Stocking up on tinned stuff?

[kenneal - lagger]

We have a large store of home made jams and pickles and also jarred tomato pulp and ratatouille. some of our jams are quite a few years old ass well.

We have a few cans, not many as we have a lot of stuff in freezers, but we also have salt and olive oil. We keep a store of butter as well, although not as much as I would like.

We've got about 60ltr of Lidl orange juice on the same basis. I also happen to like it.

We've got our spuds in trays in our cold cellar and most have started sprouting. I'll have to splash out on some bags for next year and see if that makes a difference. The only light they get is when we go into our store room for something and turn the 11W CF light on.

Seeing the BBC program on spices, I will have to make sure my good lady has a good store of those. She usually buys large containers of certain spices which she uses for catering.

[vtsnowedin]

No ones mentioned homemade jams pickles & chutney?
Im still eating damson jelly from 2004 vintage.
I don't have any tins stocked piled though mostly fruit & veg stuff in a chest freezer no good if the power goes down.
Do have 4 full sacks of spuds left though enough to last till the next crop i hopefully if they don't all sprout.

Have enough apple juice to last many months coz lidl was doing a 1/2 price deal so bought 10 crates.
180 of litres apple juice in think should last ages!

Jams and pickles are a nice addition to your stock but are not the basis for a balanced diet.
I have a freezer full also and find it quite useful year in and year out but I do not count on it if things get really bad. Too many countries when crisis have struck have lost all their electric grid for years at a time. You need some amount of secure food on hand at all times. The amount set by how long you think it will take to get resupplied either by growing your own or a restart of the distribution system. That food needs to be in a stable long term storage that keeps it edible for as long as necessary. Rice in glass jars, wheat flour in air tight and mouse proof containers etc. You can make a start at this with just one five gallon plastic bucket with a snap tight lid. If you think about it you can put enough food in the one pail to last you and yours a week or more. For real emergency rations forget about taste and variety, just concentrate on calorie count and durability. With a belly full of bland rice you can go forth and seek out other more palatable foods. Hopefully none of us here on this board will ever have to live on just what they have stored but it does no harm to have three weeks to a year of food that has an adequate shelf life on hand and will serve as well as a comparable amount of money in the bank.

[DominicJ]

FC
I had rather a few unexpected bills over winter, gas and electric were 5x the previous quarter, roof needed quite a bit of repair, other halfs car needed a new exhaust and a bag of other bits, mine needed quite a bit of work, and we'd blown our cash reserve on new flooring downstairs.

Had I not been able to nail the food bill to the floor, we'd have been in serious trouble.

Not a doomer, but I'm glad I doomed up a little bit...

[DominicJ]

Seeing the BBC program on spices, I will have to make sure my good lady has a good store of those. She usually buys large containers of certain spices which she uses for catering.

I have a pretty decent indian supermarket nearby, we store spices in those plastic tubs you get rice crispy cakes or flapjacks in from the supermarket.
Well, similar ones, other halfs dad works at a food factory, and nabs us the rejected ones for whatever they use them for.

For real emergency rations forget about taste and variety, just concentrate on calorie count and durability. With a belly full of bland rice you can go forth and seek out other more palatable foods.

For a few days, perhaps, but your body will reject the same food if eaten for long periods of time.
Your also likely to reject new foods as well.
Storing flour only makes sense if you already make your own bread.

For the cost iof it, its madness to not store a few 1kg bags of different curry powders and spices.

[vtsnowedin]

For real emergency rations forget about taste and variety, just concentrate on calorie count and durability. With a belly full of bland rice you can go forth and seek out other more palatable foods.

For a few days, perhaps, but your body will reject the same food if eaten for long periods of time.
Your also likely to reject new foods as well.
Storing flour only makes sense if you already make your own bread.

For the cost iof it, its madness to not store a few 1kg bags of different curry powders and spices.

I was considering a true survival situation where taste is not an object and you just have to suck it up and deal with it. Also I was still on the limited space to store emergency rations as was put forth up thread. If you only have a couple of cubic feet of storage space I would use that space for core calories and keep the rest of the kitchen well stocked with spices, baking powder and yeast and salt.
If more space is available then of course store a shopping list of food that provides a balanced diet with plenty of spices. There are several good lists of suggested inventory out there, one I saw recently had a years food for one person at a cost of $1300 USD
The simplest thing is to get away from shopping every day and having no food on hand other then what you plan to consume today. There should always be something on the back shelf that will make a meal or two in case you can't get out or the stores are closed. Having worked for years on a biweekly pay schedule I'm used to buying at least two weeks worth of food at a time and the normal storage space holds a months worth but I'm in a house I built to my own requirements and have the space.
As to the flour point. My wife and I both know how to cook so flour is the basis of not only breads but biscuits, dumplings, cakes, pasta etc. and a thickening agent for gravies. I keep a five gallon pail full in the storage and have five to ten pounds in the kitchen in the canisters. I also keep pasta in storage to save the bother of making it from flour.
If you don't cook for yourself much your storage preferences would of course be different but if you are ever in a snowed in situation you will have the time to read a cook book and try something new. The smell of baking bread or cookies brings a feeling of "all is well" no matter how hard and cold the storm is blowing outside.

[postie]

Something I've been meaning to add to this, but have so far forgotten to do so is ... Polish food.



I know, it's a weird one, but in a lot of UK supermarkets now you'll find a small shelf of Polish foods for those who're living here from Poland. There are things such as spam/chopped ham in tins that are about half the price of the English equivalent. The best thing we've found is tinned pate. The tins are kinda small, but weight for weight on similar produce they're also about 50% cheaper. We did buy some for the store but only about half of them made it there as they were very nice indeed on toast.

I can't be totally sure, but I think Polish shops would be cheaper still than supermarkets. ( and as an aside, not really a storage for TSHTF event... Polish beer/lager in Polish shops normally sells for about £1 a large can... and if you like lager type beers, then you can get pissed quite cheaply as they're all at 5% or above strength )

[DominicJ]

Postie
I traded down to ASDA Smartprice
Nice enough chilled, a little under £3 for 12 cans, and only 2%, so I can drink it like pop and wake up fresh as a daisey

[sam_uk]

As I was cooking my dinner last night it occurred to me I could make it entirely out of tinned and long term storage ingredients.

I had roast potatoes and a tomato and butter bean sauce.

1) Start roasting the (tinned) potatoes

2) Fry the (tinned) onions with some garlic from a tube in plenty of olive oil.

3) Add a tin of chopped tomatoes to the onions and garlic. Simmer

4) Add the butter beans to the tomato sauce.

5) Serve

Does anyone else have any recipes based on tinned ingredients?

[lancasterlad]

Postie
I traded down to ASDA Smartprice
Nice enough chilled, a little under £3 for 12 cans, and only 2%, so I can drink it like pop and wake up fresh as a daisey

Try brewing your own from a kit - 40 pints of a Becks type lager for less than £20 (once you have all the equipment) - 50p a pint and far nicer than ASDA Smartprice.

[DominicJ]

I was looking into before christmass, but never took the plunge.
You can brew spirits as well, up to about 20%.

I was looking at the beer starter kits on a few websites, but its not really clear whether any of the kit is any good, and if its everything you need.
Should be clearing the office in a couple of weeks, might see if I can appropriate a corner

[kenneal - lagger]

You can brew spirits as well, up to about 20%.

You can brew a wine type drink of between 16% and 20% if you're lucky and have the specific yeast, but spirits can only be distilled.

[DominicJ]

There are kits out there that create a Bacardi/Whiskey/Brandy/Giun flavoured beveridge of about 20% alcohol content.
I posted them last time this came up.

http://www.brew-it-yourself.co.uk/shop/ ... 3cb101e175

[adam2]

You can brew spirits as well, up to about 20%.

You can brew a wine type drink of between 16% and 20% if you're lucky and have the specific yeast, but spirits can only be distilled.

Yes.
Traditionly the limit of brewed or fermented drink was about 15% alcohol, beyond that the alcohol killed the yeast and stopped the drink getting any stronger.
Recently improved strains of yeast have become available that can survive in alcohol up to about 20% by volume.
It should be noted that fermenting to that level of alcohol is a slow and painstaking process, unlike brewing up to about 10% which is quick and simple.
Fermented drinks are available that allegedly taste like spirits.

True spirits can only be produced by distillation.

Brewing or fermenting of wine, beer, cider and similar drink is permitted in the UK for ones own use or to give as a gift.
Selling it is a serious offence.

Distilling spirits is illegal, even for ones own use.
Apart from the law, it is potentialy dangerous.
The true doomer keeps a large supply of copper pipe and other parts, perfectly legally, but does not even think about assembling these into a still.

[kenneal - lagger]

It's best to use a copper HW cylinder as these have all the coils you need in a cold water bath. You can't be prosecuted to owning a HW cylinder but you could if you had loads of copper coil.

A true spirit drink will be over 35% alcohol and even a Vermouth, port or sherry will be about 25%

[kenneal - lagger]

Recently improved strains of yeast have become available that can survive in alcohol up to about 20% by volume.

The new strains of yeast are a bit like us really. We have become more adept at polluting our environment as we have evolved.