Tag Archives: food

Beef – it’s what’s not for dinner

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I was in my local Albertson’s and was doing my usual trawling of the meat department for bargains when I notices that a large amount of ground beef was plastered with the “30%” off stickers. But no “50%”. I inquired at the meat counter and was told that a) meats aren’t getting marked down 50% because the demand is high enough that it will sell at 30% off and b) the 50% is too much of a price cut because of the higher prices they are having to pay these days. That last part made no sense but the guy in the white coat and hairnet isn’t a finance major.

Regardless of the guy’s statement, I can see some of what he’s getting at. No two ways around it, beef prices are up. Ground beef is at prices that, to me, are just ridiculous. Fortunately, chicken is my main go-to for animal protein and I can usually get that on sale for around $1.99/#. But my meat trays, which have been a staple of my freezer stocking program for quite a few years now, are reflecting these new sensibilities. Gone is the 3# “Log” of ground beef that used to make up 1/4 of the tray. And the sirloins which sometimes were part of the tray are now completely gone. Whats left? Pork and chicken. Invariably it’s now some type of sausage, pork steak, chicken legs, and some other cut of pork. In my opinion, not really worth the bother anymore.

Meat tray as it used to be

Another version of the meat tray as it used to be. Note this one is 1/2 beef.

Fortunately, I’ve been stocking the freezer long before this, and chicken is my main choice of meat, so the relative high price/scarcity of beef doesn’t really faze me. But…it is kind of unsettling to think that in a country whose supermarkets were incomprehensible to people from communist countries, we are starting to get the very faintest of whiffs of the kind of supermarket shortages that we always associated with Communist/Socialist states.

Come to think of it, this year is the first time I have ever seen national-level grocery store shortages. We had The Great TP Rush of 2020, and similar runs on things like Rice, pasta, frozen pizzas, and that sort of thing. Sure, we see it when hurricanes and earthquakes occur…but that’s usually a local-level thing. Earlier this year it didn’t matter if you were in Alaska or Alabama, you weren’t gonna get to squeeze any Charmin.

And now, as there is talk of ‘re-lockdowns’, it might be time to make sure that you’ve learned your lesson from earlier this year. And,  by the by, even if there’s not a shortage of [beef/pasta/rice/TP] I can almost guarantee you that there is going to be a shortage of money. I think right now people are holding onto their cash with both hands as they worry about the market, their jobs, etc. Housing prices in my town, which were ridiculously high, have come down slightly as people are deciding that perhaps this isn’t the year to be spending huge money and perhaps it might be better to just hold onto that down payment money until next year…you know…’just in case’.

Its the weekend, so for me it’s time for another $50 towards getting items on the Preponomicon into the green. Go. Buy. Stockpile.

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There’s a link at the top of the column on the right hand of your screen. I think what I’ll probably do is, on an experimental basis for now, post a footer in a random post once a week with a quick link. We’ll see if that doesn’t come across as too crass and self-serving.

Shelf Reliance

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Food rotation is one of those important things to keep in mind when storing food. Sure, a 15-gallon drum of rice will last virtually forever (if my Y2k stash is anything to go by), but it’s probably a good idea to rotate through whatever you store every few years.

When it comes to canned goods, there are zillions of can ‘rotation shelves’, ‘organizer shelves’, and other can distributors. I had a can organizer that I bought years ago when they were up at CostCo. It has served well for a number of years but, as of late, I’ve kinda ramped up the inventory of canned goods. This means I need to have  more cans positioned so that the oldest ones get used up first. So, it was time to expand on the modular can organizer.

First step, clear off a run of shelving:

Next step is to unbox these guys:

Grab a couple cans off the shelf to make sure the spacing is correct, and start assembling. The whole thing snaps together like Lego so…no muss, no fuss.

Finish assembly, slide into shelf, and start adding cans…oldest go in first:

I then ran a second row across the shelf next to it, but since it’s pretty much identical to this one there’s no point in documenting that.

Now, yeah, you can buy some cheaper units. And, if your even halfway talented with a saw and a hammer you can fab up something on your own. However, what I was after was modularity.This unit can be configured for variable width to accommodate different size cans, they can be linked together to form one long continuous run, and, very conveniently, they seamlessly integrated with the existing unit I had which was about 15 years old. So…very backwards compatible, which is nice.

You can order of Amazon if you’re so inclined.

Given how much I’m spending these days on beefing(!) up the food storage, the last thing I need is to waste money on cans of food getting shoved into a dark corner, being discovered years later, and having to be discarded because they should have been used up years earlier.

How’s your short- to mid-term food storage coming along? I’m feeling pretty good with what I have so far. I need to fine tune a few ‘luxury’ items I want but….starve to death? Not a chance. However, for practicality’s sake, it would be nice to take about half of this and move it to the Beta Site.

Adventures in self control

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Went to Murdoch’s the other day to pick up a 16-gallon ‘blue barrel’ for rice storage and as I walked down the aisle I beheld….this:

I know it doesn’t seem like I have good impulse control, but I actually impressed myself by not just buying the bloody thing right then and there. BUT….I had a long, long talk with myself basically talking myself in and out of whether I should buy it. Fact is, it ain’t cheap at around $2800~. But I can freeze dry my favorite foods that may be unobtainable elsewhere and get myself a nice stash of FD meats without paying the crazy prices that they normally command. I actually should fab up a spreadsheet to calculate just how many pounds of chicken and beef I’d have to FD before the thing hits the break even point.

But…I already have a pretty healthy (so to speak) stash of freeze drieds. Sure, more would be nice and being able to get exactly the foods I want has a pretty nice attraction as well. And I suppose I could get a couple of the LMI to come in on it with the expectation we could all take turns using it. But..but….expensive. Although people pay more money for far stupider items….jet skis, expensive living room chairs, Manolo Blahniks, etc.

To my way of thinking its the same financial equivalent as:

  • 4 mid-tier ARs
  • 5 Glocks
  • 1.5~ oz. of gold
  • 150 oz. of silver (hey its a 100:1 ratio)
  • 1/3 of a decent used pickup
  • 13k 9mm ball ammo

What I really need is a friend who has one of these things. 80/20 ….. get 80% of the usage for 20% of the cost.

But, dang, it would be kinda fun to see what does and does not come out well.

Article – America’s meat shortage is more serious than your missing hamburgers

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If you go to Wendy’s this week, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to get a hamburger. Go to the supermarket and you’ll probably see some empty shelves in the meat section. You may also be restricted to buying one or two packs of whatever’s available. Try not to look at the prices. They’re almost definitely higher than what you’re used to.

This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago.

One of the far-downstream  consequences of the Current Situation that probably not too many people thought about when this started. My habit of cruising the remaindered meat aisle and freezing any good deals I find should serve me well. But, honestly, if meat costs a little more…so what? It’s not a problem for me. And, really, this is true of everything. No matter what it is…from caviar to plutonium to machine guns…it’s always available, it’s just expensive. If beef jumps a dollar a pound..:::shrug::: I can deal with it.

Of course, prices go up when supply is low. I can adjust. It’s when the product is completely unavailable…thats the problem. I’ve got a pretty goodly supply of animal flesh sitting in the freezer but thats very much an ‘eggs in one basket’ kind of thing. That freezer craps out on me, I lose a good 85% or so of mt supply of meat. Oh, I have the resources on hand to can it all if something like that happened, but I think that perhaps having more than one freezer should be the way to go. I’ve the generator to run them in case of a power failure, and should the power failure last longer than my generator can support, that still buys me time to can it all.

I’d been picking up more canned meats from CostCo these last two months….chicken and beef mostly. I’ve talked about the CostCo canned roast beef before and I highly recommend it. Canned chicken is canned chicken…it’s all pretty much the same. In addition to the canned meats I’ve a couple cases of Mountain House freeze dried pork chops, diced chicken, diced beef, and ground beef. And, yes, I am aware of canned bacon but I’m just not a huge bacon guy…I like bacon, but I can live without it.

Being the jaded survivalist, I wonder how much of this meat panic is genuine and how much of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy brought about by the media. Thus far, for me, in my locale, I haven’t seen any real change in pricing or availability but then again perhaps it takes a while for these effects to trickle down to flyover country. I’ll continue to buy my meat trays once a week and just keep working the vacuum sealer. A full freezer is never a bad idea, really, anyway.

Article – Ranks of Absent U.S. Food Inspectors Swell on Virus, Union Says

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Well, normally I take anything a union says with a big grain of salt. Add in another heaping tablespoon for it coming from Bloomberg. But…it makes sense.
As I pointed out to someone in comments earlier, most people just looked at the immediate consequences of this pandemic (“I might get sick”) and many fewer looked at the downstream consequences (“The guy who fixes my car might get sick and I need to have work done on it.”, “The guy who delivers the food to the market might call in sick”, “I may not be able to schedule that root canal in two weeks”, etc.)
Meat inspectors? Sure. Probably the same for vehicle inspectors, air safety inspectors, engineering inspectors, etc. (Which might underscore that perhaps we have too many inspections required in our everyday lives.) Occupancy permit for your new addition on your house? City inspector isn’t coming out. Vehicle inspection so you can renew your tags? Most garages are at half staff and have huge waiting lists. You get the idea.
All of this, though, is completely predictable if you think far enough out. What is it that you cannot do yourself and will bottleneck things if the person who does it is unavailable? Thats the question. The answer, of course, is to have a workaround in place…could be stockpiled materials, alternate vendors, DIY, or a Plan B to make do until later.
And, maybe, it’s a good idea to make sure the freezer is topped off. Just in case.

Article- Five threats to US food supply chains

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The coronavirus pandemic has upended food supply chains, led to closures of meat producing plants and left Americans with the unsettling experience of seeing empty shelves at supermarkets.

Coupled with the run on toilet paper that led to severe shortages, recent events are leading Americans to wonder if the nation’s food supply is secure.

Experts say that by and large, Americans don’t need to worry about food running out, but that does not mean all food will be readily available.

I’m seeing more and more articles like this pop up lately. The cynic in me says it’s simply the media looking for a new equine to flog. The conspiracy buff in me says it’s TPTB warming us up to the idea of Soviet-style grocery shortages. Regardless, I post the link here for your own scrutiny.

The article does make some sense about the threats to the food chain. For you TL;DR types, here they are:

  • Virus outbreaks at food plants
  • Agricultural reliance on guest workers
  • Supply chain mismatches
  • Increased food insecurity (Which really has nothing to do with the food chain)
  • Crunch on delivery capacity

The first one, virus outbreaks at food plants, are already happening as several meat processing plants have had to dial back. The rest…we shall see.

But despite all this, for now, my local supermarkets seem to be puttering along just fine. Of course, everything works fine right up until the point it doesn’t. Is this the calm before the storm of empty shelves? I have no idea. But… you don’t wait for a drought to dig a well, so if you’ve got some gaps in your pantry now might be a reasonable time to get ’em plugged.

 

Rice and networking

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There are a lot of reasons to zip your lip about your secret life as a survivalist. I won’t enumerate them all because if you’re reading this you’ve already figured most of them out. However, there are some advantages to having a few trusted fellow survivalists know about your interest – case in point:  I got a text message early in the morning from someone I know advising me that the local restaurant supply store had 50# sacks of long grain rice in stock.

I’d have missed that opportunity if someone I knew hadn’t kept an eye open on my behalf. So, there is some merit to having a few people (preferably fellow survivalists) know what you’re up to.

As an aside, I did wind up picking up a couple sacks of rice. Thing is, as it turned out, I was out of food grade 5-gallon buckets. Pro Tip: Keep extra buckets and lids on hand so that if there are any ‘last minute’ additions to your stockpile you can have the needed containers. The internet is full of expert advice on what is or is not considered a food grade bucket. And…none of it agrees. Just because your bucket has a ‘2’ stamped in the little recycling triangle doesn’t make it so. So, I headed off to Home Depot to look for a thick (.090 mil or better) HDPE food grade bucket. Turns out, they make it pretty easy to tell if the bucket is food grade:

Well, THAT was easy.

Conveniently, the bucket was, literally, marked as food grade. Cool. How many you got? I’ll take them all.

After that it was a quick washdown with 50/50 bleach/water, and then leave them to thoroughly dry. If the interior of the bucket doesn’t smell like a swimming pool after you wash it, wash it again and use more bleach.Then hammer on a couple Gamma Seal lids, fill with rice, slap a date label on there, and good to go.

This is actually one of myriads of ‘failures’ or oversights I am discovering that I have made. In this case, I should have had a stash of extra food-grade buckets around for last minute acquisitions-of-opportunity and that sort of thing.

I already had a couple hundred pounds of rice on hand but rice keeps forever, transports easily, and…I like it. So, why not grab another 150#?

While we are on the subject, here’s a collection of rice recipes. Me, I’m genetically predisposed towards towards arroz con pollo and, sure enough, that’s probably where tonights dinner is heading.

So, for those keeping track, here’s a Lesson Learned From The 2020 Flu: have extra storage containers on hand and in quantity for last-minute purchases or relocation/redistribution of supplies.

McGuyver meets Alton Brown

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Well, if I can’t go out to eat then I guess I gotta do my own thing.

A few months back I decided to experiment with chicken enchiladas (hmm..I would have thought there would be two ‘L’s in that). The tedious part is, of course, shredding the chicken. I’m a problem solver…I’m not gonna stand around with a couple forks compulsively shredding a piece of chicken. There’s gotta be an easier way. So, I put my outside-the-box way of thinking to work and… found what I have been told is a brilliant method: I put the chunks of chicken in my Cuisinart with the dull plastic ‘dough blade’ and turned it loose. The dull plastic blade did not cut up the chicken, but it shredded it like you wouldn’t believe. Perfect for my use.

So this week, I’ve had a hankering for a cheesesteak-style sandwich. Basically strips of paper thin beef cooked up with peppers and onions, slathered over a hoagie bun and melt some cheese over the whole thing. So…how to get that beef sliced up nice and thin. Well, I could cook a roast and then try to slice it really, really thin. Or I could freeze some beef and then try slicing it as thin as possible with a sharp knife. Not consistent enough. No… I had to think for a bit. As it turns out, typing ‘how to shave meat’ into Google brings you up a lot of results that have nothing to do with cooking. But…then an idea struck me. I took a simple cheap sirloin steak, threw it in the freezer, and let it solidify. Then, I reached into the kitchen drawer and pulled out one of these.

Worked perfectly.

I grabbed the frozen steak with a gloved hand and with the other hand I started going at the edge of it with the vegetable peeler like I was peeling a carrot. Long strips of paper-thin frozen meat started to pile up. When I had a couple handfuls I tossed em in the frying pan with some onions, green peppers, a shot of Tabasco, and waited for the rolls to get toasted int he toaster oven. Put it all together, melted some provolone on top and it was a thing of beauty.

I have some pork loin and chicken breast in the freezer now to try this on later. I think I may be on to something.

Signs of the times

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I don’t really need anything but, like the idiots that head to the beach after an earthquake to see the tsunami, I decided to go look and see what was available.

Two and a half years ago I posted about this place opening up and I took a picture of their rice and bean aisle:

And here is what it looks like today:

Whats interesting is that there’s even a bit of a run on…canning supplies. I stopped by WalMart to snag a dozen half-pint for making relish and……:

I already have hundreds of jars and lids, but I was curious to see how far the panic buying had gone. Answer: pretty far.

Shelf-stable Parmalat whole and 2% milk bricks? Yeah…gone.

I returned back to my abode and, to calm my nerves, took a walk through my stockpiles of LDS canned rice, oats, and macaroni…my 5-gallon buckets of rice, corn, sugar, and salt….my plastic bins of pasta….and my wall of Mountain House…..my 15-gallon drums of rice..and I am calm once more.

 

Convenience stores

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Like every smart survivalist, I try to keep a fairly good amount (and selection) of short- to mid-term foods on hand. Mostly stuff that I normally use and therefore can rotate through within a period of time of less than a year or so. Things like salsa, spaghetti sauce, pasta, canned meats, canned vegetables, etc, etc. I was doing an inventory and thought that I needed to round off a few things and beef up the amount of others. Since it was going to be a goodly amount of stuff, I figured I’d really nerd out and price compare my usual local grocery suppliers on their websites. As it turns out, unsurprisingly, Walmart wound up being the most economic supplier for about 85% of the things I was looking for. Okay, fine..now I know where to shop. And as I was on Walmarts doing this, I noticed that I had the option to simply order the stuff up, pay online, and simply roll up to the store the next day and have everything all boxed up and ready to go. Hmm. Okay, let’s try that.

And..it worked out quite well. I simply dumped the email confirmation that Walmart sent into Excel, took thirty seconds to clean it up, and then had a nice record of quantities and price-per-ounce breakdowns for comparison shopping later. And, when I went to pick up the stuff, it really was all of about four minutes to pick it up and stuff it in the back of the vehicle.

Say what you will about Wallyworld, they do take a bunch of the friction out of stocking up.

I’d been a bit remiss in updating the food stash lately…being able to just flop into a chair and add a case of crushed tomatoes, a dozen jars of salsa, a half dozen bottles of Tabasco, etc, into one list, pay for it, and then schedule a pickup the next day….thats some living in future right there, boyo.