Prepping « Robin Writes

Like I said last week, you have to prepare for you and your family. It does no good to have a lot of extra stuff, like food you can’t stand. Of course, we’ll all have to make some sacrifices when SHTF, but you may as well try to make things as easy as possible.

Let’s start with breakfast:

For our family of three-plus, granola is a big staple. It has oats, sugar, protein, and fruit. And it keeps really well:

Robin’s Granola Recipe

3 cups rolled oats (regular oatmeal, not instant)

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

3/4 dry roasted peanuts

1/2 cup honey

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup dried fruit

Mix oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, and peanuts. In separate bowl, mix honey, oil, vanilla; pour over oats, mix thoroughly.

Spread evenly on cookie sheet and bake at 300 degrees for about 30 minutes, until toasted, stirring halfway through.

When done, remove from oven and sprinkle with dried fruit. Do not stir. Allow to cool, then scoop into container.

I keep mine in a freezer bag, stays fresh for about two weeks or longer. When you get down to the crumbs, you can eat it just like cereal.

This makes about 4 cups, which is roughly 8 servings.

So, in order to feed my family breakfast—using only granola—for three months, a standard supply, it would take about 32 batches. Sealed properly, granola could last a long time; I’d suggest freezing, which is fine unless the power goes out, or oven canning. I watched a video on this other day, with crackers, and I’m sure it’d work with granola too. In a 225-degree oven, it took 20-30 minutes.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure my preference would be to eat granola every single day for three months. I would, I could, but let’s look at other options:

I buy bacon on sale and freeze it; there is also shelf-stable bacon available. Love bacon! You can, of course, do the same with other breakfast meats. You can also can meat, although I haven’t tried that and not sure I’d want to . . .

As long as you’re buying oats for granola, you could also just prepare oatmeal. Don’t forget the items you eat ON your oatmeal. And, of course, skip the sugary, flavored varieties. That goes for cereal, too.

Bread, coffeecake, and other baked goods can be prepared and frozen. Learning to bake from scratch is important—what happens when the grocery store shelves are bare?

Whatever you do, prepare for three months—and this usually isn’t gathering and cooking and preserving for three months and stopping. You have to rotate, so foods don’t go bad—since you’re now cooking without preservatives, the commercial kind, some foods don’t last as long. But that’s a good thing! It’s much better for you. So you have to keep it up, on a regular basis, for many items.

Look at packaged foods and see what the recommended servings are. For example, two pieces of bread make a sandwich, so for three people I’d calculate six slices per day. There are about 10 servings in a loaf of commercial bread, so for my family of three I’d need 40 loaves of bread for three months—assuming we eat bread every day, which we usually do not. Let’s guesstimate a total of 26 loaves instead, or two-thirds.

Now, I’m obviously not going to bake that much bread and leave it in the freezer, even given the rotation schedule and assuming I had enough space, but if you know how to bake, you can always bake—even without gas or electric power.

I suggest getting started!

So we made a list. A long one. And we seem to be looking for that elusive property farther and farther away. At this point, we have two “maybes.” And they’re both about a seven on a scale of 1-10. It’s not that we’re picky, exactly, but so many of them have had so very much wrong!

I’ve told you about the cave property, which could be really cool. But the building site, about the only one we could see, is really close to the property line. Plus, it’s kind of a funny shape, really narrow where you’d have to actually get to the building site.

This past weekend, we went south about 90 minutes’ driving time. Beautiful country down there, and it was just a bit past another property we’d seen recently, the one where you had to drive and then walk a bit past all the junkyards. Or houses with junk. Either/or.

Sunday’s venture was 60 acres within a “subdivision.” Now, that could be an actual suburban-type subdivision or a legal subdivision, wherein the land was legally divided. Government can be confusing.

Anyway, the directions said “go through the gate,” so we did. The road was decent, and we came to a large pond on the right. The property started just before that pond, and it was shared with 3-4 other landowners; the line went through the south end. Obviously it was a local party spot, but in better condition that some I’ve seen . . . and there were a lot of ATV trails and old mining roads. We wound around, using the map on my iPhone to locate ourselves, had to back up a few times on the more narrow stretches, and finally parked and walked down a trail to the lake.

Yes, this includes a 10-acre lake. Which adjoins the state penitentiary. The one that houses the inmates on death row. Right smack across that lake.

Now, don’t get me wrong—if we built around there, which seems to be the most feasible, there are a lot of obstacles between us and the prison: trees, a big lake, more trees, a huge open area (well-trimmed), a high razor-wired fence, a yard, block walls and guard towers . . . you get the idea.

And there’s only ever been one escape. In 1994. Twenty years ago. So, you could look at that both ways: either it’s darn near impossible, or they’re due for another.

We hiked around a bit, and went into “town.” Population 400, so said the sign, but I’m thinking it was more like 150. A larger town is five or so minutes away, pop. 3000. Not bad. Anyway, we stopped in at the local store in the tiny town. The locals were all very friendly, said a lot of people had looked but no one pursued it. Said the seller was a very nice man. Good enough.

So this could work. No, not worried about the prison. More importantly, getting a well drilled and some kind of electric could be expensive. Although my husband thinks playing around on a bulldozer could be fun, too . . . I’d give this a seven, or an eight.

Next time—even further south!