violently annoying noise roughly akin to five hundred colicky babies with the croup. Cutting through a hollow drum with a buzzing saber saw makes enough racket that you may want to consider earplugs. Or suicide. But persevere, and cut a hole for the fire door at one end of the bottom barrel and matching holes in both barrels for the flues that connect them. Cut the top barrel in half horizontally, setting the top half aside. Then do your drilling and mounting and bolting, referring to the directions in the wood-stove kit whenever appropriate. Basically, you want to mount the bottom barrel on its legs (and we recommend connecting these to a couple of two-by-fours for a sturdier base), and then mount the fire door to it, followed by the connecting supports and the two flues (remember to insert the dampers before you bolt on the top barrel). Then you add the top barrel, bolting together the supports and flues between the two. At this point, lay the top half of the top barrel in place and mark holes for the hinges and handles. After the lid is in place, you can drill holes and bolt in place a small chain to keep the lid from falling over backwards. About now you can use the saber saw one last time to cut holes in either end of the bottom half of the top barrel and mount the two smokestacks (again, don’t forget those dampers). Drill a hole for your thermometer (an inexpensive dial-type candy thermometer works fine, and even includes a clip that will hold it in place). Line the bottom of the bottom barrel with fire bricks, which keep it from burning through. Then drill and mount the brackets that support the grill surfaces, slap those puppies in place, and call one of those fellows who delivers wood. You’re ready to barbecue!

It’s best to operate this smoker over a nonflammable surface, from something as basic as packed dirt to concrete. The Babe sits a bit low to the ground, and her firebox gets more than a mite hot, so she will send any grass in the area to Turf Heaven almost immediately. For a neater look, you could put down gravel and even border the area with bricks.

Cooking With Big Baby

Big Baby is designed to burn real wood, not charcoal. She’ll be happy with just about any hardwood – hickory, oak, mesquite, whatever – but stay away from soft stuff like pine. Build a good-sized fire in the bottom barrel and let it go for a while, maybe an hour or more, until it has formed a healthy pile of hot coals. Avoid cooking over a “fresh” fire, since such fires send up a lot of soot and creosote like goo. Go for a hot bed of coals onto which you can toss the occasional log, keeping the temperature as even as possible. Barbecue is not set-it-and-forget-it food; cooking it requires almost constant tinkering and tending to keep the heat even over a period of hours. But with a big base of coals for consistency and the proper combination of damper settings for the wind and outdoor temperature, the Babe will chug along at a constant heat for an hour at a time, certainly time enough to go out for more beer or cassette tapes.

There will be very little in the way of barbecue that Big Baby can’t handle, from a suckling pig to three twelve-quart stockpots of smoky chili. But she’s more than a simple smoker.Big Baby is a sculpture in basic black, a life-style statement, a conversation piece, a badge of honor, and a joy forever. And on a hot summer day, even when you’re not cooking anything, it still smells like barbecue.

Where To Get The Parts

Parts for the Big Baby are available from Vogelzang International Corp. In Holland, MI.

Here are some pictures of a Big Baby smoker built by Stuart MacMillan of Seattle, WA using parts from Vogelzang. He reports that it took him about 12 hours and $275 to construct the smoker. He also reports that it works great.