Know your Plastics

Plastic is one of the most common items in the world. We make everything out of it, but not all plastics are created equal. Some are good, most are bad. If you turn over any plastic item it should have a recycling symbol with a number in it. Occasionally this number will not be there, unless it says PP in the symbol in place of a number it should be discarded. The number system identifies the type of plastic, PP denotes polypropylene, which is food safe. If there is no identification, assume the worst and throw it away. Plastic products are full of chemicals, many can leech into food and water, some simply deposit chemicals like BPA (Bis phenol-A) on everything they touch. Most of these chemicals are long term dangers, in a survival situation, use whatever you have to. In the case of prepping food and water for said survival situation, keep these things in mind. It is a good habit to be in, just in case the apocalypse never comes, it would be nice to live to a healthy old age. 

#1 PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) Not food grade, avoid if possible.
Commonly used in soda bottles, water bottles, cooking oil containers. Should be avoided for anything other than water. They can leach antimony and phthalates. Not really any short term danger but not good for food storage, especially acidic contents.


#2 HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) Food grade, safe to use.
Commonly used in milk jugs, plastic bags, and garbage cans. This is the most common plastic you will find. It's widely used in the food service industry. Generally the big blue plastic barrels everyone uses for emergency water are made of this material as well.


#3 PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride, aka Vinyl): Not food grade, avoid if possible.
Commonly used in condiment bottles, shower curtains, Saran wrap, and toys.
Can leach lead and phthalates and other nasty chemicals. Can also release toxic gases when heated or exposed to chemicals.


#4 LDPE (Low Density Polyethylene): Food grade, safe to use.
Commonly used in grocery bags, food containers.


#5 PP (Polypropylene) Food grade, safe to use.
Commonly used in Gladware, water bottles and bottle caps.


#6 PS (Polystyrene, aka Styrofoam): Not safe, do not use.
Commonly used goddamn everywhere.
Can leach carcinogenic styrene and estrogenic alkylphenols. It's also about the worst thing for the environment on this list.


#7 Can be a variety of plastics, some are safe, most are not. If it doesn't specify, avoid.
PC (Polycarbonate) Avoid at all costs, it can leach Bis phenol-A (BPA). Also commonly used in thermal receipt tape so avoid that as well.
ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene), S. AN (Styrene Acrylonitrile), Acrylic, and Polyamide fall into this category too. They are safer, but not great. Some require a bit more research as well before I would trust them.

New plant-based, biodegradable plastics like PLA (Polylactic Acid) also fall into the #7 category and are food grade.

Wild Onion Soup

Now that you've made your own stock, time to make soup! I did a post about this time last year titled "Food is everywhere" To revisit this concept we will be making wild onion soup. Wild onions are easily spotted about this time of year. Commonly called onion grass, they look quite like a small patch of tall grass. Once you notice them, you can't help but see them everywhere. Dig up the taller clumps and pull out the bigger bulbs. They really do grow like weeds so unless you have a lot of time on your hands don't bother with the smaller ones. In a survival situation they can be eaten right out of the ground, though caloric content is pretty low. The flavor is like a cross between a chive and a green onion. Gather a whole bunch and clean them thoroughly. Chop off the roots and remove the bulb just below where it begins to turn green.

Ingredients-

-2 cups wild onion bulbs, cleaned and sliced in half lengthwise
-6 cloves garlic, chopped
-1/3 of a stick of butter
-1 tablespoon rendered chicken fat (optional but recommended)
-6 cups chicken broth (or beef)
-1 cup white wine (red if using beef)
-4 ounces beer (pale ale for chicken, stout for beef)
-1 tablespoon flour, (Any type will do)
-Salt and pepper to taste
-2 tablespoons Herbs De Provance or preferred French herb blend
-Sliced Baguette
-Provolone cheese, sliced

Melt butter and chicken fat in a large pot, add onions. Wild onion takes awhile to soften, saute for about 15-20 minutes until they begin to brown. This is where the chicken fat makes a difference, butter may not brown them much. When the onions are almost done add the garlic. Sprinkle flour on top and cook for an additional two or three minutes to cook off the raw flour taste. Add the wine and beer and bring to boil. Simmer until all the liquid is gone then pour in broth. If using home made stock I like to pre-mix it but you can do it in the pot, start with 3 cups water and add stock till it tastes right. Add herbs, salt and pepper, simmer uncovered for an hour. Taste and add spice as needed.

Toast the sliced baguette till it's quite crispy. Fill an oven safe bowl with soup and float the bread on top, cover with cheese and broil until the cheese browns.

Homemade Stock

How often do you take those little cubes you put in your "home made" chicken soup for granted? Without the flavor that bullion cubes or canned chicken stock gives your soup, it comes out flat and boring. Kinda like boiled chicken with salt and garlic. Well the beauty of this post is that not only will it teach you to make your own stock, but it will teach you to be less wasteful. It also saves a ton of money. Throwing away this source of nutrition would be a big no no when you're trying to survive. You can make stock from the bones of any animal, though chicken and beef are the most common. For this one let's start with chicken, as the process is pretty similar either way. The basic idea is to boil bones low and slow to get all that tasty marrow out. Pretty easy right?

Ingredients-

-One dead chicken 

-Whatever vegetables you have in the fridge

-All drippings left over from cooking aforementioned dead chicken

-Salt

Start with a whole roaster chicken, prepare it however you like. If you're planning on making soup, roasting the whole chicken is best, save the drippings. Put the meat in the fridge or freezer to add to the soup after the stock is done. Butchering first is fine too, just save all the bones and skin. They can be frozen as well, I like to save up two or three chicken carcasses and boil them all at once. Add all the bones to a big stockpot or crockpot and cover with water. Now add everything else. I prefer the slow cooker method as it uses less energy but on the stove is just fine too. (next project will be the solar cooker) As far as vegetables, I like to make sure I at least have a half onion per chicken and a few cloves of garlic. The more stuff you use, the better the flavor. Celery, potatoes, leeks, scallions, and apples have all worked well for me. You can add spices if you'd like, bear in mind it will limit what you can do with the stock.

If using a slow cooker, put on low and simmer for a minimum of twelve hours. For stovetop, bring to boil and turn down to simmer for twelve hours as well. The longer it goes, the better. I prefer over 24 hours. After it's boiled for as long as you like, remove from heat and strain out all the solids. The veggies are great for the dog, but for the most part the rest is garbage. To be as thorough as possible I put aside the big bones and let them cool long enough to handle them. Break the bones in half and put them in a pot on the stove and add the stock. Add salt to taste, it should be very salty, maybe double what you would put in the same amount of soup. Boil the stock uncovered for an additional hour. This removes some of the water content and gets the last little bit out of the bones. Boiling it down really just saves space for storage, if you're going to be making soup soon you can skip this step. After the hour, remove the last of the bones and pour off the stock into a tall container. For one chicken a quart size container is usually perfect.

Refrigerate overnight. The next day you will see all the fat has separated from the stock underneath, skim off and save. Pictured left is a beef stock a friend made. The stock should have the consistency of gelatin, if it's still runny, boil it down some more. Distribute the stock out to smaller containers and store in the freezer. If done properly it can be canned as well. I haven't tried this yet so I won't speculate. I prefer pouring it into ice cube trays, one cube equals roughly two servings of soup depending on how concentrated you manage to get it. For the fat there is a multitude of uses. Chicken fat can be a substitute for butter in most recipes, pork and beef fat make great candles. (See previous post) I like to add it back in when I roast my chickens, it concentrates the flavor and you don't have to add oil or butter.

The reason your mom always made you chicken soup when you were sick is for all the health benefits of stock. Being made from bone marrow it gives an immune system boost. It also helps the the healing process along, especially in the case of a broken bone or joint injury.  These home remedies have gone by the wayside in recent years, hopefully things like this will make a comeback.

Pine pitch torch.

Dandelion Mead

This is a mead that I've been wanting to brew for the better part of a year, I just never seemed to get around to it. So today while wandering around outside the shop on my lunch, I noticed how many dandelions had flowered in the last day or so. In about twenty minutes I had enough picked for a one gallon batch. This is a good one for beginners due to the small amount. From what Ive read to make dandelion flower tea (You can make a tea from the leaves, but it is quite bitter) you need about eight flowers per twelve ounces of tea. One thing I have noticed about mead is that you lose quite a bit of flavor after racking, so I tend to make my teas much stronger for brewing. I used about 60 flowers, which is about six times as much needed for the average cup of this tea. Simply bring about a gallon of water to a boil and add the flowers. Remove from heat and cover. Allow to steep for and hour or so.

Once the tea is brewed, strain out the flowers using a mesh strainer. Add about half of the tea back into the pot, add two pounds of your favorite honey. For this batch I'm using Russel farms pure wild flower honey, from Rhinebeck NY. All honey, especially local stuff, has a different sugar content. This is why we start with half of the tea, it's much easier to add more tea than remove it. Add tea in small increments until the hydrometer* reads the desired potential. For this batch I'm looking for about 11% potential, hopefully ending in about two months at 1%, giving a total of 10% abv. If you don't have a hydrometer they can be picked up at any brewing supply store, or at Amazon for under ten dollars. If you want to make this before you get one, or society has broken down an you're unable to purchase one from Amazon, two pounds of honey makes roughly 10% potential in a gallon total of wort*. That's a gallon total, not adding to a gallon of water, so add the honey to a one gallon measure, then add the water. This should get you pretty close. This particular jar of honey gave me three quarts of wort at 12% potential. Once you've reached the desired sweetness, bring the mixture up to a rolling boil. This kills any wild yeasts or bacteria in the honey or water. While warming up, sanitize your fermenters.

There are several ways to sanitize. The most readily available is heat, simply fill the containers (in this case two 1/2 gallon growlers) with boiling hot water and cap them. This is similar to pasteurization, keeping the container above 160 degrees for about 10 minutes should kill anything inside. By far the easiest way is to buy a brewing disinfectant like Starsan, which I am using for this batch. A small amount of bleach mixed with water will work well, (about a capfull per gallon) but can leave some bad flavors behind. Disinfect a small piece of tinfoil as well to loosely cover the top. You cannot just cap it, IT WILL EXPLODE. Believe me, I've had it happen. I've found that with Mead you don't need to be quite as careful as with beer. Honey has natural disinfectant and antibacterial properties and gives you a little room for error, once your yeast is established theres little chance of something else taking hold. The traditional way to make mead by the way is to not disinfect at all and ferment openly, allowing the wild yeasts to penetrate the brew. I will be doing half in the traditional way and the other half using commercial brewing yeast. Which can also be picked up at a brewing supply or online. For mead I prefer Nottingham dry ale yeast.

Once your wort has boiled, remove from heat and pour off about eight ounces for a yeast starter. After the starter has cooled to about 90 degrees, add yeast to it. Allow the larger amount to cool to about 80-100 degrees before adding starter. By this time the starter should be foamy, this is how you know its ready. If it doesn't do anything, you put it in too hot or the yeast is too old. Pour in the starter and cover with the tinfoil tightly but don't secure it in any way. Once the CO2 has built up inside the jar it will push the foil out of the way and vent. This slight pressurization keeps foreign things from getting in. You can also use a commercial bubbler, but as I said, it's a little less likely that it will get contaminated so I don't generally use them anymore. Place the fermenter in a cool, dry, dark place. Make note of the date and alcohol potential. For the open fermentation, place it on a window sill in a container with a large opening on top. Cover with a cheesecloth to keep bugs out. For mine I will be using a large mason jar. After a few days you will see the wild yeast take hold. It will begin to bubble and froth on top. At this point move the jar to a similar cool, dry, dark place.

After about a month, check on your brews. At this point they should be around 5% potential, still way too sweet, but especially when experimenting I like to keep a close eye on it. With my spruce mead a gallon batch was done in 19 days so keep that in mind. At about 2% pour off a glass and chill it in the fridge. If its too sweet, let it go a little longer, if not, start racking. If you don't have a hydrometer, taste will be all you have to go on, it will take practice

Racking consists of chilling the mead so the solids drop out. My method generally is to refrigerate my fermenter down to about 35 degrees and to carefully pour off the mead without disturbing the sediment at the bottom. Do this three times and you will have shelf stable mead, but if you plan on refrigerating it can just be done once or twice. The danger of exploding bottles makes me worry about leaving my mead unrefrigerated. I have had success in the past though, just check them every few days for the first week, if there's no sediment forming in the bottom you got all the yeast out. Serve your mead chilled, somewhere between 45 and 60 degrees. All brews will be a little different depending on ingredients and sweetness, so serving temperature will vary.

Mead has truly become one of my favorite beverages. It's all natural, full of vitamins, and there's no hangover to deal with. Local honey also has really helped with my allergies as well. Three years ago I had such bad allergies I was medicated for two months every spring. Now I only have one attack a year when the trees bloom. All of these benefits and the satisfaction of getting a nice buzz on something you made yourself.

Hydrometer- A device that when floated in a mixture shows sugar content based on bouyancy.

Wort- Beer or mead before fermentation begins, basically a sweet liquid.