Survive part 2

 I have been cleaning up the garden and setting it up for next year with shade cloths in mind. So changing from short east-west beds back to long north south ones, a smaller garden in the same footprint with generous path widths, grow a little less food but hopefully we'll be able to water it better.

 Now back to our thought experiment. You're still very poor, getting by on rice and greens, with some fruit and maybe mushrooms, but winter has come and you're becoming interested in varying your diet a bit.

It's time to crawl the Web and the thrifts and see about finding a hand cranked grinder. Something like an old Universal might do, but I'd hold out for the Corona (sorry about that name!) grain mill.

These things usually come with a large hopper but you don't really need that. Affix it to a good working surface (screws will help), put a lid on it to keep dust out when it's not in use, and find a large dish to catch your makings.

We're not out to make fine flour here, though you can if you grind twice and then sift. We're making cracked grains to speed cooking and save on fuel, be it electricity, gas, or wood.

I use this to grind wheat, spelt, rye, barley, millet, quinoa, amaranth, oats, corn, buckwheat, sorghum, teff, wild rice, and brown or white rice as they come to hand. I may add dried vegetable powder flakes, sunflower or sesame seeds, brewer's yeast or the like, and perhaps some lentils. The idea is that if a) the ingredient will go through the grinder well enough and b) is sufficiently appetizing (never the first consideration where survival is concerned), mix as you go --pour a little of this in, and then a little of that. 

If you fill the machine's chamber to the rim, you will find it supplies you, in about thirty turns of the crank, with a single serving of fairly quick-cooking porridge. Pour from the receptacle dish to your pot, bowl or cooker bowl, add powdered milk or salt or fresh or dried fruit or whatever as desired, add water, and either let soak for awhile or take it straight to the heat. I find that three minutes in a microwave does it for me, or five minutes on "steam" in the rice cooker, or just a short while in the Dutch oven (shown here making bread) on top of the wood heat stove.

If the granularity is fine enough, and it helps to have eggs and baking powder or yeast and sugar (or honey) for this, you can make pan bread or pancakes with this. I usually just have it with a spoon. I'm well enough off nowadays that I can add butter, but, seriously -- as most of these ingredients store well without refrigeration, you could keep a grinder and some loaded one gallon food buckets in a rudimentary shelter and get by.

For best results in such a case, find a steel bucket or large can and make a simple rocket stove (we have done this, but currently have a manufactured one we bought for under $50), or build a fire ring, set up a tripod, and hang a pot from a chain over the flames. 

You can cook whole grains in a saucepan over an open fire, but you may find you are spending more time gathering wood than you were prepared for; so this is a way to save your energy. You may want to economize as well if you are using camp stoves that run on fuels such as propane.

In cold weather when a fire is desirable, don't fret if there's no coffee or tea; you can make a greens tea as I have mentioned before or just drink hot water. As a bonus, ground grains will cook up even faster if you use some of your boiling water to start the cooking; or you can even just add boiling water to your other ingredients in a pot or bowl, cover it with some insulating material such as coats and towels (or make a hay cooker), set it aside for a bit, and it will cook up nicely unattended.

We used to "go camping;" a fine way to cosplay being homeless (BTDT); we have always prepared our barley/oats/millet/dried apples porridge in advance and stored it in the vehicle or tent in a tight container and it makes for us a hot meal that seems to have more staying power than just oats alone, or any processed breakfast cereal or even granola. It's good to have such a thing to fall back on if one's circumstances suddenly dictate making do instead of checking out the restaurants and quick-stop markets.

 

 

::: 

"[Grains] have sustained human life since the Old Stone Age became the New Stone Age. They are the foundation of your diet, the staff of your life, the contents of your food storage system that guards you from disaster." -- Carla Emery

Survive

 So, this is not one of my photos; I grabbed it off a bulletin board where the rice cooker shown, an oldie, is being offered for $15. You may also find these at thrifts, along with other necessaries.

Let's do a thought experiment.

You've gone through some things. Now you occupy a small room, and you've run out of unemployment. You're getting by, throwing bundles of advertiser papers out of the back of a van in the wee hours (I've done that), or doing setup for conventions (that too). It's enough for rent but not groceries and certainly not enough for the neighborhood restaurant. You're shy about panhandling.

But you saw this coming. So you bought a used rice cooker with steam basket, a couple of small bowls and a steak knife and spoon (consider chopsticks), and a fifty pound bag of rice and some salt while you could. 

Maybe oatmeal, potatoes, beans (or lentils!). Now, that's foresight. But this will be about the rice.

Since you don't really have access to the kitchen, you scrounge some two-liter bottles, fill them with water at the bathroom sink, and make rice. To save on trying to scrub rice glue off your cooker liner (which often has a nasty teflon coating, easily introduced into the food) put water into the liner, water and rice in your bowl, and just lift the bowl out after cooking. I use a pair of pliers to grab a hot bowl in such a tight place. 

Maybe there are more than one of you, in which case, scale up.

Okay, that bowl of rice by itself, with maybe a Mason jar of tap water for beverage, is a little stark, I agree. You maybe can't go forever on that.

What now?

You head for the yard, an alley, a park, a vacant lot, maybe the weed pile at the local organic community gardens (see if you can volunteer there; that would help a lot). Much of what is tossed by such gardens can be utilized, such as the big side leaves of cabbage or kale, squash leaves, and bean and pea foliage.

Look for (in season -- and seasons can be longer than you think):

Dandelions

Cat's ears (false dandelion)

Purslane

Nipplewort

Sheep sorrel

Deadnettles

Curly dock

Wild garlic (we call this "wild chives," which it's not, but looks like it).

Wood sorrel

Wild lettuce

Chickweed

Money plant

Lamb's quarters (most nutritious)

Plantain

Mulberry leaves

Garlic mustard

Wild geraniums

Violets

Red clover

Maple flowers (Bigleaf maple -- that has a narrow window of opportunity here)

Fuchsia blossoms

Linden leaves

Etc.

You may find blackberries, and one or more abandoned plum, pear, apple, Asian pear, fig, or other trees. 

 Also keep an eye out for things like sage, rosemary, thyme, wild fennel.

This list is for what you might find around my nearby urban area (I am rural for reasons). Adjust for your location.

Learn from someone experienced or study some of the better websites -- there are many.

We won't talk about mushrooms here, due to the risks of misidentification, but you may eventually branch out into things like meadow mushrooms or puffballs, which are relatively easy to find, identify, cut up, dry and store.

If you are able to score real vegs from your community garden volunteer work, you're sitting pretty. But the edible weeds and surplus fruits can take you a long way.

Now: put a couple of cups of water in your cooker liner, cut up some greens (and maybe fruit if any), put them in your steam basket, hit the "steam" button on your old cooker, wait awhile (you need not wait till the red light says it's done), open the cooker, add your cooked greens to the rice, and season to taste as able. Pour the excess water from the cooker liner into your other bowl, or cup, glass, tumbler, small Mason jar, whatever you have scrounged). 

You could do this simultaneously with the rice making, but I'm agin' it. The greens will overcook, and you will want your "used" steam water.

The rice bowl has your dinner waiting for you. The hot greenish veggie water in the other bowl is your tea.

If you want to get fancy and have the means, procure a small coffee maker. Do the greens in the coffee filter basket (no need for filters) at the same time as you make the rice. Move the cooked greens from the filter basket to the rice, then pour your "tea" (It's a tisane) from the carafe. Or make a tisane from the herbs you gathered and dried.

This routine will prevent some aspects of starvation and malnutrition for months, if necessary, while you are looking for a new source or sources for stable and sufficient income.

I know it worked for me. Good luck.

Survive.

:::

I'm nothing but patched rags -- I get it.
Food is so hard to come by in these times,
And weeds have hidden my house.
So? I watch the cold moon
And speak poems into the night. -- Ryokan

 

Some days

I mentioned there are quinces this year. 

We have five young trees, interspersed among the apple, cherry, fig, peach, pear, mulberry and plum trees. Like the peaches, they're vulnerable to a serious freeze. Decades ago there were a number of quince orchards in our area, and a freeze came along and shut them down. 

Taken in a heavy downpour

 Many trees currently producing, such as ours, were cut from rooted suckers around the stumps of dead orchard trees and passed from hand to hand till they found a home. Ours are third generation, a gift from a friend.

Picked a little too green but they did okay

So, we've had maybe our second good crop, four flats full. I have off and on looked at the recipes for the use of these rather imposing, hard, fuzzy yet intriguingly pineapple-y fruits, and there seems to be a consensus that they are worth making a jam of, called membrillo, but that peeling them is a bit dangerous. Too slick. Knives skip all over. Some have had luck baking them for 20 minutes and then peeling them. I tried that and was not all that pleased with it.

Happily, I've discovered the apple peeler/corer/slicer will handle them -- best after they do indeed turn yellow. You'll need the patience to wait for the ripening turn, and the attentiveness to get to them then in the narrow window before rot starts. Also, the current manufacturers of peeler/corer/slicers seem to insist on offering mainly the suction-cup variety. I'd hold out for one with a clamp base, especially if you're going to try quince on it.

 This is an older photo, and shows an apple being peeled, sliced and cored. Nowadays the little machine lives in the potting shed and is not only clamped in place but screws help it to stay put.

If your quince is too green you will feel a graininess as you turn the handle. The yellow ones will give you less resistance, though they are more work than apples. Also, seeds radiate farther from the center of the core than with apples and escapees should be found and picked out.

I quarter the spirals on the chopping block and load them into the slow cooker, perhaps with some apples if there are not enough quince ripe at the time. Depending on your preferences and health concerns, you may add a little salt, say a quarter cup of sugar, some ginger, and a capful or more of lime or lemon juice.

 Cook on high until the result pleases you. My cooker makes a chunky quince butter in about three hours, which is what I want, so I've never made it all the way to a membrillo. Load into jars and water bath can.

I love this stuff -- not everyone will. Try it with yogurt, or oatmeal, on pancakes, as an alternative pb&j, or as a substitute for apple in apple cake recipes.

My discovery that my slicer can handle quinces certainly made my day. About as much as one can hope for, some days.

:::

Should I try to grow all the food my family and I require? If I tried to do so, I probably could do little else. And what about all the other things we need? Should I try to become a Jack of all trades? At most of these trades I would be pretty incompetent and horribly inefficient. But to grow or make some things by myself, for myself: what fun, what exhilaration, what liberation from any feelings of utter dependence on organizations! What is perhaps even more: what an education of the real person! To be in touch with actual processes of creation.-- E.F. Schumacher

 

Eyes on the tomatoes

In November I, like a true enough Bear, retire to my lounge chair and sleep, a bit fitfully, until March. I suspect the politicians know this, and steal past me as I drowse, on the first Tuesday of the harvest home, to wreak their horrors. 

The kale and chard have settled in to await their first real frost and regain a measure of edibility. They're all right as they are, though.

There are yet more than a thousand apples still in the trees. They're no longer prime, except for the Granny Smiths, but I've done all I can for them. I mostly halve the drops for the hens, and can expect to do this right into the holidays.

 
 I plan to make a tomato sandwich with the last fresh tomatoes. The Rutgers have gone the way of all flesh, but the Romas often survive quite a long while, even lying on the ground, so I have picked up some of the relicts and am en route to the kitchen. 

The little basket on the chain above the stove is drying mushrooms. It's not nearly as close to the chimney as it may appear. Eyes on the tomatoes, 'kay?

:::

Even when you are making a broth of coarse greens, do not arouse an attitude of distaste or dismissal. Even when you are making a high-quality cream soup, do not arouse an attitude of rapture or dancing for joy. If you already have no attachments, how could you have any disgust? Therefore, although you may encounter inferior ingredients, do not be at all negligent; although you may come across delicacies, be all the more diligent. Never alter your state of mind based on materials. People who change their mind according to ingredients, or adjust their speech to the status of whomever they are talking to, are not people of the Way. -- Dogen

 

Politicians take note.