September 10, 2025 • 31 mins
The playlist linked below is a collaborative playlist produced by multiple prepper channels on YouTube. There is some really good information in these videos.
30 Days of Preparedness
30 Days of Preparedness
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning. This is Emma. And unless the world has
come to an end, I'm a little confused. That's why
I'm sitting at the end of my driveway and there
is nobody here but me. But here comes a couple
of cars. So the world is still here, though, just
slow getting to this part of it this early in
the morning apparently, and I'm not running early by any chance,
(00:23):
by any stretch of the imagination. So today is the
tenth and according to my vehicle, it's fifty nine. So
we've had three days in a row where the low
temperature in the morning has been in the fifties. Where
we're gonna take that gift and run with it. Now,
I would say we could use some rain. It doesn't
(00:44):
look like we're gonna get any for a while. So anyway,
we're gonna talk about today. Well, I think I've mentioned
this before. This week this is the or last week.
This is the national month of Preparedness in America. I
(01:04):
noticed I have some folks that listen to this podcast
in Australia and the UK, which I appreciate that, thank y'all.
But in America this is the national month of Preparedness.
I think part of that has to do with it's
also the busiest month for hurricanes. Now we're not we
(01:26):
don't seem to have much going on in the way
of hurricanes at this point, which is not a bad thing,
because okay, this is a tent so it must have been.
Monday the eighth was the one hundred and twenty fifth
anniversary of the hurricane that hit Galveston, and as best
(01:49):
as can be figured, between eight thousand and ten thousand
people died in that hurricane. Because of course, it wasn't
like hurricane preparedness now, because they it was, there wasn't
a whole lot of notice, and even the folks who
(02:12):
were supposed to do that. There was a meteorologist on,
you know, such as he was at that point in
nineteen hundred at Galveston, and he they apparently knew a
storm was coming, but they seriously underestimated the size of
it and the strength of the wind and whatever. But
(02:37):
you know, giving him a little bit of benefit of
the doubt. First of all, he didn't have Dobbler radar,
and secondly, he they could only depend on hearing from
ships that were out in the ocean. And it is
very it's not unusual for a hurricane to strengthen very
(03:00):
quickly in a very short period of time. I think
that's what Hurricane Aaron did this year. Except the saving
grace was it didn't actually hit make landfall. It kind
of spun off the coast for a little while and
then went back out the sea. And so you know,
even though there was some effect from Hurricane Aaron, it
(03:22):
wasn't like this one where Galveston took a direct hit.
And Galveston being an island, you know, pretty close to
sea level, and so it was a horrific event. And
so you know, that's part of hurricane season here in America.
One of the reasons I don't ever want to live
(03:43):
on the coast for real. There's lots of reasons I
wouldn't want to live on the coast, but that's one
of them. Anyway. So this is National Preparedness Month, and
because of that, there is on YouTube a group of
channels that have all partnered together to do what's called
a collaborative where somebody one of this group does a
(04:05):
video every day, And so I would suggest I'll put
a link to it in the descriptions so that you
can go back and see it. Some are more helpful
than others. Kind of depends on your situation. But one
of them I wanted to highlight today, and that was
the one by the Needy Homesteader. And that's needy like
(04:31):
you're kneading bread. So it's k n e a d.
She has her own channel, all these people do, and
she the title of her video is uh, perfection is
the enemy of done. And I've heard that said in
(04:55):
various and sundry ways before. Excuse me. One time I
took an online preemotion quilting class, and one of the
things that the teacher for that class emphasized over and
over again, and this is true for those of us
who like to do needlework and crafts and that kind
of stuff, is sometimes we get so caught up in
(05:17):
the perfection of the piece we don't ever get it done.
And so then we have a bunch of things sitting
around that we didn't get finished, as we call works
in progress or w ips. Anyway, So she, in this case,
the needy Homesteader is talking about her pantry and so
(05:38):
but and oh, back to the quilting lady. She always
said perfection beats no. She said, done is more important
than perfection. Or done beats perfection. And that is very
much the case now when you're talking about a pantry.
It's not ever done. But whether or not you have
(06:01):
a pantry done or at least working, it's more important
that it worked for you than that it be perfect. Okay,
you see all these things on Facebook and blocks and
TikTok and YouTube, and you know, these people will do
(06:22):
a pantry tour and they'll show you everything's color coded
and stacked neatly and in baskets, and I mean, it
looks very pretty, whether or not it's useful. As a
whole nother story for those of us in an old house,
there is no such thing as a pantry. I think
(06:42):
the room or the area that I'm using as a
laundry room would have been originally the pantry. And the
reason I say that is because one time I went
in an old house that was not too far down
the road from me. It's gone now, but it was
abandoned at the time. It was open and so we just,
you know, some of us were there and that and
(07:03):
just kind of walked around through it and looked at
the inside. It was comparable in age to my house,
and it, you know, built in many ways the same way,
uh or the same basic structure. And on the left
hand side of the house it had the living room
and it had the dining room, and then it had
the kitchen, and the kitchen had this little room at
(07:30):
the back of it that was in and see this
would have not been you know, they didn't have a
door there and all that kind of stuff, but there
was this little room behind the kitchen, and that was
the pantry. You could tell it was a petry because
this being an old house that really hadn't been changed
and and you know, things rearranged or whatever. It had shelves,
(07:55):
and I thought, oh, that's the And then once I
bought my house it I couldn't figure out what this
little area was for a while because the church that
owned my house had actually cut through it and made
a pass through to the back porch because that's it
was the closest door to the church. And so they
(08:15):
they put a door because I could tell because it
was a cheap door, and then they cut an opening
in the other wall so that they could go through
this room onto the back porch, and it was the
closest way to get in and out. So that worked
for the church. But I never could figure out what
this was because it was this little it it they
(08:36):
had made the remainder of it when they cut it through.
They'd put a little false while their little new wall there,
and a and a little door. But it was a
closet with a window in it. And that didn't make
any sense at all. Now I've got the e gubs.
Let me see if I get rid of them. So
(08:59):
I was. I lived in this house probably at least
a year, if not longer than that, before I put
two and two together and figured out that there was
a pantry, but I needed a laundry room at that point.
So because the laundry facilities at that point were on
(09:22):
the back porch, which was not inside that heated in
cool space, and it was a little chilly and what
at different times of the year. Okay, truck, I'm still
trying to get rid of that. He give us all right,
So back to pastries. So I don't actually have a pantry.
(09:45):
And that was one reason why I appreciated her video,
because she talks about how you, you know, may do
with what you've got, just make sure that you have
some sort of pantry. Now she goes into and I
had heard her talk about her story before she was
she's a widow. She was married and uh, you know,
(10:08):
they had children and at one point, this has been
several years ago, evidently they were involved in a really
horrific car wreck with a drunk driver and it killed
her husband. It almost killed her and her children, who
obviously in vac seat, were seriously injured. So, you know,
she lost her husband. She did live, but she had
(10:30):
lots of injuries she had to get over. I think
she had a lot of facial injuries and like you know,
like had to have tee three done, dental surgery, and
I mean all kinds of stuff, uh that she and
I think it has. You know, obviously there's some of
(10:51):
it she hasn't gotten over, but uh, it took a
long time to get to where she is now. And then,
as she said, you know, she was loved with two
kids to raise, and her husband was the primary you know,
he was the breadwinner. He he was the one their
insurance was on, you know, they had And so she
talks about prepping for the I don't know how she
(11:15):
worded it, something that you couldn't have prepped for, Okay,
that you just have to deal with when it happens.
And that's a lot of things in life. And I've
had some of those myself, not to the point that
she did, but I have lost family members that made
a profound effect on things. When my father died in
(11:39):
an accident, obviously we were not involved in the accident,
but you know, that cut my mother's income. We had
a when he passed away, he had a pasture full
of cows. I think he had about eighty eight head.
At that point. We were in the drought of the century.
You know, we had to make sure we were able
(12:02):
to have enough grass for those cows. We had to
sell them. It was a terrible time to sell cows
because you were literally lined up at the at the
sail barn to sell them. They were stacked up at
the sail barn because they couldn't because they were stacked
up at the packing houses. I mean, it was it
(12:23):
was a horrible time, and it's not something we could
have prepared for. I mean, as far as knowing that
that was gonna happen. I mean, you can have certain
things in place and and be prepared for things in general,
but that's not something you think is gonna happen at
some point, now can But you know, I understood what
she was talking about at this point, although obviously her
(12:46):
situation was way worse than mine. Anyway, So back to
her pantry where she says that perfection is the enemy
of done, is that she first of all, she talks
about the fact that her pantry was built around what
(13:07):
she used to cook, and she cooked from scratch all
the time, so she had like ingredients to cook from scratch.
But the problem was when she was incapacitated and nobody
you know, she could not personally cook, but there were
other people in her house cooking in her place. Then
those people didn't always know how to cook from scratch,
(13:27):
so they didn't really know what to do with the
stuff in her pantry. And so one of the things
she has done since then, it is made is is
made sure that she had some like ready to cook things,
things that were you know, that instead of making macaroni
and cheese from scratch, she might have some boxes of
craft Okay, that makes sense, And so I think that's
(13:51):
a good idea that you have to make sure that
you Jesus not good today, that you have like a
variety of things. One of the things that I hear
about people doing. I don't know that I know anybody
(14:11):
that's done this, but if they had them, they might
not have said anything about it. So that's okay. You
see all these advertisements for these buckets of freeze dried food,
and I have to say that when I started prepping,
that's not something I ever thought we would want. First
of all, as people as as people who have reviewed
(14:34):
those will say, you know, there's really not that much
stuff in them, and you've paid a lot of money.
And that's a good point. There's lots of other ways
to get food that is long term, and like some
food's going to be long term and some food's not.
And in some cases you can store ingredients that you
couldn't that you might and the ingredient, the ingredients are
(14:56):
shelf stable, but maybe the actual food it's self when
you put the ingredients together, is not a shelf stable
for a long time. But you can store the ingredients.
So there's that one thing, for example, and I'm gonna
try I haven't tried this yet, and I'm gonna do
(15:17):
I may do it with like a couple of eggs
and see how it turns out. You know, people have
the freeze dried eggs and all that kind of stuff.
I don't know that I'm really interested in that either.
But you're supposed to be able to scramble an egg
and freeze it like in an ice cube tray, and
(15:38):
then you thaw it out and it'll cook just like
a scrambled egg. And normally what we would do with eggs. Now,
we do eat some eggs, like for breakfast or whatever,
but normally what we do is we use eggs in cooking.
And one of the non shelf stable things that comes
to mind is may days, you can make your own mayonnaise.
(16:01):
Mayonnaise is not shelf stable for a long time. It does.
It only has like a couple of months, and so
it's not something that you can put in your pantry
and just forget that it's there. It's not like canned
peas or something. But you can make mayonnaise very easily
if you have the ingredients. You just have to have
(16:22):
some kind of oil. I have. I'm storing olive oil
mostly because though that is a you know, a better
oil than some stuff. But I also store it in
the freezer so it's not gonna go bad that way,
and vinegar or lemon juice, and I have both of
those and an egg, and you basically in salt and
(16:45):
pepper and whatever, and you mix that up with an
immersion blender and while all you have mayonnaise. It's pretty cool,
actually to make your own mayonnaise tastes very good. I
made some the other day, probably within the last might
have been last spring, because I had a recipe that
called for mayonnaise and I'd forgotten to make sure I
had some, and so it didn't have enough and I
(17:08):
had to punch and make it myself. It turned out fine.
So you can do that as long as you have
the ingredients to do that kind of thing. And obviously
one of the most important skills is being able to
cook from scratch. But again, as the Needy Homesteader said,
having some things that are easier to do is also helpful,
(17:29):
because like when I had the five day power outage
and it was hot, the last thing I wanted to
do was cook something. Now in the winter time, if
the power went off, we you know I would like
to cook. We would want a home cook meal. I
would put something in the oven, because you know, having
(17:50):
the stove on is gonna heat up the kitchen. So
there's lots of reasons why I might want to cook
from scratch if we didn't have electric, see, but in
the summertime, that's not gonna happen. So I really, honestly,
in the summertime, I just wanted like a bowl of
cereal or something. I just it was hot and I
(18:11):
did not want to have I didn't want to have
to cook anything, but it really didn't want to eat
anything hot. And so, uh, what I my plan in
case we were to have a power outage in the summer,
well even in the winter time as well, is and
I and I need to do this is I'm gonna
so I'm gonna do this as an accountability thing. Is
(18:34):
to put like some two liter bottles in the freezer,
uh with with water in them so that they freeze,
and then use those to keep a cooler cool. And
in the cooler we would put like the milk and
the you know, things to drink, like the bottles of
(18:55):
water in my case, that coke, and you know, butter,
and the things that we would be reaching into the
fridge to get often lunch meat, cheese, that kind of stuff,
mayonnaise are condiments put all that stuff in the cooler,
(19:15):
and so if we need something, we can just reach
in and get that thing. Oh lovely, we have the
train across the track here, it's well, get to turn
around and go the other direction. I think this is
the same train that was here last night, sorry, yesterday
afternoon after work. So that's great. It's been there for
a whole day. That's never a good thing. I don't
(19:40):
know why the train being across the track and just
sitting here for a day is a good thing. Okay,
you look at these cars and you think they need
to be somewhere. Don't they need to deliver something? Surely
they do. So back to the patron the you know,
(20:01):
if we had if we had a way to use
and coolers especially have got ice or something that's frozen
in it, and I could trade those out, then that
cooler's gonna stay cool. And that way we don't have
to open the fridges and freezers. And if we don't
then that means that Uh. One of the things I
(20:22):
would do is I would put them on timers so
they the electricity was on when they cycled on, uh,
and then stay them for a little while and then
you know, turn the electricity off to them to when
they cycled off, and that would give me that would
extend the life of my power sources. Uh. But back
(20:46):
to a pantry. So if a person doesn't have a pantry,
now I will say this, we we always had at
least food for a week. I'm not a person that
likes to shop at the grocery store, and so I
do shop once a week at the grocery store. I
do not go multiple times. That to me is like
(21:07):
a fate worse than death. I just don't like to
do it. So I'm not one that's I'm gonna take.
I'm gonna get together a grocery list and we're gonna
go once. My mother was bad about going to the
grocery store every day. I don't know why, but you did.
My sister was kind of the same way when she
was do the one buying the groceries, and it's just
(21:29):
not something that I enjoyed doing. She used to stop
by the grocery store every evening after work, and I'm thinking,
why do you do this? I have other things I
want to do. But you know, to each his own,
everybody has has their own way of doing things. I
just prefer so we would always have at least a week. Okay,
(21:50):
all said, with what we have at this point in time,
I'm gonna say somewhere between three and six months, So
I don't I don't know that I'm two a year yet,
but I have gotten some things and we might eat
the same thing several times if we did that. But
we've also started canning and that kind of thing, so
we have a variety of stuff that we have that
(22:12):
we could eat, so we'd be fine, and we're a
long way from starvation. But if you have members of
your family that have special things that they need, or
you know, you have kids and they have things they like,
and those are the kinds of things that you would
want to stalk up on. But I don't think it's
(22:33):
helpful to have all of those freeze dried buckets. Okay,
now I do have buckets, but they're not freeze dried food.
I have buckets with wheatberries because wheatberries last forever. Apparently
that way worse comes to worse. I can grind my
(22:54):
own flour and continue to make bread. That's one reason
why I wanted to do the salur dough, because I
do have yeast and I have yeast in the freezer,
which is supposed to last indefinitely, but the sour dough
starter will. Uh. You know, you basically grow in your
own yeast, and so that's nice because then you have
(23:15):
the leavening you need for bread from then owned, so
that that helps makes a big difference. Anyway, the pantry
is probably one of the most thing, most important things,
and it's one of those things where it's gonna be
one of the most expensive when you take into consideration
(23:37):
all of what you have here. But it's also not
something that you can do all at one time. You
need to stay. If you've not done a pantry, you
need to start looking at what you use. What do
y'all eat, What do you like, what do your kids like?
(23:58):
If you have kids, or if you have elderly people
that they have specific things they need to have. I
think honestly, as we get older, our needs tend to
be less carb and more protein, it seems to be. Anyway,
you have to take that kind of stuff into consideration.
So there's lots of things to consider with your pantry.
(24:21):
One of the things that I noticed that in fact,
the one of the collaborators in this group is the
provident preppers, and they are it's a husband and wife
team and they're really very experienced at this kind of
thing and have a very large YouTube channel. They did
(24:42):
one own food storage, and in the food storage they
talked about using mile our bags and I, you know,
it's funny because that's what I had the conversation with
the guy in front of me in Walmart that day
when he was buying I want to say, he had
like seven bos of gram crackers. Maybe, I mean it
(25:04):
was something. It was something where he had a whole
bunch of one thing and then he had like a
box of skittles, and I I thought this is an
I think it was Graham crackers because I thought, well,
he's not doing I thought maybe he's gonna have a
cookout with like s'mores or something. But there wasn't any
marshmallows or chocolate. It was just the gram crackers. And
(25:26):
so I made a comment about all of his gram crackers,
and that's how we got into a discussion of preparedness.
And I thought, Mmmm, Okay, that's a lot of gram crackers,
but okay, I think you might want to have some
vegetables in there somewhere. Anyway, That's when he started talking
about putting rice and beans and bags. And I said,
(25:47):
are you talking about my lar bags? And he said yes,
and I thought, oh my. Anyway, so the mylar bags
are very handy. I will tell you about a pantry
fail that I had I when I first first started
putting stuff back. I do like oatmeal, so, and you
can do lots of things with oatmeal. You can make cookies,
(26:11):
you can make you know, bread, you can have it
for breakfast. I mean, there's lots of things you do
with oatmeal, muffins, all kinds of stuff. And so I
had stored quite a bit of oatmeal, but I had
put it in because I don't know about my lar bags.
I had put it in like these little I had
(26:31):
found some. They were pretty cheap plastic, almost like canisters.
They were sort of like square jars. Maybe they had
a screw top of lid. And I put my oatmeal
in them, and you know, put a label on the
mist when I bought it. And I noticed, even though
I had those in a cabinet where they would have
(26:52):
been dark, they they went they got stale really quick,
and they were n I mean, I and I finally
I've actually ended up throwing a bunch of them away
because of the fact that they were so stale. I
since I learned about mylar bags, I started storing my
(27:14):
oatmeal in the mylar bags. And when I do that,
it is actually it doesn't appear to go stale like that.
I don't know what's different about the millar bag, but
it makes a difference. So, uh. And oxygen absorbers. Those
are those little packets that you put in the flour
(27:34):
or any kind of grain that's going to suck the
oxygen out and then you're able to store something long term.
So there's lots of things to know about food storage.
It's kind of a rabbit hole you can go down.
But the most important thing is to store what you eat.
(27:56):
And as the saying goes, eat what you store to
rotate stuff. Well, you know, I'm not gonna bust out
these buckets of wheatberries unless we get to the point
where we can't buy flour. Okay, I have flour in
storage as well, and that's in the mile our bags
with the oxygen absorbers to keep those bags of flowers safe. Anyway,
(28:25):
this is just something to be thinking about that, Okay.
So if you needed to kind of like we did
in COVID, Shelter in place or hunker down at your
house for a while. What kind of food storage do
you have. And one of the things I've seen preppers
talk about, and this is generally men, preppers that do
this because they're not the ones that normally cook in
(28:47):
their household, I think, is they talk about calories and
they'll say, okay, well, you need two thousand calories for
each person in your each adult in your household, or
maybe more than they for men that are gonna be
working hard and teenagers. That kind of stuff. And that
is true, that is not an incorrect statement, but that's
(29:08):
not normally how people buy food. I don't go into
Walmart and go, okay, now, I'm gonna need to make
sure that we each have two thousand calories this week,
and I look at all the calorie count of all
the things I put in the bucket. Now I may
look at the calorie count and see whether or not
I don't need to have this thing very often, that's
another story. But what I do is I look at meals. Okay,
(29:31):
so if we have, like for example, Nice made a
crop pot full of chili yesterday, and when she did.
We each had something with chili on it for dinner
last night. I had chili dogs. I think sister had
chili and free toe something. Anyway, so we had this
nice homemade chili. I'm taking some from my lunch today.
(29:53):
Well then she only ended up with like five servings
left out of this big pot of chili, so that
we have that in the freezer and then you can
just you know, heat it up and you have chili.
But think in terms of servings of stuff when you
make a dish, like, for example, if she makes a
meat loaf. Now she usually makes a big meat loaf,
(30:15):
so if she does make that, then we eat on
that for a while. We can figure out about how
many servings of that are we gonna get. We'll eat
some of it, We'll cut it up and put it
in plastic containers and put it in the freezer, and
then you can get a piece of meat loaf out
and thought out, and you have lunch, get some stuff
to go, you know, sides to go with it. So
(30:37):
thinking it's best with food storage to think in terms
of meals. If I have this thing, how many servings
does that make and how long does that last? Us
in our family, and that's gonna be very unique. What
you like to eat is also gonna be unique to
your family. Some people like some things, other people like
(31:00):
that at all. One of the things the needy Homesteaders
said is her husband loved clam chowder. Well, she had
this big supply of clam chowder for him, but nobody
in the rest of the family doesn't like clam chowder.
And now he's gone, so you know, she had donated
the clam chowder cans to other people. So it you know,
(31:21):
it's just what does your family like to eat, and
that's the best way to go about food storage. Okay,
I'm at work again, just several meetings today and I
will talk to you tomorrow is Thursday, so we'll find
out what's going on with Mary Maverick at this point
taught you soon
Good morning. This is Emma. And unless the world has
come to an end, I'm a little confused. That's why
I'm sitting at the end of my driveway and there
is nobody here but me. But here comes a couple
of cars. So the world is still here, though, just
slow getting to this part of it this early in
the morning apparently, and I'm not running early by any chance,
(00:23):
by any stretch of the imagination. So today is the
tenth and according to my vehicle, it's fifty nine. So
we've had three days in a row where the low
temperature in the morning has been in the fifties. Where
we're gonna take that gift and run with it. Now,
I would say we could use some rain. It doesn't
(00:44):
look like we're gonna get any for a while. So anyway,
we're gonna talk about today. Well, I think I've mentioned
this before. This week this is the or last week.
This is the national month of Preparedness in America. I
(01:04):
noticed I have some folks that listen to this podcast
in Australia and the UK, which I appreciate that, thank y'all.
But in America this is the national month of Preparedness.
I think part of that has to do with it's
also the busiest month for hurricanes. Now we're not we
(01:26):
don't seem to have much going on in the way
of hurricanes at this point, which is not a bad thing,
because okay, this is a tent so it must have been.
Monday the eighth was the one hundred and twenty fifth
anniversary of the hurricane that hit Galveston, and as best
(01:49):
as can be figured, between eight thousand and ten thousand
people died in that hurricane. Because of course, it wasn't
like hurricane preparedness now, because they it was, there wasn't
a whole lot of notice, and even the folks who
(02:12):
were supposed to do that. There was a meteorologist on,
you know, such as he was at that point in
nineteen hundred at Galveston, and he they apparently knew a
storm was coming, but they seriously underestimated the size of
it and the strength of the wind and whatever. But
(02:37):
you know, giving him a little bit of benefit of
the doubt. First of all, he didn't have Dobbler radar,
and secondly, he they could only depend on hearing from
ships that were out in the ocean. And it is
very it's not unusual for a hurricane to strengthen very
(03:00):
quickly in a very short period of time. I think
that's what Hurricane Aaron did this year. Except the saving
grace was it didn't actually hit make landfall. It kind
of spun off the coast for a little while and
then went back out the sea. And so you know,
even though there was some effect from Hurricane Aaron, it
(03:22):
wasn't like this one where Galveston took a direct hit.
And Galveston being an island, you know, pretty close to
sea level, and so it was a horrific event. And
so you know, that's part of hurricane season here in America.
One of the reasons I don't ever want to live
(03:43):
on the coast for real. There's lots of reasons I
wouldn't want to live on the coast, but that's one
of them. Anyway. So this is National Preparedness Month, and
because of that, there is on YouTube a group of
channels that have all partnered together to do what's called
a collaborative where somebody one of this group does a
(04:05):
video every day, And so I would suggest I'll put
a link to it in the descriptions so that you
can go back and see it. Some are more helpful
than others. Kind of depends on your situation. But one
of them I wanted to highlight today, and that was
the one by the Needy Homesteader. And that's needy like
(04:31):
you're kneading bread. So it's k n e a d.
She has her own channel, all these people do, and
she the title of her video is uh, perfection is
the enemy of done. And I've heard that said in
(04:55):
various and sundry ways before. Excuse me. One time I
took an online preemotion quilting class, and one of the
things that the teacher for that class emphasized over and
over again, and this is true for those of us
who like to do needlework and crafts and that kind
of stuff, is sometimes we get so caught up in
(05:17):
the perfection of the piece we don't ever get it done.
And so then we have a bunch of things sitting
around that we didn't get finished, as we call works
in progress or w ips. Anyway, So she, in this case,
the needy Homesteader is talking about her pantry and so
(05:38):
but and oh, back to the quilting lady. She always
said perfection beats no. She said, done is more important
than perfection. Or done beats perfection. And that is very
much the case now when you're talking about a pantry.
It's not ever done. But whether or not you have
(06:01):
a pantry done or at least working, it's more important
that it worked for you than that it be perfect. Okay,
you see all these things on Facebook and blocks and
TikTok and YouTube, and you know, these people will do
(06:22):
a pantry tour and they'll show you everything's color coded
and stacked neatly and in baskets, and I mean, it
looks very pretty, whether or not it's useful. As a
whole nother story for those of us in an old house,
there is no such thing as a pantry. I think
(06:42):
the room or the area that I'm using as a
laundry room would have been originally the pantry. And the
reason I say that is because one time I went
in an old house that was not too far down
the road from me. It's gone now, but it was
abandoned at the time. It was open and so we just,
you know, some of us were there and that and
(07:03):
just kind of walked around through it and looked at
the inside. It was comparable in age to my house,
and it, you know, built in many ways the same way,
uh or the same basic structure. And on the left
hand side of the house it had the living room
and it had the dining room, and then it had
the kitchen, and the kitchen had this little room at
(07:30):
the back of it that was in and see this
would have not been you know, they didn't have a
door there and all that kind of stuff, but there
was this little room behind the kitchen, and that was
the pantry. You could tell it was a petry because
this being an old house that really hadn't been changed
and and you know, things rearranged or whatever. It had shelves,
(07:55):
and I thought, oh, that's the And then once I
bought my house it I couldn't figure out what this
little area was for a while because the church that
owned my house had actually cut through it and made
a pass through to the back porch because that's it
was the closest door to the church. And so they
(08:15):
they put a door because I could tell because it
was a cheap door, and then they cut an opening
in the other wall so that they could go through
this room onto the back porch, and it was the
closest way to get in and out. So that worked
for the church. But I never could figure out what
this was because it was this little it it they
(08:36):
had made the remainder of it when they cut it through.
They'd put a little false while their little new wall there,
and a and a little door. But it was a
closet with a window in it. And that didn't make
any sense at all. Now I've got the e gubs.
Let me see if I get rid of them. So
(08:59):
I was. I lived in this house probably at least
a year, if not longer than that, before I put
two and two together and figured out that there was
a pantry, but I needed a laundry room at that point.
So because the laundry facilities at that point were on
(09:22):
the back porch, which was not inside that heated in
cool space, and it was a little chilly and what
at different times of the year. Okay, truck, I'm still
trying to get rid of that. He give us all right,
So back to pastries. So I don't actually have a pantry.
(09:45):
And that was one reason why I appreciated her video,
because she talks about how you, you know, may do
with what you've got, just make sure that you have
some sort of pantry. Now she goes into and I
had heard her talk about her story before she was
she's a widow. She was married and uh, you know,
(10:08):
they had children and at one point, this has been
several years ago, evidently they were involved in a really
horrific car wreck with a drunk driver and it killed
her husband. It almost killed her and her children, who
obviously in vac seat, were seriously injured. So, you know,
she lost her husband. She did live, but she had
(10:30):
lots of injuries she had to get over. I think
she had a lot of facial injuries and like you know,
like had to have tee three done, dental surgery, and
I mean all kinds of stuff, uh that she and
I think it has. You know, obviously there's some of
(10:51):
it she hasn't gotten over, but uh, it took a
long time to get to where she is now. And then,
as she said, you know, she was loved with two
kids to raise, and her husband was the primary you know,
he was the breadwinner. He he was the one their
insurance was on, you know, they had And so she
talks about prepping for the I don't know how she
(11:15):
worded it, something that you couldn't have prepped for, Okay,
that you just have to deal with when it happens.
And that's a lot of things in life. And I've
had some of those myself, not to the point that
she did, but I have lost family members that made
a profound effect on things. When my father died in
(11:39):
an accident, obviously we were not involved in the accident,
but you know, that cut my mother's income. We had
a when he passed away, he had a pasture full
of cows. I think he had about eighty eight head.
At that point. We were in the drought of the century.
You know, we had to make sure we were able
(12:02):
to have enough grass for those cows. We had to
sell them. It was a terrible time to sell cows
because you were literally lined up at the at the
sail barn to sell them. They were stacked up at
the sail barn because they couldn't because they were stacked
up at the packing houses. I mean, it was it
(12:23):
was a horrible time, and it's not something we could
have prepared for. I mean, as far as knowing that
that was gonna happen. I mean, you can have certain
things in place and and be prepared for things in general,
but that's not something you think is gonna happen at
some point, now can But you know, I understood what
she was talking about at this point, although obviously her
(12:46):
situation was way worse than mine. Anyway, So back to
her pantry where she says that perfection is the enemy
of done, is that she first of all, she talks
about the fact that her pantry was built around what
(13:07):
she used to cook, and she cooked from scratch all
the time, so she had like ingredients to cook from scratch.
But the problem was when she was incapacitated and nobody
you know, she could not personally cook, but there were
other people in her house cooking in her place. Then
those people didn't always know how to cook from scratch,
(13:27):
so they didn't really know what to do with the
stuff in her pantry. And so one of the things
she has done since then, it is made is is
made sure that she had some like ready to cook things,
things that were you know, that instead of making macaroni
and cheese from scratch, she might have some boxes of
craft Okay, that makes sense, And so I think that's
(13:51):
a good idea that you have to make sure that
you Jesus not good today, that you have like a
variety of things. One of the things that I hear
about people doing. I don't know that I know anybody
(14:11):
that's done this, but if they had them, they might
not have said anything about it. So that's okay. You
see all these advertisements for these buckets of freeze dried food,
and I have to say that when I started prepping,
that's not something I ever thought we would want. First
of all, as people as as people who have reviewed
(14:34):
those will say, you know, there's really not that much
stuff in them, and you've paid a lot of money.
And that's a good point. There's lots of other ways
to get food that is long term, and like some
food's going to be long term and some food's not.
And in some cases you can store ingredients that you
couldn't that you might and the ingredient, the ingredients are
(14:56):
shelf stable, but maybe the actual food it's self when
you put the ingredients together, is not a shelf stable
for a long time. But you can store the ingredients.
So there's that one thing, for example, and I'm gonna
try I haven't tried this yet, and I'm gonna do
(15:17):
I may do it with like a couple of eggs
and see how it turns out. You know, people have
the freeze dried eggs and all that kind of stuff.
I don't know that I'm really interested in that either.
But you're supposed to be able to scramble an egg
and freeze it like in an ice cube tray, and
(15:38):
then you thaw it out and it'll cook just like
a scrambled egg. And normally what we would do with eggs. Now,
we do eat some eggs, like for breakfast or whatever,
but normally what we do is we use eggs in cooking.
And one of the non shelf stable things that comes
to mind is may days, you can make your own mayonnaise.
(16:01):
Mayonnaise is not shelf stable for a long time. It does.
It only has like a couple of months, and so
it's not something that you can put in your pantry
and just forget that it's there. It's not like canned
peas or something. But you can make mayonnaise very easily
if you have the ingredients. You just have to have
(16:22):
some kind of oil. I have. I'm storing olive oil
mostly because though that is a you know, a better
oil than some stuff. But I also store it in
the freezer so it's not gonna go bad that way,
and vinegar or lemon juice, and I have both of
those and an egg, and you basically in salt and
(16:45):
pepper and whatever, and you mix that up with an
immersion blender and while all you have mayonnaise. It's pretty cool,
actually to make your own mayonnaise tastes very good. I
made some the other day, probably within the last might
have been last spring, because I had a recipe that
called for mayonnaise and I'd forgotten to make sure I
had some, and so it didn't have enough and I
(17:08):
had to punch and make it myself. It turned out fine.
So you can do that as long as you have
the ingredients to do that kind of thing. And obviously
one of the most important skills is being able to
cook from scratch. But again, as the Needy Homesteader said,
having some things that are easier to do is also helpful,
(17:29):
because like when I had the five day power outage
and it was hot, the last thing I wanted to
do was cook something. Now in the winter time, if
the power went off, we you know I would like
to cook. We would want a home cook meal. I
would put something in the oven, because you know, having
(17:50):
the stove on is gonna heat up the kitchen. So
there's lots of reasons why I might want to cook
from scratch if we didn't have electric, see, but in
the summertime, that's not gonna happen. So I really, honestly,
in the summertime, I just wanted like a bowl of
cereal or something. I just it was hot and I
(18:11):
did not want to have I didn't want to have
to cook anything, but it really didn't want to eat
anything hot. And so, uh, what I my plan in
case we were to have a power outage in the summer,
well even in the winter time as well, is and
I and I need to do this is I'm gonna
so I'm gonna do this as an accountability thing. Is
(18:34):
to put like some two liter bottles in the freezer,
uh with with water in them so that they freeze,
and then use those to keep a cooler cool. And
in the cooler we would put like the milk and
the you know, things to drink, like the bottles of
(18:55):
water in my case, that coke, and you know, butter,
and the things that we would be reaching into the
fridge to get often lunch meat, cheese, that kind of stuff,
mayonnaise are condiments put all that stuff in the cooler,
(19:15):
and so if we need something, we can just reach
in and get that thing. Oh lovely, we have the
train across the track here, it's well, get to turn
around and go the other direction. I think this is
the same train that was here last night, sorry, yesterday
afternoon after work. So that's great. It's been there for
a whole day. That's never a good thing. I don't
(19:40):
know why the train being across the track and just
sitting here for a day is a good thing. Okay,
you look at these cars and you think they need
to be somewhere. Don't they need to deliver something? Surely
they do. So back to the patron the you know,
(20:01):
if we had if we had a way to use
and coolers especially have got ice or something that's frozen
in it, and I could trade those out, then that
cooler's gonna stay cool. And that way we don't have
to open the fridges and freezers. And if we don't
then that means that Uh. One of the things I
(20:22):
would do is I would put them on timers so
they the electricity was on when they cycled on, uh,
and then stay them for a little while and then
you know, turn the electricity off to them to when
they cycled off, and that would give me that would
extend the life of my power sources. Uh. But back
(20:46):
to a pantry. So if a person doesn't have a pantry,
now I will say this, we we always had at
least food for a week. I'm not a person that
likes to shop at the grocery store, and so I
do shop once a week at the grocery store. I
do not go multiple times. That to me is like
(21:07):
a fate worse than death. I just don't like to
do it. So I'm not one that's I'm gonna take.
I'm gonna get together a grocery list and we're gonna
go once. My mother was bad about going to the
grocery store every day. I don't know why, but you did.
My sister was kind of the same way when she
was do the one buying the groceries, and it's just
(21:29):
not something that I enjoyed doing. She used to stop
by the grocery store every evening after work, and I'm thinking,
why do you do this? I have other things I
want to do. But you know, to each his own,
everybody has has their own way of doing things. I
just prefer so we would always have at least a week. Okay,
(21:50):
all said, with what we have at this point in time,
I'm gonna say somewhere between three and six months, So
I don't I don't know that I'm two a year yet,
but I have gotten some things and we might eat
the same thing several times if we did that. But
we've also started canning and that kind of thing, so
we have a variety of stuff that we have that
(22:12):
we could eat, so we'd be fine, and we're a
long way from starvation. But if you have members of
your family that have special things that they need, or
you know, you have kids and they have things they like,
and those are the kinds of things that you would
want to stalk up on. But I don't think it's
(22:33):
helpful to have all of those freeze dried buckets. Okay,
now I do have buckets, but they're not freeze dried food.
I have buckets with wheatberries because wheatberries last forever. Apparently
that way worse comes to worse. I can grind my
(22:54):
own flour and continue to make bread. That's one reason
why I wanted to do the salur dough, because I
do have yeast and I have yeast in the freezer,
which is supposed to last indefinitely, but the sour dough
starter will. Uh. You know, you basically grow in your
own yeast, and so that's nice because then you have
(23:15):
the leavening you need for bread from then owned, so
that that helps makes a big difference. Anyway, the pantry
is probably one of the most thing, most important things,
and it's one of those things where it's gonna be
one of the most expensive when you take into consideration
(23:37):
all of what you have here. But it's also not
something that you can do all at one time. You
need to stay. If you've not done a pantry, you
need to start looking at what you use. What do
y'all eat, What do you like, what do your kids like?
(23:58):
If you have kids, or if you have elderly people
that they have specific things they need to have. I
think honestly, as we get older, our needs tend to
be less carb and more protein, it seems to be. Anyway,
you have to take that kind of stuff into consideration.
So there's lots of things to consider with your pantry.
(24:21):
One of the things that I noticed that in fact,
the one of the collaborators in this group is the
provident preppers, and they are it's a husband and wife
team and they're really very experienced at this kind of
thing and have a very large YouTube channel. They did
(24:42):
one own food storage, and in the food storage they
talked about using mile our bags and I, you know,
it's funny because that's what I had the conversation with
the guy in front of me in Walmart that day
when he was buying I want to say, he had
like seven bos of gram crackers. Maybe, I mean it
(25:04):
was something. It was something where he had a whole
bunch of one thing and then he had like a
box of skittles, and I I thought this is an
I think it was Graham crackers because I thought, well,
he's not doing I thought maybe he's gonna have a
cookout with like s'mores or something. But there wasn't any
marshmallows or chocolate. It was just the gram crackers. And
(25:26):
so I made a comment about all of his gram crackers,
and that's how we got into a discussion of preparedness.
And I thought, Mmmm, Okay, that's a lot of gram crackers,
but okay, I think you might want to have some
vegetables in there somewhere. Anyway, That's when he started talking
about putting rice and beans and bags. And I said,
(25:47):
are you talking about my lar bags? And he said yes,
and I thought, oh my. Anyway, so the mylar bags
are very handy. I will tell you about a pantry
fail that I had I when I first first started
putting stuff back. I do like oatmeal, so, and you
can do lots of things with oatmeal. You can make cookies,
(26:11):
you can make you know, bread, you can have it
for breakfast. I mean, there's lots of things you do
with oatmeal, muffins, all kinds of stuff. And so I
had stored quite a bit of oatmeal, but I had
put it in because I don't know about my lar bags.
I had put it in like these little I had
(26:31):
found some. They were pretty cheap plastic, almost like canisters.
They were sort of like square jars. Maybe they had
a screw top of lid. And I put my oatmeal
in them, and you know, put a label on the
mist when I bought it. And I noticed, even though
I had those in a cabinet where they would have
(26:52):
been dark, they they went they got stale really quick,
and they were n I mean, I and I finally
I've actually ended up throwing a bunch of them away
because of the fact that they were so stale. I
since I learned about mylar bags, I started storing my
(27:14):
oatmeal in the mylar bags. And when I do that,
it is actually it doesn't appear to go stale like that.
I don't know what's different about the millar bag, but
it makes a difference. So, uh. And oxygen absorbers. Those
are those little packets that you put in the flour
(27:34):
or any kind of grain that's going to suck the
oxygen out and then you're able to store something long term.
So there's lots of things to know about food storage.
It's kind of a rabbit hole you can go down.
But the most important thing is to store what you eat.
(27:56):
And as the saying goes, eat what you store to
rotate stuff. Well, you know, I'm not gonna bust out
these buckets of wheatberries unless we get to the point
where we can't buy flour. Okay, I have flour in
storage as well, and that's in the mile our bags
with the oxygen absorbers to keep those bags of flowers safe. Anyway,
(28:25):
this is just something to be thinking about that, Okay.
So if you needed to kind of like we did
in COVID, Shelter in place or hunker down at your
house for a while. What kind of food storage do
you have. And one of the things I've seen preppers
talk about, and this is generally men, preppers that do
this because they're not the ones that normally cook in
(28:47):
their household, I think, is they talk about calories and
they'll say, okay, well, you need two thousand calories for
each person in your each adult in your household, or
maybe more than they for men that are gonna be
working hard and teenagers. That kind of stuff. And that
is true, that is not an incorrect statement, but that's
(29:08):
not normally how people buy food. I don't go into
Walmart and go, okay, now, I'm gonna need to make
sure that we each have two thousand calories this week,
and I look at all the calorie count of all
the things I put in the bucket. Now I may
look at the calorie count and see whether or not
I don't need to have this thing very often, that's
another story. But what I do is I look at meals. Okay,
(29:31):
so if we have, like for example, Nice made a
crop pot full of chili yesterday, and when she did.
We each had something with chili on it for dinner
last night. I had chili dogs. I think sister had
chili and free toe something. Anyway, so we had this
nice homemade chili. I'm taking some from my lunch today.
(29:53):
Well then she only ended up with like five servings
left out of this big pot of chili, so that
we have that in the freezer and then you can
just you know, heat it up and you have chili.
But think in terms of servings of stuff when you
make a dish, like, for example, if she makes a
meat loaf. Now she usually makes a big meat loaf,
(30:15):
so if she does make that, then we eat on
that for a while. We can figure out about how
many servings of that are we gonna get. We'll eat
some of it, We'll cut it up and put it
in plastic containers and put it in the freezer, and
then you can get a piece of meat loaf out
and thought out, and you have lunch, get some stuff
to go, you know, sides to go with it. So
(30:37):
thinking it's best with food storage to think in terms
of meals. If I have this thing, how many servings
does that make and how long does that last? Us
in our family, and that's gonna be very unique. What
you like to eat is also gonna be unique to
your family. Some people like some things, other people like
(31:00):
that at all. One of the things the needy Homesteaders
said is her husband loved clam chowder. Well, she had
this big supply of clam chowder for him, but nobody
in the rest of the family doesn't like clam chowder.
And now he's gone, so you know, she had donated
the clam chowder cans to other people. So it you know,
(31:21):
it's just what does your family like to eat, and
that's the best way to go about food storage. Okay,
I'm at work again, just several meetings today and I
will talk to you tomorrow is Thursday, so we'll find
out what's going on with Mary Maverick at this point
taught you soon
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