Wow! Mombu Cuisine - a cooking forum - recommended this site and gave it an 8.4 rating. I’m happy with that.

Thanks Tager!

Country Kitchen Pantry Recommendation.

Since I work at a restaurant that serves awesome deli sandwiches, I get to bring home empty pickle jars that are very helpful as far as keeping my staples goes. Each is filled with a different vegetarian delight food like hummus mix, lentils, brown rice, and falafel mix. I truly enjoy looking at the jars full of goodies. They are so colorful - and the textures are all different.

I think falafel mix is particularly good, health-wise. It is made from chick peas. I’ve had some that was too spicy, but what I buy up in Medford, Oregon is excellent quality and enjoyable. If I were hiking in the wilderness with a little stove, this is one food I’d take with me for nutrition and to provide lightweight staples. You can mix falafel mix with cooked, crushed beans to produce a thick textured burger patty. Fry that up, and eat in a hamburger bun with all the condiments, lettuce, onion, and tomato.

Recently my significant other, the magnificent Bob, decided to make beans and rice the new staple of his diet. First let me say I’m very proud of this man. He was a meat eater all his life until gout stopped him from eating 90% of the foods he loved, including red meat. Now he’s recovering thanks to some medication, but rather than going back to the bad diet, he’s adjusted to being mostly vegetarian, though he still eats fish. I don’t, so we usually don’t share meals. He cooks what he wants and I cook what I want. I’ve gone on a vegan diet. Anyhow, as I was about to say, Bob wants to eat rice and beans. So I’ve been cooking them, keeping them on hand in the fridge. I’ve been using pinto beans. The rice and beans fill several jars in my pantry. I find that when I’m cooking them constantly, I go through the beans pretty fast - so I need more than one of the gallon jars full of them.

I have granola in one jar. I’ve been using that to make the sweet treat I mentioned in my last post. More on that in another post. I’ve morphed the recipe into breakfast bars! Recipe to be announced SOON. I keep the rice flour in another gallon jar, and cinnamon I bought in bulk in another smaller jar. Cinnamon and rice flour provide the outer coating for these treats.

Anyhow, if you need jars, ask at your local restaurant or deli. If they use pickles, they probably have more jars than they want. The one gallon mayonnaise jars are plastic, but they’re handy too… I use them for pasta and beans.

Suggestion: Stock up on as many dry staples as you can.

I was in the mood for a sweet treat tonight. Now first I must explain, I’ve recently gone on a vegan diet, with lots of raw food. So I wanted something healthy, sweet, and preferably not cooked.

I used a blender, but this is probably better for a food processor, using the s-blade.

Peanut Butter Granola Rounds

1 + 1/2 cups granola
1/4 cup peanut butter
4 tablespoons real maple syrup

Blend, process, whatever, until this is the consistency of cookie dough.

Roll into balls and dredge in a mixture of rice flour and cinnamon.

I could only eat two. This definitely took away my craving for sweets, and I’ll have something in the freezer for ‘next time’.

Here’s more sad news from the economic crisis. People are selling their prized possessions and heirlooms to get enough money to pay for their basic living necessities. I haven’t gotten that desperate, but perhaps it is because I’m already living in affordable circumstances and haven’t lost my job. In fact, I’m starting a new business to supplement the money I make working in a local restaurant, so I’m hoping for better times and not worrying about how to pay the electric bill.

But many Americans are apparently that desperate already. This article, Americans unload prized belongings to make ends meet by Anne D’Innocenzio, an AP business writer, was published in the Sacramento Bee on April 29, 2008. The writer states that people are selling their belongings to pay utility bills, buy gasoline, buy food…

This is tragic… and I wonder what percentage of the population is having to sell things now. I haven’t noticed anything like that here in the mountains where I live.

Yesterday I was at the laundromat when an acquaintance came in and started talking about her frustrating day at work. We talked for maybe an hour, ending on the crisis in the world’s economy, poor choice of presidential candidates, and things like that. It seems that most people are aware now that something is dreadfully wrong in America, that someone is controlling us, forcing us into poverty, making America into a nation of slaves.

Have you ever considered that? America IS a nation of slaves. We are forced to work five days a week to be able to afford to live in this civilization. If we wanted to live off the land, that’s not allowed. We can’t camp full time in the National Forests. We have to buy land, so that means working, for most of us. Yes, I know some people own their land outright and have the cash reserves to live without working, but most of us work day after day, year after year, just to be solvent.

For those that can’t work, the crisis has shown its sharpest edge… that precipice between having something to hold onto and the fall into homelessness and despair. For those of us who are not at that point yet, it is unkind to pretend there’s no disaster looming, or to say we shouldn’t try to prepare for the worst, in case our homes are visited with the dreadful disease of poverty next.

My main theme here is “Wake up! Wake up! Things are changing.” Thanks for reading this far.

All the best to all of you.

A few days ago I watched Sean Penn’s 2007 movie about Chris McCandless, Into The Wild. A true story that I was already familiar with, the film is about an idealistic 24-year-old college graduate from a wealthy family who gave away his life savings and hiked alone into the Alaskan wilderness, where he starved to death after about 112 days. The film gave a shocking look at the deterioration of the human body and mind as the actor apparently lost weight, taking in his belt by cutting new notches several times. Eventually he was totally emaciated and mentally disoriented.

Other symptoms of starvation are anemia, decreased ability to digest food, swelling under the skin, and shrinking vital organs such as the heart and lungs as they lose their ability to function. Mentally it causes irritability and an inability to concentrate. It takes only two to three months of severe malnutrition to die of starvation.

I’m writing about starvation because I’ve been shocked by the specter of high food prices and lack of availability of certain staples. In Asia people have been rioting because they can’t buy rice. Here in America some large stores are restricting the amount of rice people can buy. In Mexico people rioted because they couldn’t afford the new high price of corn tortillas. And in Africa, the wheat crop is ruined by Ug99, the fungus that threatens to destroy wheat crops around the world. I wrote about that a few days ago in Ug99, the Destruction of Wheat Crops, and Prices In Our Local Supermarkets.

Scientists predict that millions will starve because of Ug99.

So, out of concern for my fellow human beings I am asking you to consider the issue of food storage. I believe most Americans are so accustomed to having our needs provided for, we’re not prepared for the fact that everything could change overnight. If gasoline becomes unavailable, which could happen, trucking companies will not be able to supply supermarkets and our food supplies will be cut off. My significant other, who is pretty good at analyzing news and predicting the future based on what he reads, believes this could happen very quickly if war is declared against Iran.

There’s a way to prepare your family. Food storage. This means buying as much food as you can afford to, and keeping your cabinets fully stocked at all times. Of course when you prepare meals you should use the oldest foods first, and rotate the supplies you store. Food, even canned food, loses some of it’s nutritive value after a while.

I’d like to explore this idea further and will prepare some lists of things that should be stored for an emergency. I don’t want to sound paranoid or fatalistic, but I truly believe this American nation is going through hard times and that things are likely to get worse before they get better. I don’t want to see people starving. I hope with passion that my words will touch someone’s heart so that they’ll get a good supply of food stored and save themselves and their babies from hunger.

All the best to all of you…