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Self-Sufficiency
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Meatless sausage

meatless-sauage2

I’m not a vegan, a vegetarian or anything remotely like that, I have nothing against anyone who chooses not to eat meat, they have more willpower than I do :)
That being said, in the past, I have tried some of the meatless burger and sausage patties, honestly they tasted OK, just OK, but each time I tried them I ended up with stomach issues, quite frankly it was bad enough that NO ONE would want to be around me for the rest of that day into the next… most of those meatless products are made with soy, something I avoid like the plague, most soy is GMO now, plus the fact that soy mimics estrogen so for most of us, that is not a good thing.

I’ve seen recipes for meatless burgers, often made with TVP (which is soy based), beans, rice, various other grains, quite frankly none of them looked very interesting or good, not enough to get me to try to make them, I’m just not that on board for substituting for meat products……

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June 24, 2013 3 Comments
Community

Freezer-fridge conversion update

Had to clean out my fridge today, while that’s not such a big deal to most, to me it’s (almost) a pleasure to do because of the kind of fridge I have. Living off-grid, using solar panels and batteries, on limited power, one looks for ways to use as little power as possible, one of the things I found that really ate up my power was my little, tiny dorm sized cube refrigerator, the kind that opened in front, had a tiny tiny tiny freezer, in fact I couldn’t even put a full size ice tray inside it, they make micro-ice cube trays.

Most of the time I didn’t even plug in that cube fridge, we just learned to live without refrigeration for the most part, honestly it just sucked up too much precious photon juice from my system. So on the odd occasion when I brought home a gallon of milk, or some meat that didn’t get used up quickly, I would plug in the darned thing and wonder how much time it was taking from my surfing the internet…

With the cube fridge, it ran 15+ minutes at a time, a couple of times an hour, more if I actually opened the door, think about it, when you open the door on a standard fridge, all the cold air drops out of the box onto your feet, feels good for the moment but the compressor kicks in immediately to compensate for all that lost cold air.

I’ll not go into detail about this because I’ve written about it (in detail) in previous posts here… this is really just a follow up on how well I like (love) my chest freezer-fridge conversion. :)…

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June 16, 2013 11 Comments
Self-Sufficiency

Slums – testbeds for new ways of living

We should not romanticise slums, but informal settlements can teach us a lot about society and the economy of resources.

Its amazing , for example, how most of us who live in cities, pay lip service to recycling – doing a bit here and there – consisting mainly of throwing bottles into the correct colored bag for the garbage disposal company to deal with.

The informal settlements of the global south could not be further removed from the financial centers where most of us spend our lives. But recycling is something that slum inhabitants do naturally, without expensive schemes.

In the slums you can find a whole new social geography … re-focus on adaptation and reuse and using scarcity as a resource to highlight the aspects that function better than the formal city around it.…

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June 1, 2013 No Comments
Community

Just say NO to GMO

no-gmo Little by little I have been actively working on removing GMO foods from my pantry, to make it more painless I focus on one food or one food group at a time.

I have always been an avid label reader, when my (now grown) son was a child, he had been diagnosed with ADHD, something that is unfortunately all too common, especially in boys. One of the things we did was to modify his diet by removing everything, and I do mean everything that was any sort of sugar, that meant every ingredient that ended in “ose”, the only exception to that was lactose, fortunately that didn’t seem to bother him. Some of the items removed from his diet was sucrose (table sugar), glucose, sucrose, dextrose, fructose, the hardest one was dextrose, that can even be found in table salt! As long as we kept his diet going, he behaved so much better, fortunately I was a prolific and adventurous cook, I had no problems making anything he wanted or needed, my son and the rest of us ate quite well. It’s my son’s birthday today, happy birthday Josh!…

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May 18, 2013 3 Comments
Community

Scorpion season

scorpion2In a recent article, I talked about all the critters that poke, stick, sting and bite, one of those critters we deal with out here are the scorpions, and it’s the beginning of scorpion season now. A few years back, we had a rash of them inside the sky castle, we were killing one and two a night, every night. They become active after dark, coming out to hunt other insects, mostly crickets and such. I wouldn’t mind except for their nasty sting. When we had that bad rash of them, I had been sitting in front of my laptop one evening, it was warm, I was wearing shorts, I felt something on my leg next to my knee, I thought it was a fly and absentmindedly brushed my leg with my hand, that was the first time (and hopefully last time) I got hit by a scorpion, I have to say, it HURTS!…

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May 12, 2013 3 Comments
Community

Life in the sky castle

I sit looking out the window, my view is magnificent, I am looking down across a high desert mountain valley, words cannot describe the beauty of the landscape that falls below me, but this is a harsh beauty, full of plants, bugs and critters that poke, stick, sting and bite. Some might find this a torture, I find it to be my Heaven on earth.

PB and I moved out here 5 years ago this last December, in some ways it was a huge move, in other ways it felt like coming home. After buying up just under 6 acres on a mountain side, in the high desert of far western Texas, one of the first things PB did was build our cabin, what would become our sky castle. …

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May 11, 2013 No Comments
Community

Trailersteading – book review

trailersteadingcoversmHow many of you would like (love?) to to have your own place and live for just what you’d pay in taxes? Assuming you already have a piece of land (hint, look for so called “junk” land and you can often have it for a song)… Well that’s precisely what Anna Hess and her husband Mark did.…

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April 28, 2013 No Comments
Community

One more tragedy

Boston bombing victim 3 lu lingziWith the tragedy of the bombing in Boston, this is just one more reminder that we need to be prepared for as many different situations as possible. First I want to say how saddened I am by the actions of whoever is responsible, this is an unspeakable tragedy to those who were injured, killed and traumatized by this bombing, to all their friends and families.…

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April 19, 2013 1 Comment
People

New Lives in the Wild – TV series

glasheenAt last – a TV series about living off the grid that does not patronise or belittle the lifestyle. Instead New Lives in the Wild but allows the stories to come out of the real lives of real people with something to say.

Presenter Ben Fogle meets people who left the modern world behind; He wrote about it in the British Daily Telegraph.”My long-suffering wife Marina has become accustomed to my returning from wild expeditions with suggestions for a new life. I’ve never acted on such impulses. But what sort of people do follow their wildest dreams?…

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April 14, 2013 6 Comments
Community

Mom takes care of everything! pt 2

MOMMOM, aka milk of magnesia, it’s incredible stuff! I wrote about using it as a deodorant, it works very well for that… now we will talk about the other good things this miraculous white liquid does. Would you ever think of putting what is essentially a laxative on your face? I do it, why you might ask? Read on!…

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April 12, 2013 No Comments
Community

The persuasive prepper: convincing loved ones to prepare

It would seem that I’m not the only blogger/prepper who is also worried about getting family on board for prepping. I can’t impress upon you just how important this is, the more people around you who are also ready for whatever may be coming down the pike, the better off YOU will be, the fewer people you will either have to share with (meaning less food and supplies for YOU and YOUR household) or the fewer you will have to turn away in an emergency situation, neither scenario is a good one. Daisy Luther recently wrote about how to get your loved ones to get ready, to be prepared, to be more responsible for taking care of themselves and their households……

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April 6, 2013 No Comments
Community

Dry canning ground beef

dry canning ground beef

There are 3 main ways of preserving meat, freezing, drying and canning, I’m sure there are a few more ways but those are the main ways we do it. Freezing meat is probably the most common method, the problems with freezing meats are if you leave it in your freezer for too long, especially if it’s not property packaged, you will find a nasty case of freezer burn when you open the package. There is also the risk of losing what is in your freezer if there is a power outage or your freezer fails. Today we will talk about preserving one of the cheapest meats, ground beef.…

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March 31, 2013 5 Comments