Tag: prepping

Let’s Make Brown Sugar

by Diane, posted in Recipe

One way I save money is I buy raw ingredients. It takes a little time to turn these raw ingredients into another product, but it’s worth it to save money and to know exactly what is in my food.

Brown sugar costs about twice as much as white sugar. I often get a 2 kg bag of white sugar on sale for $1.99, but I think the regular price is $2.99. One kg of brown sugar is $2.49. A 1.35 kg container of molasses is about $3.00 (that’s a lot of tablespoons).

If I make brown sugar instead of buying it, I’m saving money. And it’s simple. Fast. And is done to my taste, not the company’s. I don’t even need special equipment to do it. Just my regular mixer I’ve had since December 1996.

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Sunroots: a sustainable source of food for homesteaders

by Diane, posted in garden, Natural Selection

In my gardening journey, I seek plants that grow well in my climate. If they are perennial – come back every year – it’s an added bonus. If I can eat it, it’s a staple.

Sunroot is both perennial and edible. They’ve been eaten by humans for centuries, yet I didn’t grow up eating them or growing them in the garden. I don’t know anyone who grew them. Once a staple in the homesteader garden, the sunroot has been replaced with more fashionable edible perennials such as rhubarb and asparagus.

When I tried to find a source for the tubers, I failed. My sister and her son joined the hunt. After two years, my nephew stumbled upon an old rural garden outlet that had sunroots growing in its field. They didn’t sell it but remembered it was growing there. They dug up a few tubers, and I was the lucky recipient of three small pieces.

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Calculating Long-term Food Storage

by Diane, posted in garden, Non-fiction

In the past several years, I’ve heard a lot about preppers, and I’ve watched many videos on how they prepare. One topic of discussion that comes up regularly is long-term food storage. This food is intended to sustain individuals in the household for x-amount of time. Some keep a month’s supply of food on hand while others keep a year or two stashed in their pantry.

What continues to amuse me is up until about sixty years ago, having a storage of food in the pantry was common practice. Perhaps people living in cities were less inclined to keep a month’s worth of food on hand, but those living in the country dedicated space, time, money and energy to having a well-stocked pantry for the brutal winter months.

In today’s climate, my family would have been considered preppers because our freezer was full of deer meat, rabbit meat, fish and various items bought from the grocery store. By the end of October, shelves in the cold room were stocked with preserves my mother had done down: chow, pickles, cranberry jam, blueberry jam and a host of other foods picked from the garden or gathered from the forest that surrounded our neighbourhood.

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