The Meat Tray, praised be its memory, is a thing of the past and its never coming back. But, my local Albertson’s still ‘remainders’ meat at 30-50% off when it hits the ‘sell by’ date. This invariably results in me cleaning them out of whatever it is that has caught my palate’s fancy. For the last few months its been ground beef….an all-purpose animal protein (like chicken breast) that lends itself to all sorts of meals.
They remainder other things, too. Steaks, roasts, etc, but I usually just stick to the ground beef for its low(er) price and versatility. However, today I caught the pork on sale and marked down 50%. I only grabbed about a third of what was there because, honestly, Im running out of freezer space. I picked up another freezer a few years back to supplement my big chest freezer and both of those are darn near at capacity. Time to start rotating out.
According to the receipt, what should have set me back around $77 came out to less than half of that. So, go me!
Im not terribly worried about starving to death. I think that, on the whole, its pretty hard to starve to death in a country of $6 rotisserie chickens. I want to put that in perspective for a moment. A 5# bag of potatoes is about $3 at Winco, a chicken is $6, and a 15 oz. can of yellow corn is about a buck. Half a chicken, corn, and mashed potatoes for two meal comes out to about four bucks for dinner for today and lunch for tomorrow. For an outlay of ten bucks. Since virtually no job is less than ten dollars an hour these days, I argue that not being able to afford to eat is a bit misleading.
But, as I said, Im not worried about starving. I’m worried about inflation and supply chain disruption. America is the only country in history where “Theres nothing to eat” means “theres nothing I want to eat”. In this country, it means “I dont want pancakes and canned pears for breakfast again”. Everywhere else it means, “There is (literally) no food in the house.”
“Buying the dip” when it comes to meats gives me a lot of margin in the event of a job less, supply issue, or other disruption. It’d be crazy not to take advantage of these sorts of sales.
The people that say “There’s nothing to eat” (in the USA) are usually the same people that say “I can’t lose weight”.
Yeah, and somehow we have wildly fat poor people.
Update your OODA loop for the following:
The righteous poor.
Any form of entitlement mentality.
Various species of narcissism.
Anti-social personality disorder.
BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder)
This list could get really long so I’ll stop here; but you get the idea…
You should be concerned about having power to run those freezers…
IF your power goes, for an extended period of time, even running a generator could become a challenge… Should “events” kick off and major transformers get taken out by “Panti-fa” or other bad actors… power could be down for some time… as it’s said that a lot of those big units are made out of country and inventory might not be sufficient to cover all the exploits the bad actors could bring forth, should they decide to move enforce… The current commie plague will move towards violence to achieve their control… as it’s always their next step once they’ve become emboldened… they’ve become emboldened with these current electoral wins, and their next move always is violence… looking at past history… but it will be interesting to see, as Carl Higbie on Newsmax stated the other day, should these idiots make a move, there’s 22 million veterans waiting to put ’em down… It will be interesting to see what, and how, all plays out in the days ahead…
There are a dozens of more likely catastrophes than the apocalypse in which frozen meat comes in handy, such as reduction in work hours, loss of a job, sudden spike in prices due to a beef/pork/poultry/lamb “disease,” etc.
Having it pre-paid is very helpful in a bunch of daily scenarios.
Beef herd is smallest in 50+ years due to Uncle Sugars’ policies. May take decades to restore or it may become unobtainium as ranchers are forced out of business
Our large chest freezer died and we lost all of the food. Then I did a search to see if there are freezer failure alarms. There are many. Invest in some. We had just invested in 30 lbs of fresh halibut a week before the failure. Ouch.
The freezer alarms are a necessity. We use 3 medium size chest freezers. Don’t fill them to the top unless using some frozen water jugs. If one fails we know before food spoils and have room in the other 2 freezers to stash the contents of the failed one until we can replace it.
Won’t be without the alarms, maybe even have spares.
Canning is always an option if the juice don’t return.
Canning, smoking, and jerking. Three reasons why I like Rawles’ idea of storing white salt blocks for livestock. It won’t matter that canned whatever may be a bit cloudy from not using canning/kosher salt, the blue ribbon award will then be that you have something edible on your plate or in your bowl.
Cane here to ask if you have put your pressure canner to work yet? Advise the wide mouth jars as easier to load and empty. I’m aware you currently use small mouth jars. Dehydrating and freeze drying are the next steps
The little grocery store near me has started doing this the day of, or the day before, meat hits it’s date.
Two weeks ago I got 85/15 ground Angus for $4.49/lb. Last week I got several bone in rib eyes for $6.99/lb.
But I’m running into the same problem: not enough freezer space!
Ground beef freezer hint: if it is not in 3#/5#/10# tubes or chubs a 1# square fits perfectly in plastic sandwich bag and 4 of those fit perfectly into a gallon freezer bag and is ready for deep freeze of year or more. If you have a vacuum sealer the 4 fit and vacuum sealed last much longer. 1# is a good portion for meal prep
I use a Tupperware sandwich container as a mould to make ground beef ‘bricks’ that clock in close enough to a pound. Vaccuum seal them and they stack beautifully in the freezer.
Bought brisket for 3.49 a lb a couple weeks ago.. haven’t thawed it yet but when I do will grind it into hamburger and can it.
We have a chest and the fridge freezer and keep them full, buy on sales and good deals in bulk. However I also worry about power outages. I live in hurricane land so its a reasonable risk every year. We have generators so can get them back up and running quickly but for food for long term it’s not that simple. We have had and lightly used canning equipment for many years but have turned that up a little in the last year to preserve excess from garden and started buying more than our freezer can hold of 99cent a pound chicken legs and thighs, 3.49 a lb brisket, 1.49 a lb pork loin etc.. . Lamb, fish, beef, chicken, pork, if it is a great deal as in seriously cheap I have been purchasing it and canning most of it. some goes in freezer and enters our daily life that way.
Food prices have increased and package sizing has decreased to where my rough calculations say we are paying on average about double what we did in 2018 and 2019…. used to be around food, cleaning supplies etc.. was in the 300 to 400 dollars a month range.. It’s more like 800 dollars a month now. Sometimes its hard to figure with out itemizing as we go on replace broken stuff or fix up house or storage or whatever other thing needs fixing or optimizing sprees but food is expensive.
One thing that tilted me over the edge to getting more serious about canning was fixing spaghetti for dinner. seems simple right? I have done it often in 45+ years of cooking. I grabbed a jar of spaghetti sauce, add a few onions, some mushrooms, etc…. hamburger added and it wasn’t spaghetti sauce but a bunch of ingredients smeared in red stuff. I had to add two more jars of spaghetti sauce from the store to actually get it to the right consistency. The jars are the same shape and have the same labels but all scaled down to about just over half the size I used to purchase 15 years ago. They started off back then at 32 oz jars, then were shrunk to 29 oz jars, then to 26 oz jars and currently they are 24 oz jars. 24 oz is said to be what you need for 12 oz of spaghetti.. Boxes of spaghetti, at least ones I get are still 16 oz I think. Might have to check that.
Sigh, the end result was that what would be enough sauce for 4 of us to make spaghetti wasn’t anymore… I had to add more. We have about 10 tomato plants that we will start harvesting in the next week to 2 weeks. 95% of those will end up canned, either whole, diced up or milled and turned into spaghetti sauce or marinara. I have also started to make my own version of ro*tel rather than purchasing it. Mine is better. 🙂
side note.
Just opened a 14 year old Mylar bag of old fashioned rolled oatmeal that used an oxygen absorber and it was fresh like it was just bought.
side note 2
bag of oatmeal was opened as I wanted to see if it was still good because someone had set the bucket with a bunch of bags on porch and it hid there in summer heat and winter cold for a few years… 6 to 7 years actually. lid had cracked and it filled with water. a few bags got punctures, not sure how, maybe insects. It looked nasty and I was tempted to toss. However we have been washing outside and then testing. Had some wheat that had puncture and smelled moldy that went in trash.. didn’t even give to chickens. Rancid I would probably feed to chickens 🙂 oatmeal wasn’t punctured and smelled fresh as day we packed it. So just an example of how well this preservation method has worked. I expected it to smell rancid even un-punctured due to the high 80-100 plus degree heat for 6 summers. So times it was in direct sunlight… not ideal at all.
Should have said.. my wife ran into this website and they have a few day long online course on canning, fermenting, and dehydrating, etc.. not totally sure. calling it a preserving course. They are offering it for free. Starts on the 6th… My wife signed me up to and our oldest daughter up for it so I can do it with her. Trying to get our kids interested in learning some of the skills we have and that if dad trys to teach it, its and instant “oh maybe next time dad!” lol
https://schooloftraditionalskills.com/
So I have to be clear… oatmeal smelled good to me and daughter but wife was like “what are you smoking, its rancid” so I guess chickens are getting it.
🙂
Reply is then, Good ! More for me. The question is add butter, syrup or brown sugar? Oatmeal cookies?
Whenever I would drop the kids off for school I would stop at our local Walmart and look for the yellow stickers. I’ve rarely paid full price for any of our meat and fish. As I’ve told my wife, there are worse problems than having three freezers that are full.
We purchased a Jackery generator at Costco, plugged one of the generators into it to see how long it would go. We got 24 hours out of it, and the Jackery was still at 27% when I unhooked it. At least for the short term, I can keep things frozen.
WRT freezers and power outages…
You hear this caveat/concern all the time. Mostly it sounds like excuses for not prepping. EVERYTHING IN LIFE has negative counters to it, but we always hear about the freezers and power outages.
Use smaller freezers. I have three 7cuft freezers at my house and another 2 at the BOL. If one fails, you don’t lose everything and can possibly move the food to the other freezers (I like to keep mine full, so I’d need to use the coolers until I could deal with the bad freezer. Have enough coolers to empty a freezer.)
Use a generator until the power comes back on. A generator, even a small one is an essential prep. Chest freezers keep stuff frozen even without power for a day or two. Plenty of time to run the freezers intermittently to keep them frozen.
Small freezers don’t use a bunch of electricity. Use an inverter and your car to run them intermittently.
Or, since they don’t have heavy power requirements, get some solar, a battery, and an inverter. Solar is cheap now, and so are chinese inverter/chargers big enough to run a small freezer.
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Don’t let naysaying stop you from having a freezer full of food. Just treat it like every other prep and have a backup plan.
nick
Generators and preps will work for everything short of TEOTWAWKI, and solar will work even for that. The longest I’ve run on gennie was 12 days and I’ve done that more than once. Managing fuel is just something you have to do. Like the rest of prepping.
If you find yourself with lots of ground meat beef and pork, then make your own breakfast sausage. Don’t need casings. Mix up your batch, fry a bit to adjust taste, store in fridge overnight, squeeze out a 4″ long sausage onto a tray with a jerky gun, freeze over night and place 10 to a bag and place in the freezer. I made up some deer 30% and pork 60% sausage, that way we had them all winter. Can’t be beat. You can use less salt as it is a freezer item and add the spices you want. I use a lot of sage.