Tag Archives: food

Article – How Long Does Frozen Meat Last? Here’s What You Need to Know About Freezing Meat

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When it comes to stocking up on food, there’s nothing as convenient as filling up your freezer with a variety of frozen meals and ingredients, since freezing your food is the best way to guarantee freshness, long-term.

If you’re like many people and keep key meat items — such as raw chicken or ground beef — in the freezer, there’s probably a question you might be wondering: How long can you freeze meat before it goes bad?

I have something this article does not – empirical data. And I feel rather qualified to say that this article is utter and total BS. IF you vacuum seal the meat and IF you store it in a deep freeze (not the freezer in your fridge) I can say without any trace of doubt that it will last years.

I routinely eat meat out of my freezer that is a couple years old and it’s fine. In fact, I have half a turkey from 2016 thawing out for dinner tomorrow. I believe the oldest meat I’ve eaten out of my freezer was over ten years old and it was fine.

Articles like this try to be helpful, and I know many people would be aghast at the thought of eating meat that is years old, but I and my content gastrointestinal system are here to tell you that IF you freeze it properly you can get years and years of storage life out of your meat.

So when you see a big deal on bulk meat, don’t hesitate to purchase it because you’re worried it’ll “go bad” or “Won’t keep” until you’re ready to use it up. Seal it, freeze it, and it’ll be good for a decade. Thats years of personal experience talking.

 

Article – Half cows, entire pigs: Families are buying meat in bulk to save money

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It was the $200 weekly grocery bills that finally did him in. With three young kids and soaring meat costs, Logan Wagoner decided it was time to go whole hog.

This spring, the St. Louis attorney bought half a cow and an entire pig – plus a freezer that now holds 320 pounds of bacon, sausages, rib-eye steaks, ground beef and soup bones in his basement.

I’m somewhat amused, and mildly dismayed, that it’s only now that the normies have discovered that, golly, buying in bulk saves money. Who knew? There is, of course, another alternative to dropping that much money at once and that is to actively pursue sales and bargains, which has generally been my strategy. There are plenty of cases, documented here on the blog, where I found a closeout or sale on some meat and swooped in on the whole batch.

But the notion that buying a freezer and half a beef is somehow newsworthy? Dude, one generation ago this was standard practice.

I’d say that its a pretty solid bet that 95% of the people reading this already have freezers, and keep them full all the time. And…thats not newsworthy.

Seven year sugar

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A while back I had posted that Winco has seen boneless skinless chicken breast increase by 40% over six months.  Was up there the other day and, surprise, it bumped up another ten cents a pound. How’s that Inflation Reduction Act workin’ for ya?

Speaking of food, I had to refill my sugar container that I keep in the kitchen. No problem, check the stockpiles and I have several 5# bags of sugar vacuum sealed for just this sort of thing. Todays volunteer was a bag of sugar that went into storage back in 2015.

How did it fare? Why, just fine. There were a few clumps in there that were easily broken up by shaking the container thoroughly. Other than that, it stored just fine…as expected. The vacuum sealing protects from moisture and bugs quite nicely and, really, thats the two biggest threats to storing sugar. I wish I had written down the price I paid seven years ago because it is always interesting to see how these things change.

When it comes to storing sugar, by the way, my usual policy is to drop the bag of sugar into a vacuum seal bag, seal it up, date it, and put it in a 5-gallon bucket with the others. Then it goes into the basement and sits on a shelf until needed. I keep about 40 or 50 pounds of sugar on hand this way. More than enough to get me through a crisis. I also store salt this way as well…not so much for the concern over bugs, but rather over keeping moisture away.

If you haven’t already got a vauum sealer, I cannot recommend them enough. They are one of the most useful tools for stockpiling things. You have to think outside the box, because these things are great for more than just putting away food.

Article -In Remote Alaska, Meal Planning Is Everything

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That first summer in the Arctic, Adam, who had already spent several summer seasons in Bettles, arrived a few weeks before me and told me that I had to go to the grocery store in Fairbanks and buy as much food as possible. What he really meant was, buy as much food as you can push in a grocery cart back to your hotel, repackage it into boxes, then get it all into a taxi to the small Alaska Bush plane office, and pay for it as freight on the flight.

What Adam hadn’t shared — but what quickly would become second nature to me — is that in the tiny town, we would develop our own rituals around eating. Yes, things like fresh strawberries would be hard to come by, but together we’d craft innovative solutions to tasks more easily accomplished in less remote places. We’d communally grow vegetables with our neighbors. We’d order food from thousands of miles away, weeks ahead of time. And we would hardly ever be eating alone.

An interesting read on what you have to deal with when the nearest Trader Joe’s, HEB, or Safeway is hundreds (or thousands) of miles away.

Have you actually done menu planning for The End Of The World? I mean, I know you’ve got all sorts of stored food, but have you actually thought about what a particular meal, say breakfast, would look like? I have. For me, breakfast looks like the following:

  • Oatmeal, Cream of What, Cornmeal porridge
  • Scrambled eggs
  • Hash browns
  • Corned beef hash
  • Pork chops
  • Orange drink
  • Biscuits
  • Strawberries, blueberries, bananas
  • Instant milk

Thats actually a better breakfast than what I eat now. See, it isn’t enough to just throw back an assortment of storage food. You have to give some thought to what sort of menus youre going to be looking at. How many different breakfasts can you do? Lunches? Sinners? Snacks?

For some ideas, I have always recommended this website and it’s very impressive list of ‘storage food recipes’: http://safelygatheredin2.blogspot.com/2008/11/alphabetical-recipe-list.html

But the important thing to take away from the article listed above is that you have to plan out what your meals will be if you have any hope of efficiently and economically getting your food storage squared away. Go plan a weeks worth of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. How many ingredients ‘cross over’ to other meals? Figure it out, get the most variety and utility from the least amount of items. Its a good exercise.

Rotating and reminiscing

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One of the cool things about being a survivalist (or, at least, a moderately prepared survivalist) is that your stockpiles become snapshots of the economy in different periods of time. For example, today I rotated out some canned tomatoes. Tomatoes,  because of their high acidity, need to be rotated fairly frequently….a couple years is about all I’m willing to trust in a metal can (even lined ones). In glass jars is a different story, but for cans….a couple years, tops.

So, I headed up to WinCo, cornered the grocery manager, and asked him to order me up a few cases of my preferred tomatoes. As I was swapping them out with the previously stored ones, I could not help but notice:

As you can see from the image, these were purchased at CostCo in 2020. $5.99 for eight cans. Thats $6 divided by eight. That comes out to seventy-five cents per can. Todays cost at WinCo? 66% more per can. Must be that Putinflation that Dopey Joe keeps deflecting to.

Get used to it.

And, while I was at Winco, I checked for remaindered meat. WinCo doesn’t discount as much as Albertson’s used to, but they will discount by 30% when meats are approaching their ‘use by’ date. Me, I’m a big fan of animal protein, so I cleaned ’em out on small breakfast-type steaks. These’ll get vacuum sealed and put away in the deep freeze for use in the coming economic disaster….which means I’ll probably be eating them next month.

Overnight price increase

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One nice thing about blogging is that it gives me some benchmarks to work with. Apparently, at the beginning of the year, boneless skinless chicken breast was $1.98/# at Winco. A bit later in January it jumped to $2.18/#…and increase of almost 10%. Today at Winco I was met with this:

Thats right, kids…it jumped sixty cents a pound in one swoop. Thats’s an overnight increase of 28%. Or, if you start with January, a 40% increase in chicken in six months. Put another way, if you spent the same amount of money as you did in January to buy 30 days worth of chicken, you’d only get about 21 says worth of chicken now.

So, unless you got a 40% raise in the last six months, you are gonna be at a net loss chicken-wise.

It must have been a very recent price increase because there were still a few lower-priced trays left:

Other than gas prices, this has been the most in-your-face thing I’ve seen. And this will be happening on everything.

Mill arrival

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Almost five weeks after I ordered it, the grain mill I ordered finally arrived. NGL, I was starting to think it wasn’t going to ship at all. And, in the intervening time, the price rose almost 25% as availability shrank. But..it’s here.

Impressions? Definitely a product that is built to last. But…I ordered the spare parts nonetheless. My biggest problem was that I simply don’t have the counter space, nor the sturdiness of construction, that this thing will require. So, I gave it some thought and came up with something that seems to work.

First consideration was space. I cant just go buy or build a sturdy little bench and bolt this thing to it. I just don’t have room for that. Secondly, whatever I bolt it to has to be able to resist the forces exerted on the mill. In other word, if I start really leaning into this thing I need the mill and its mounting surface to not walk around or wobble.

Solution? Black and Decker Workmate WM225.

I mounted the mill to some scrap lumber, and then c-clamp that to the bench. The bench folds flat like a folding chair when not in use, so the footprint is minimal. And, thanks to physics, if I stand on the bench’s step while turning the mill handle I cannot lift the mill or the bench….for the same reason you cant stand in a bucket and lift yourself up in it. So…that works.

The mill itself looks like it’ll last a lifetime. I tried grinding up some hard white wheat and the result was a very fine flour. Changed out a few parts, threw in a handful of dried corn, and experimented with several different grades of fineness.

I will say that I can see why some people motorize these things. But, I picked up the extension handle for it so the extra leverage makes a big difference.

I haven’t done much, if any, baking in a while so I’ll have to see how the taste of fresh ground flour and cornmeal compares to what I’m used to.

Also, I can see where it might make sense for me to go pick up another 16-gallon ‘blue barrel’ and dump another hundred pounds of wheat or corn into it… just in case. A couple hundred pounds of each should last for quite a while.

Yeah, the mill was a major hit to the wallet but over the rest of my anticipated life span that knocks it down to something like a dime a day for a tool that will last forever and help keep me and the people I care about fed.

 

I miss the meat tray

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Man, I really miss the Meat Tray. It was only a little over a year ago that I could still plunk down a $20 bill and get a variety pack of meat that, used wisely, would last most of a week.

But, those days are gone. WinCo does ‘remainder’ the meats to the tune of about 30% off, which is a good deal considering they are already a pretty good value. I still haven’t exactly figured out the right time of day to catch them when they’re putting out the markdowns so I can be first before theyre all scooped up.

Most of the supermarkets in town here offer some sort of markdowns on meat that’s on its last day. The trick is catching them before they’ve been picked over by the other shoppers. But with 85/15 running over $5 a pound(!) it’s just foolish not to make the effort.

I am not one of those people who is willing to ‘get by’ on TVP or any other non-meat meat. If it isn’t dead animal flesh, I’m not interested. At the moment, WinCo is offering the cheapest animal protein…boneless pork at around $1.88/#. And thats good for stews, shredding for enchilladas,, or just roasting and slicing up with a pan gravy.

With no indication of food prices, and especially meat prices, going anywhere but up it makes sense to buy now and freeze for later. Or can it when you can find canning jar lids.

I have no intention of going through…well…whatever it is we’re going through….as a inveg (involuntary vegan). So, to that end I have canned meat, frozen meat, and freeze dried meat.

This is the unsexy  part of survivalism, guys. But having to eat spaghetti-n-tunafish is even less sexy.  I’m a naturally cheap person, so even in the best of times I’d still be hunting for a bargain at the meat counter. Nowadays, its almost a requirement. It’ll be interesting to see when all of this blows over and things start looking up. My guess is: no time soon.

On tonights episode of “Will It Digest”….

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Cleaning out the freezer and…pork ribs from 2011. Ah, such carefree days….

Your ‘best by ‘ dates, I laugh at them. Ha! Ha, I say!

So, how’d they turn out? Well, unless something rather untoward happens in the next eight hours, just fine. Why wouldnt they? These were vacuum sealed, and have been sitting below zero for the last eleven years. The moral of the story here? If you package meat properly, and keep it consistently frozen, it should be just fine literally a decade later.

This is now officially the oldest meat I have eaten out of my freezer, wildly trouncing the five year old turkey I had a few years back.

Ah.the memories……..

Link – Why is there a shortage of canning jars and lids?

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A reader was thoughtful enough to send me this link and there’s some interesting details in it. Specifically:

What consumers didn’t know was that canning lids (around since 1884) and canning jars (around since 1858) are no longer being made by Ball and Kerr, the two big manufacturers of American canning supplies. A few years before the pandemic, these companies had sold out to a mega-corporation called Newell Brands.

….

Since Ball and Kerr were just two more of multiple brands bought out by this company, consumer demands for any one product are not a priority for the mega-corporation. When the 2020 pandemic created a huge demand for canning supplies, Newell Brands decided it would not try to sell Ball and Kerr products at every store handling canning supplies as in the past, but only through online giant Amazon and select major chains such as Walmart and Ace Hardware stores.

I didn’t know that. Did you? I’ve not verified the information on my own, but if true it would mean that domestic production of canning supplies is all under one company which may or may not care about how available those items are.

There are, of course, offshore options. When theres a void in the market you can usually rely on the Chinese to swoop in, create a knockoff version thats 1/10th the quality at 1/2 the price, and then flood the market with it under several different names. Everything I read says that the Chinese canning lids are 50/50 in terms of efficacy.

Clearly canning lids have sort of migrated into the Uncertain Goods category. Fortunately, I’ve been able to stock up on a healthy amount of them, albeit much later than I should have.