The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Community => Coffee Lounge => Topic started by: Rich/Jan on February 06, 2012, 10:43:01 am
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Hi - ny OH says I keep enough food in my store cupboard to feed the 3rd world :wave: :wave: What do you keep in yours? I have about four different types of rice (4kg of each) porridge oats 6Kg, Pasta 7-8 different types including spaghetti, loads of different pulses, large 10kilo buckets of flour (white and brown), salt, sugar, lots of dried fruits, UHT milk approx 20 1ltr bottles, 24 bottles 2ltr water, loads of different spices, atora suet, pearl barley, different boxes of cereal, bottles of home preserved pears, peaches, plums and passata. Loads of sponges/cakes etc made when geese laying 6 a day!) We have four large freezers so meat etc isnt a problem unless the electricity goes off. Have I forgotten anything?? :thumbsup: :thumbsup: By the way we are only about 4 km from shops but cant always get out to them for one reason or another. Excessive I know - but it makes me feel happy to know I can knock up something to eat.
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I'm with you on this - siege mentality ;D I grew up in the wilds and we always had a well-stocked store cupboard (no freezers back then). For a while we lived in a city and my winter stores caused great amusement, but when the supermarkets couldn't get supplies through I was the smug one :D It seems the supermarkets don't keep stores but rely on daily deliveries, so I think it is essential to store enough yourself to get through an emergency.
Now we are in the wilds again and can expect to be cut off several times each winter. We have several freezers with a number of hoggets, pork and loads of fruit and veg, plus a frozen loaf and sometimes a bottle of frozen milk. I make jam and chutneys etc - enough for a couple of years ::) and they live under the bed :D. The store cupboard itself has some pasta and rice but we are not overly fond of that, all sorts of bought tinned stuff, masses of cat and dog emergency rations, a couple of pints of UHT milk and alot of dried milk, a little flour - must look into your buckets of flour as I make all our bread and worry about running out. I always have lots of sugar in case a jam-making opportunity arises ;D
I keep packets of seeds for sprouting so we can have some greenery through the winter, plus the garden is full of winter veggie staples.
In the barn, we try to keep enough bought animal feed to last us a couple of weeks, plus we have hay and straw stores for the whole winter.
In the past on a few occasions the only way out has been by trials bike, when even the Land Rover or tractor couldn't get through. Mostly it was because we had run out of dog food when we had 6 giant dogs. Now we have two tiny ones so we can store enough for them.
Finally, we have some ancient Army ration packs as an absolutely last resort. They date back from before the modern tasty meals our service men and women get now - they probably don't like them much, but they should have seen what was handed out years ago ;D
I should add that when the snow falls the leccie tends to go off too, so more difficult to cook complicated stuff
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I preserve, freeze etc for the year as well. Being prepared and storing for the year ahead has got my shopping bill down to £10.00 per week per person and thats mainly toiletries,flour and suchlike. I make everything from scratch so I need a well stocked pantry full of 'makings' as my mum calls them. I do buy a couple of tins of beans a week and those are the only tins you will find in my pantry. I dont stockpile for a siege though
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I hate you all! ;) ;D I am not at all organised. I have enough food to last me about a week. I don't batch cook. I make jam and chutney in the summer/autumn but that's the closest I get to stock piling! ::) ;D ;D
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The wafe has always thought me mad, I beieve you should have a least 2 week rations/food on top of normal eats. including water purifree tablets and fuel for cooking on (small but useful camping gas cooker) during the year we make as much bottled stuff, from jams to pickles etc.
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We have 2 chest freezers, for frozen goats milk, bread, veg, fruit, meat, +some meat for dogs, lots of reduced dated stuff that OH picks up from supermarkets.
In the cupboard we have baked beans, a few tins of soup for a quick hot warm up, a tin of peaches, 1 evaporated milk, couple of tins of ham + tuna, jams, chutneys, dried apples + onions, small sack of rice, + I keep a good supply of COFFEE!, + flour, sugar, basic staples etc. we have solid fuel rayburn (run on wood), so apart from the freezers I think we'd manage without electric for a few days, with electric a good week to 10 days. We are sometimes snowed in a few days at a time, can't get a vehicle near so I like to keep stocked up rather than lugging stuff up half mile track, usually against the wind and snow :(. Actualy just remembered we have a generator that would run the freezers and the main rooms of the house, so we should be OK.
We are on our own water supply, but I've known us go and get it from the cattle trough (collected from entry point) and boil it when the house water was frozen, same water, just comes down through different pipes.
I should really keep more in for the goats, there is plenty of hay, but concentrates are only brought in as they run down.
Buy dog food in sacks and their tins in 12's, so hopefully would have enough in for a while, fussy dog would just have to get used to eating complete mix.
And a few bottles of wine for those long dark nights ;D
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with 4 kids its not often our cupboards are full.....they eat sooo much!
lol :yum: :yum: :yum:
tho no-one has eaten my homegrown pickled onions, they are fierce!
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Due to shortages and lack of work, our stock pile is deminishing, we ate the stored mixed up eggs, the pancakes, all the cakes that I froze, stock and soups and in all have had some yummy and cheap meals, we have finnaly used up most of the berries picked in the local woods and nearly all the fish and meat, although we still have some brown trout fished locally, I stock pile any fish thats cheap or on offer too, otherwise I tend just to buy tin beans and toms and tuna and they have nearly all gone too...loads of rice, I like a lot of that stored as the dogs and chickens can also eat that, lots of flour but that gets its own wild life if left too long and of course good old porrage if all else fails, the freezer used to be full of breakfast stuff but not at the mo,,,,,we also just defrosted a half price rangers cake.....If this post is full of mistakes and rude typo's sorry, not sure whats got into me at the moment but I am having issues but missing letters out !!! ;D ;D
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Lots of Tins, lots of flour and sugar - all good and will get used .....my big prob is blackcurrants, we had a massive crop in our first summer here last year, not a big freezer (need to rectify that before pig d day later this month) so did loads of preserved jars as I could not see them go to waste. I have about 3 dozen left and running out of ideas what to do with them - apple and blackcurrant crumble is the staple. Gonna start having blackcurrant nightmares if they are still in my cupboard in June!!
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Now I have to admit I take the mick out of my OH for his siege mentality and stockpiling but the main reason for this is that he stockpiles stuff like tins of spam and corned beef which I loathe with a passion and he has admitted he doesn't like either! They just seem to fit into his mental image of siege rations!
The last lot I put my foot down on and fed to the feral cats that live on our street and they turned their noses up at it too!
I'm all for being prepared but can't see the point in preparing to be miserable!
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We always stock up for the winter with animal food. I have two big freezers that has enough food to do us for weeks as we can get blocked in.
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I did a "winter apocalypse" stock up.... cat litter (I don't have cats...but someone said if the loo froze up... I'll let you figure it out :o )
More normal rations:
tinned tomatoes
tinned tuna
tinned salmon
bulk teabags, coffee
a little bit of rice / dried beans / tinned beans (I don't eat these, but in an emergency they'll do)
lots of herbs and spices, inc dried tomatoes, mushrooms, chestnuts, wakame, and I have just run out of Whitworths mixed dried veg
my freezer is running low but normally have meat and fish
I tend to stockpile spuds and roots
Next year (this year! eek!) I want to dry as much as I can in terms of fruit and veg :)
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We've got three freezers with a lot of lamb, and about 25kg of preserves plus an unquantifiable amount of honey. OH is really good at keeping the dry goods in circulation but we don't keep a lot of tinned food: perhaps a dozen tins of corned beef and tuna.
We do have a standby generator because we get power cuts of a few hours. Unfortunately it's petrol so we keep 100 litres of petrol as well as a lot more red diesel. We're thinking about converting it to propane. We also have 12,000 litres of rainwater storage cos this is drought area.
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We have a very tall upright freezer full, a fridge freezer full and a small chest freezer which I have just bought for when Curry the goat becomes Curry the joints. Tins of beans, tomatoes, tuna, salmon, sardines, pilchards (I like fish), loads of pulses, lots of flour, pasta, oats, tea bags (OH would emigrate if we ran out of tea bags), hot chocolate, onions, potatoes, goat food, hay (I have a small barn which holds six bales but also have six bales in the garage), two spare sacks of dog food, two sacks fo carrots. Don't think we'll starve.
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2 freezers full of meat (mainly pork ;)) one that has last summers rasps, bread, ice-cream etc.
Store cupboards, beans, uht milk, pulses, pasta, rice, chocolate(as in galaxy!), coffee, pickles & jams. Sack of spuds & onions in the utootie and sack dog grub.
Outside tonne pig nuts, horse carrots and remains of apple harvest so nobody will starve.
We also keep a camping stove, candles and logs/coal as being all electric we have issues every time theres a sniff of strong winds/snow.
Love making store cupboard meals, very comforting. :)
mandy :pig:
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Freezer full of pork plus last years veg (carrots, broccoli, runner beans, french beans, sweetcorn)
Pickled beetroot/onions
Plaited garlic and onions, although they're beginning to grow, wish I'd dried more of the garlic!
Dried garlic ;D
Cupboard of last years potatoes
tinned last years tomatoes
Ridiculously big bags of rice and pasta and flour
My girlfriend still feels the need to constantly shop at the supermarket after saying "but we have nothing in"! Although, to be fair, she often comes back with chocolate which I don't complain about. Really wish I could grow my own chocolate but then I probably wouldn't have room for growing anything else!
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We have had no water to the house for days and the tap in the cellar has now burst ! So all our dried foods and stuff in the freezer will have to be cooked in snow melt until the water people turn up. We are making bread and are really hitting the different jams made a few months back.
Chris has just walked in with 2 leaks that she broke off above snow level to make yet more soup. Now she is back with spuds from the cellar. She does not know yet that these will be frozen as today ( for the first time) the cold has penetrated the cellar floor causing ice to erupt upwards and the butternut squash I fed to the pigs to freeze.
Despite all our stores we now realise that water and cooking fuel ( bottled gas) are just as imporatnt to us.
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Wow richnJan, what did you start?
very interesting seeing what people keep in and how we all stock up (much of the same things I see), but I'm curious -
UHT milk, do people voluntary drink that stuff? or are one or two kept in just for winter and does anyone check the sell by dates of all this 'fodder'? ??? Goats milk freezes well so we are buying cow milk and keeping goat milk for back up.
MAK you sound like you're getting it bad over there, what temperatures are you getting? I was reading even Venice has frozen up.
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UHT milk is standard here and fresh milk is variously kept with the fresh fruit juice ( veg department) cheese or the yogurt isles. We have stacks as we expect long cold winters.
What temperatures you ask? Who knows as it is so local and differs from the meteor reports. Our plumer was in the next valley at 09:00 today and it was -20. The sun came out and was warm on our face ( Chris is now pink) but we stuck a thermometer on the log pile and it was -6. Warm compared to recent days.
Bit fed up with the challenge of getting water for us and the animals. We have 2 buckets of snow in the house to flush the loo but they are not melting. We have just drunk beer and wine since 6:00 PM to conserve what water we have left. Ahhh frozen sprouts have just gone on. We froze loads but need not have bothered as somewhere out there I have 3 rows of the buggers. :wave:
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Have added 'smash' (flocons of dried potato) to my list. Only one box and it does have its uses. Watching TV the other day and saw a TV chef use it in a batter mix to make a type of griddle scone with smash added. Thought Id give it a go one day next week. Might not like it so the pigs will give it a go rather than waste it. I normally add sweetcorn to my griddle scone and sometimes peppers for a change, maybe all three would be good?
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Gin.
Stays in date for ages, at least I've never had a bottle go out of date. And on the same theme, painkillers.
I used to chide my mother for her medicine cupboard which had a very comprehensive collection of prescription drugs. Now I know why she kept them.