Category Archives: Food

CostCo hashbrowns

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There are some combinations that are just counter productive – black Klansman, blind tattoo artist, deaf piano tuner, claustrophobic escape artist, that sorta thing. Sadly, my particular dead-end combination is that Im a person who really likes to eat but doesnt really like to cook. In short, Im a lazy cook.

For example, I can make a very nice red sauce from scratch. Fresh basil, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, a bit of onion, a long time on the stove and – voila – terrific homemade spaghetti sauce. But nine times out of ten, I’ll just crack open a jar of prepared sauce because I want to eat, not cook.

As a result of this, I’m always on the look out for food that tastes good, keeps well, and requires minimal effort. As I was strolling through CostCo the other day I came across these:

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Yup, another crappy cellphone pic. Brand is “Golden Grill Russet”.

Now, to my way of thinking, nothing is going to make an apocalypse more bearable than a decent breakfast. The cheap and easy way out for most of us is a bucket full of those little packets of Quaker instant oatmeal. And, yeah, its better than nothing in a pinch. But when you’ve got a long day shooting looters, moving debris, scavenging the ruins, and running for your life ahead of you it might be nice to have a real breakfast. Fortunately, with a little pre-planning you can have eggs, bacon, fruit, hasbrowns, coffee, and orange drink for breakfast.

CostCo had these hashbrowns in little pint-size cardboard cartons and, being a sucker for ‘individual serving size’ packages, I threw ’em in the cart. Figured I’d take a chance on them. The instructions say to open the container, fill with really hot water, close container, let sit for twelve minutes, drain, then fry in a pan. Okay, followed the instructions and twelve minutes later there was a huge pile of hash browns ready for the pan. I mean these things increased in size exponentially. I’m not a shy eater…. ‘two servings’ is what I’d consider single serve. But there was a lot of hash browns coming out of that container. Easily enough for two hungry guys and probably enough for at least three average people.

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Theres nothing in this pic for scale, but trust me…thats a LOT of hash browns. And they’re yummy.

Fried ’em up in butter, added some salt and some ketchup, and they were really good. Highly recommend. Im going to have to pick up another one or two packages of them. Eight cartons to package so one or two should handle most short- to mid-length crises. They’d also be an amazingly good choice for camping if you break it down to a smaller package.

The packaging is about the same as a pint of milk – a treated, coated cardboard container. Expiration date is about a year, but as is usual in these sorts of things that date is probably very conservative. Unless the packaging takes some damage these should have years on them. I found them at CostCo but it turns out they’re available on Amazon as well (where they get very high reviews.)

Case of these, a can of bacon, some freeze dried eggs, big tub o’ Tang, and a couple cans of fruit, and you’ve pretty much got the long-term-storage breakfast thing under control. But, they’re also quite good to the point you might just use ’em on a Sunday morning where you don’t feel like making a lot of effort. One of the rare ‘storage foods’ that really is good enough to eat during ‘normal’ times.

Fun with eggs

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Have you ever actually eaten powdered eggs? I know theres all sortsa stories from military folk talking about the horrors of such tings, but those stories are also usually pretty dated. Food preservation (and fabrication) technology has changed a bit.

Being an unapologetic bargain hunter, I always peruse the ‘marked down’ shopping carts in the back of the store where my local supermarket dumps the stuff it wants to sell now. Usually it’s things no one wants like sugar-free cake frosting, squirrel-flavored olive oil, dill pickle flavored barbecue sauce, and other ‘food’ items that are obviously not moving and taking up valuable shelf real estate.

So, the other day as I was sifting through the cart I found this:

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My history with powdered eggs is a long one. I originally wanted some back in the late ’90s but had no idea for a source. I found this particular brand, Deb El, but found out they did not offer any larger quantity of them than these cans and some industrial-sized 50# bags that I was in no position to repackage. A few years later I discovered ‘Wakefield’ powdered eggs (an excellent product) but its availability was spotty since it was basically manufacturer overruns from .gov contracts (they can sometimes be found through REI). Finally, I found that Mountain House offered #10 cans of eggs and I picked up a few cases of that. Later on I found that Augason Farms offers whole eggs in the far more convenient #2 size cans…and scrambled egg mix in the larger #10 cans. I got a buncha those as well.

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The first time I used powdered eggs I was extremely skeptical… the powder, when mixed with water, made this foul-smelling, orange-colored, pancake-batter-consistency mix that looked amazingly unappetizing. but, after a couple minutes in a frying pan with some butter it was like some sort of culinary magic trick – the orange turned into that lovely scrambled-egg-yellow that we all know and love, the smell was just like regular scrambled eggs, and the texture, while quite uniform, was also very similar. In fact, the giveaway that fresh eggs were not used came from the even coloring of the eggs….’real’ scrambled eggs have random flecks of white among the yellow. These were an even yellow across the board. But….absolutely delicious and indistinguishable, taste wise, from fresh eggs.

The powdered eggs are a bit more orange-y colored that fresh eggs, but in the half-light of your average apocalypse-induced power failure you probably won’t notice the difference. However, here’s a comparison of the powdered egs [first photo] cooking versus the fresh eggs cooking [second photo]:

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Takes about two  minutes to cook. Powdered:

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Side by side on a plate you can see the color difference. (Too be fair, I used much more butter with the powdered eggs and virtually none with the fresh, so that may contribute to the color difference.) However texture is identical:

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The powdered eggs come out looking not as good as the bright-yellow fresh eggs, but they have a far greater shelf life and lend themselves to mass feeding. Ever go to a hotel that has a breakfast bar and you can get all the omelettes you want? Notice the cook often has a juice bottle or container full of egg mix he pours or dips from? Yeah. Thats powdered egg (or liquid egg mix from powder) that he’s using.

So what good is this stuff? Well, for starters, if your breakfast includes scrambled eggs, french toast, or anything that requires an egg….well, heres your egg. No refrigeration necessary (although refrigerating eggs is, I am told, a mostly American notion. In Europe eggs are left at room temperature.) When Hurricane Sandy knocks out the power and the morning promises a long day of grunt work it’d be nice to be able to have scrambled eggs to go with the canned bacon, canned hash, or other breakfast fare. (According to my research, a post apocalyptic breakfast can be pretty impressive – scrambled eggs, hash, bacon, breakfast cereal with milk, oatmeal, canned fruit, orange drink, and coffee….a better breakfast than I have now.) And, of course, anything that requires egg like pasta dough, breaded foods, etc, etc, are going to be needing this stuff as well.

So…for those of you who may be curious about powdered eggs but don’t feel like cracking open a $40 #10 can of them for an experiment…well, I risked $4 to show you what to expect:

My suggestion to you? Buy the long term eggs in the smaller cans (because once you open a can of powdered eggs it’ll start drawing moisture and if you dont use it soon it’ll cake solid). Don’t expect it to taste/look exactly like fresh eggs, but don’t be terrified about it either. Its about the same quality as fastfood/breakfast bar/college cafeteria eggs.

 

Ranking the LMI, Fire fight, Medical Guide For Ships

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Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Its Patriots’ Day! Get out there and make some noise!
I have a hot date with the Dillon 1050 and 1m .452″ 230 gr. TC bullets later this week.
Plenty of food, plenty of ammo….the upcoming years are going to be messy but we’re going to go through them with every advantage we can get.
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After I went to Rosauers the other day and confirmed that they were, in fact, selling large quantities of storage food in #10 cans I started calling all my LMI friends and acquaintances to inform them to get in on the action. As I thought about it later I realized that the order in which I called them, and those whom I thought ‘call immediately’ and ‘meh, I’ll call them later’ was a subconscious prioritizing and ranking of where they stood on the Friends Of Zero scale. The ones I felt closest to I called first, the ones I’m kind of ambivalent about I called much later (or haven’t called at all yet). In this way, I’ve had a rather eye-opening experience into the nature of my relationships with the people I hang out with. Kinda interesting.

Speaking of, I went back there today and there was significantly less food. One of the LMI told me that when he went to checkout the clerk said “Oh, another one!” and mentioned that the record for the day had been one person buying $800 worth of food. The fella at the supermarket I spoke with said that the stuff has been selling very well and he thinks it might become a regular item. I dont know if they appreciate the market for that kinda product. Once you spend your $800 on it, youre pretty much done for twenty years or twenty kilotons, whichever comes first. I picked up a couple more cans of scrambled egg mix. Me and a budding LMI (more about him in the next paragraph) joked that there was no way we were going through the apocalypse eating just rice and beans. Indeed, while rice and beans has been a staple of Third World countries I cannot for the life of me think why anyone would want to live like a Third World country when they dont have to.
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In the last few weeks a fella has been dropping by the shop once in a while to talk preparedness. He’s been into it on and off since Y2k but he has gotten back into it in a much bigger way as of late. I bounce ideas at him, give him my opinions (for whatever theyre worth), loan him books and sometimes make him a nice deal on preparedness stuff. We chitchat in that familiar and welcome way of people who have finally found people who ‘understand’ each other. Lets face it, many times when youre talking long term food, ammo, bunkers, ham radios and bugout bags to people youre going to get some seriously weird looks unless the person youre talking to is a like-minded individual. Anyway, he’s in a business that, like my own, has a certain utility amongst the LMI. One of the things he does is sell, recharge, test, etc. fire extinguishers.

Now, most of us have the small extinguishers you buy in a two-pack up at CostCo for $40. Nothing wrong with them, Im sure many a kitchen grease fire has met its powdery end at the hands of someone wielding one. But, sometimes you want something with a little more firepower. After all, when the wheels fly off civilization it won’t take a Ph. D in BTU’s to whip up fiery trouble with some gasoline and an empty bottle of Night Train. So, without getting into the realm of ‘not man-portable’, I got the fire extinguisher equivalent of “ten pounds a’ swingin’ cod” as a wise man once said.

Considering the plethora of electrical equipment thats running around here, this could be handy.

What I really want is a modern version of the old stirrup pumps used during the Blitz. There is a modern version out there, but Im having a hell of a time finding a US supplier.
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An interesting .pdf came across my monitor the other day. International Medical Guide For Ships. The ’ships medicine chest’ at the end is pretty illuminating and would probably go quite well with the appendices in ‘Where There Is No Doctor’.