Tag Archives: food

CostCo canned meats again

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I do not like canned meats. It’s incredibly stupid, but my biggest objection is that when you open the can they all look and smell identical and are indistinguishable from cat food. But…when the apocalypse occurs it would be nice to have actual meat to eat that didnt come off the neighbor’s dog (or the neighbor).

I’ve blogged about the canned roast beef that CostCo used to carry and was quite pleased with it. Yeah, it looked and smelled horrible when you open the can but once you cook it up and get it on some rice it turns out to be pretty darned good.

Unfortunately, my local CostCo stopped carrying the Kirkland-brand roast beef several years ago, and although they recently started carrying a different brand it appears they are no longer carrying that one either. Supply chain issues, regional distribution agreements, sales numbers not supportive, whatever ther eason the end result is the dame – no canned beef.

Now, roast beef is one thing but corned beef is another. Personally I think corned beef or pastrami and swiss on rye is proof that the universe has room for luxuries. And canned corned beef, it seems, is never in short supply. Problem is, virtually all of it is imported. Most of the canned corned beef I’ve come across is from Brazil. Makes sense, Brazil is cattle country. But as far as I’m concerned it is also a Third World-ish environ that, honestly, I suspect might be a little fast-and-loose with it’s food safety.So..I avoid.

But, I was up at CostCo today and came across canned corned beef from Australia. Assuming they were sober at the cannery that day, I’d put more faith in Australian food safety observances than those of some South American venue. So, on a whim, I picked up these:

I’ll try it later in the week with some eggs. Probably should go for the full on guerrilla-gourmet experience and use the powdered eggs. Regardless, if it’s any good I’ll let you know. I need to try it soon because with CostCo’s history of dropping products unexpectedly they may be out of it by next week and I’ll never see more again.

Yes, beans and rice form a complete protein and lasts forever in storage. You konw what else forms a complete protein? Meat. I am not going through the apocalypse just to live in a future of textured vegetable protein and other fake meats. I mean, what would be the point?

Freezer Day

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There’s a lot of things I like about being a survivalist…the clothing is usually quite durable, the sense of security is quite nice, and there’s a satisfaction from being somewhat resourceful and prepared. But, on the other hand…the hours are horrible and there is often a lot of heavy lifting. Case in point…..

Because it was solidly below freezing today, today became Organize The Freezer Day. It could also be called Arctic Archaeology Day.

Let’s be reasonable, if you’re going to ‘clean out’ and organize your freezer you need to temporarily remove the frozen contents. The key challenge in this is, naturally, keeping stuff frozen. There are two ways to do this: have an empty extra freezer or wait until it’s 5-degrees outside and stage your freezer contents outside. I went with option #2.

First off, I discovered that I have a lot more butter than I thought I did. A lot. Same for ground beef. And at least a half dozen half-turkeys that were bought at post-Thanksgiving sales five years ago. but, since they were vacuum sealed and in the freezer all this time, they’ll cook up just fine. They are, however, bulky. Stuff I did not know I have? Well, there was a brisket the size of a folded beach towel. And a buncha short ribs. I had no idea they were there but they’ve been there for at least the last six years so it’s time to crack them open and do something with them. It was also interesting to note the prices over the years as well. It made the coming year look even more dismal.

But…it needed to be done. I was literally out of room in my deep freeze and in the kitchen freezer. On the good side, having no room means I am at full capacity on food. The bad news is that I  have no capacity to increase the supply unless I wanna buy another freezer…which I do not.

But, my advice to you is this: if it’s close to 0-degrees where you are, one of these weekend you might wanna block out a few hours and go through your freezer(s) and get a feel for what you have and make some more space for more food.

Erbswurst case scenario

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There has always been a need for compact forms of food that you could stuff in a pack for times when you were cut off from resupply and had to make do with only what you had on you, or what you could find locally. The Germans apparently approached this with erbswurst…a compressed ration of pea meal and other things that, when dissolved in a canteen cup full of hot water, allowed the user to make a soup. Personally, it seems rather unappealing to me but I suppose if your stuck in Stalingrad watching your comrades eat dead horses, it might not seem too bad.

Today, of course, we have MRE’s, freezedrieds, and even simple off-the-shelf soup products that are leaps and bounds ahead of the technology that brought us erbswurst. But… it’s an interesting concept. If a person had access to on of those consumer-grade freeze driers you could make some pretty impressive fare. Here are a couple videos on the subject:

It’s not too hard to imagine the plethora of items found in a modern supermarket that might lend themselves to this sort of thing. The trick is to keep the main principles as the fore: compactness, longevity, and nutrition.

This was actually addressed in a product that came out of WW2 …MPF…a fascinating product with a fascinating backstory: A nalgene bottle full of that stuff would probably duplicate (or exceed) the nutritional value of erbswurst and be a tad more versatile. That MPF, by the way, can be replicated at home.

For running out the door on your way to the boogaloo, a bag of a few days worth of freeze drieds takes virtually no weight and very little space. The more hidebound might go with a few tins of meat and that sort of thing. But wandering around a supermarket sometime, with a careful eye, might reveal some interesting choices for the ‘iron rations’ to keep in your gear. But…the Germans did it first, apparently.

Arbitrage

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Arbitrage is the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same asset in different markets in order to profit from tiny differences in the asset’s listed price. … Arbitrage exists as a result of market inefficiencies and it both exploits those inefficiencies and resolves them

A market inefficiency like….a Walmart in a populous region that doesnt have a large percentage of the population that does canning winding up with a shelf full of canning lids…..and a Walmart in a rural region where people are known to do quite a bit of canning and be survivalists that has no canning lids in stock.

There’s an opportunity there.

Someone who knew I was interested in lids texted me. The conversation was like this:

Them: Im in a WalMart and they have canning lids…
Me: All of them
Them: They have….
Me: All of them.
Them: How many do you….
Me: All. Of. Them.

(And bring me all your bacon and eggs while youre at it)

And in todays post:

The death of the meat tray

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Nothing good lasts forever. I was disheartened to learn that the Albertson’s grcery is no longer carrying The Meat Tray. The Meat Tray is gone. Long live the Meat Tray.

Fortunately, although it isn’t the same as the meat tray, it turns out that the local WinCo will ‘remainder’ meat as well. And since their prices are already pretty fair, the remaindered prices are just a solid deal all around:

My freezer is already at capacity, and I really don’t want to get another one, so I’ll just keep this stuff in mind for when I rotate through the frozen stuff. But…animal protein at discount is always a good thing.

That pork in the pictures? I take that, put it in the slow cooker with a half bottle of salsa verde, let it go for about six hours, shred it up, serve with rice, melt Mexican cheese blend on top, and scoop it up with tortilla chips. Sooo good, so cheap, and so much. Highly recommend.

I’m sure some folks would say, “Dude..my life is too short to get worked up about saving $14 on a styrofoam tray of meat once a week.” Fair enough. Let’s tackle it from a different direction. Imagine a supermarket where, when you buy a tray of meat they give you two free Pmags. Or a voucher for three gallons of gas at the Conoco down the street. Or they give you a free refill on your propane tank for your barbecue. You’d get pretty excited about that, right? Same. Exact. Thing.

Every dollar I don’t spend on an item is an extra dollar I have for another item. It’s another dollar in the Roth, in silver, in cash, in the land fund, etc.Thats the mindset that makes the difference when you’re trying to prepare for the inevitable-yet-unpredictable.

Video – How long could you survive in a supermarket

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If you remember the fast-zombie movie, 28 Days Later, there was a scene where the survivors find a supermarket and load up. One of the interesting things in the scene was that the irradiated produce held up much better than the non-irradiated. On a side note, irradiated produce is far more common in Europe than it is in the US because, it seems, we in the US have a knee-jerk reaction to the word ‘irradiated’. If you knew how much stuff in this country is sterilized through irradiation (esp. in the medical industry) I think you’dbe quite surprised.

Anyway, its a trope of apocalypse fiction that survivors either a) find supermarkets that are looted and beyond salvage or b) spared from looting and are treasure trove of unimaginable stores. Which raises an interesting question: if you had a supermarket all to yourself, how long would you be able to survive? Well, someone did the math:

I very much like the fact that they address the issue of food spoilage for the dairy and deli counters. But I think that if you hit the home canning aisle, and then the housewares aisle, you could at least get enough gear to water-bath can some of the produce. If they had a pressure canner on the rack in the home canning aisle you’d be freakin’ golden.

Realistically, I doubt getting locked inside a supermarket is an actual apocalypse thing. Even in post-apocalyptic fiction you’d have to do some pretty deus ex machina to contrive a logical reason for people to be locked in a supermarket (Stephen King’s “The Mist” not withstanding). More likely, you’d have survivors ‘own’ the supermarket and guard it as an extremely high-value resource…assuming they don’t start methodically taking the contents back to their stronghold.

But, if you were forced to stay in a supermarket, how long would you be able to keep from starving? TL;DR = 63 years.

I can’t think of any disaster that would preclude me from being able to otherwise source food for 63 years but…good to know that if I hit the local Safeway as the sole survivor of..whatever…I can cross ‘food’ off my list for the rest of my life.

Canned beef back at Costco

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I usually have an aversion to canned meats. Intellectually I know that the meat is, in fact, what it says it is on the label… yet, every single time I open a can of chicken, beef, or tuna, it smells like cat food. Years ago, I tried the Costco canned roast beef and, once you got it into a pan and heated up, it was delicious. I mean, really good. So I grabbed a bunch and, naturally, Costco stopped selling it. It has been, no lie, probably five or six years since I’ve seen canned roast beef at Costco.

Now, one thing I have noticed about other canned beef products is that virtually none of them are made-in-USA. Invariably they are from Brazil or Argentina or some other south American country. And while I’m sure (eyeroll) that their quality control standards are first rate, I think I’d rather stuff my face with American beef rather than something some gaucho carved up and processed through a semi-Third World processing plant.

Anyway…..

Up at Costco today and beheld this:

Let’s do some math.

4-12 oz. cans at 9.69 means each can is $2.42. Each can is 12 oz. so that comes out to $3.20~ per pound. Now, I know what you’re going to say – “But Commander, part of that 12 oz. is water weight from the broth its packaged in.” You are correct, sir. However, this is $3.20 per pound of cooked beef, whereas the pricing youre comparing your meat counter purchase to is for raw beef. We all agree that a quarter-pound burger patty ain’t 4 oz. once we’re done cooking it, right? So, to my way of thinking, I’m guessing that the post-cooked weight of the canned beef with its broth is probably pretty close to what the pre-cooked weight of the actual raw beef would be. So, I’m reasonably comfortable with saying its $3.20/#. With that said, $3.20/# is actually a decent deal these days.

But, even at a dollar a pound it’s no bargain if it tastes horrible enough that you won’t eat it. So, let’s cook up some rice, throw the contents of the can into a pan, heat it up, add in some soy sauce or chili paste, serve it over some rice, and see if it’s worth going long on.

So, lets grab a can of the Kirkland stuff and compare a few things. These cans are pull-tops whereas the Kirklands were not. I prefer non-pull-top because if that pre-scored seam on the can takes a hit from something it can let go pretty easily. But, this can be mitigated with proper packing and storage.

Opening the can and…….merciful Crom, it always looks like dog food. There was some congealed fat floating in there, which is good, and the meat appeared to not be heavy in the gristle or undesirable-parts department.

WHY!? WHY DOES IT ALWAYS LOOK LIKE DOG FOOD!?!?

Ok, I’ll be honest…I held my breath until it was in the pan and on the flame. Once it got some heat under it I added some chopped onion and soy sauce. Shoulda skipped the soy sauce. More on that later.

I ran it over high heat to make sure it was heated all the way through and to reduce some of the broth. There was a very strong ‘well done beef’ smell from the pan. I cooked up half a cup of rice and added the contents of the pan.

How was it? Good. But salty. The meat was wonderfully tender and this would go really nicely in a soup, stew, or bourguignon. As it was, just the rice, onions, beef, and soy sauce worked out just fine. A meal that you could do pretty easily and quickly in a power outage or shelter-in-place situation.

Comparing the nutritional label data between this and the Kirkland roast beef showed something interesting. The Kirkland is listed as four servings per can, this stuff says six. What that means is that when you figure that out as RDA per can, you get this:

Kirkland = 32% of your RDA of sodium, per can
Butterfield = 72% of your RDA of sodium, per can

So, yeah….it wasn’t just the soy sauce that made it taste salty. But, if you really think that when the end of the world gets here you need to watch your salt intake…well…clearly you’re priorities need some review. After a long day of sweating through your cammies as you hang looters and man roadblocks, stress over the mutant zombie biker gangs, and generally lead a pretty physical and stressful life….you’ll welcome that little bit of extra salt. But if it really, really matters to you…just cut the sodium in half. How? Eat half as much. Problem solved.

Another odd thing. look at those nutritional labels. Both of them show a serving size as being the same – 2 oz./56gram. And both cans are 12 oz. But the Kirkland says there are 4 servings per can, whereas the Butterfield says six. The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that the Kirkland numbers are net of any liquid. Or maybe it’s bad math. But if it really is true that both are the same 2 oz. per serving, once of them is packing 50% more sodium per serving than the other. You go figure it out.

Final verdict? Worth it. It comes out cheaper than the Kirkland stuff Costco was selling ten years ago. Texture and taste seem fine and it cooks up quite nicely. I approve of it enough that I went back to Costco and bought a case of it. (Because I’m sure as heck not gonna buy a case of something without trying it out first.) If you really wanna go nuts…a can of this stuff, a bottle of soy sauce or other seasoning), and a vacuum sealed bag of minute rice would store literally indefinitely in just about any environ and give you a hot meal that you could fix over a sterno stove.

So…an addition to the food stockpile. But a yummy enough one that keeping it rotated shouldn’t be a problem.
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For The WinCo

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Decided to cash out my CostCo rewards and see if maybe it wasn’t time to try a new venue…….

TL;Dr version: Winco: Emphasis on Win

The longer I identify and live my life as a survivalist (and, yeah, I’m gonna go with that over ‘prepper’) the more I am convinced that in 90% of the most likely emergencies I will face the most important things to have will be a) money (or money-like instruments) and b) food. To that end, I stockpile food and I sock away moneystuff. Winco will be my new go-to for food.

The Winco at the corner of South and Reserve opened up last week and a friend of mine recommended I check it out. Selection was broad and prices were very competitive, I was told. Okay, I go check it out. Ah…you had me at the food storage section:

Interestingly, those are not Gamma Seal lids on that top shelf but rather some sort of knockoff….so…lose a few points on that one. But, they have oxygen absorbers, which is nice. Also some fairly decent water storage containers.

Selection was quite good and prices were competitive with the local chain groceries, although noticeably absent were signs comparing their prices to Walmart and CostCo. However, the selection was much, much, much broader than CostCo and, for many things, the prices seemed better.

More importantly, for me, was the ability to buy cases of a product easily, and they also had a very large selection of ‘bulk’ items like pasta, rice, spice blends, etc.

Their ‘house brand’ canned goods seemed very reasonably priced but I need to try them before I commit to buying a case of something.

All in all, if you’re reasonably local to Missoula and youre the kinda guy who likes to stock up, this is a place you definitely need to go visit.

 

Soylent

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Remember my post about the quest for People Chow? Well, there is a product called ‘Soylent’ which is pretty much a nutrient-liquid that meets the specs I had mentioned. Think a person could live on it for a month? Find out.

I find these sorts of things interesting because, strictly from a logistical standpoint, this is quite a product. If something requires minimal prep, has a long shelf life, meets your nutritional requirements, and is reasonably palatable….well, that sounds like a candidate for survival bunkers and Mars missions.

Of course, we all know better than that. “Appetite fatigue” is a real thing. Don’t believe me? We are the only country in the world where “Theres nothing to eat” really means “Theres nothing I want to eat.” On the rest of the planet, “theres nothing to eat” really means that…theres nothing to eat.

I don’t want to ride out a long bout of unemployment, let alone an apocalypse, eating what amounts to some sort of protein powder as my breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

But it fascinates me that I can.

 

Shelf stable milk pouch

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I know, I know…when you think shelf-stable milk pouches you think of something like this. (Yeah, it’s cheap humour…I’m not above being low.) I was up at CostCo the other day and beheld this:

Basically, ‘juice boxes’ of whole milk. No refrigeration required. I’ve talked about this before…the folks at Parmalat built an entire empire on UHT pasteurized products. Although not available everywhere, Parmalot milk can be found on Amazon. Problem is, it is quite difficult to find anything smaller than 32 oz. Oh they  make it, yes…but just hard to find. Why would you want the smaller? Because in a grid-down situation you may not need all 32 oz of milk and without refrigeration it sure ain’t gonna keep safely terribly long.

The stuff I found at CostCo is available (also on Amazon) in 8 oz. servings. That’s more suitable for a bowl of breakfast cereal or mixing with your ‘instant breakfast’ powder.

Personally, I don’t really like milk…but several recipes I do like call for it, and corn flakes taste pretty weird without it. So, for me, someone who uses miniscule amounts of moo juice, these are handy sizes.

The more savvy amongst you may ask, “Zero, why not powdered milk?”. A valid question. The answer is….fat. Most powdered milke products are reduced fat. Skim, low-fat, 2%, whatever….it is not whole milk. And although I suppose someone can get used to it, powdered milk tastes lousy and low-fat powdered milk is even worse. See, fat is something that does not lend itself to long-term storage. As a result, whole milk powder, when you can find it, isn’t as long-term as a milk powder that has less fat. But…who wants to drink low fat milk? Ugh.

Now, it took me a while but I did eventually discover powdered whole milk and it is surprisingly not difficult to find. However, it is most definitely not low fat milk..in fact it has about 7(!!!) times the fat of whole milk. My experience is that it is very rich. Very. Like drinking melted ice cream. Using more water than perhaps is recommended might bring it down a notch closer to real whole milk, but it is far more palatable (to me) than that powdered low-fat crap.

So if your the type who like to drink milk, or you’ve got a houseful of kids who you think need to, and you want to have something for when refrigeration is no longer an option, you can head up to CostCo and satisfy your lactose cravings with some reasonably-portioned packages of shelf stable whole milk.

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