When Being Dense is Good

Have you ever stopped to really consider that the modern convenience of refrigeration is REALLY modern.  I mean, it has only existed since the early 1950s? Somebody figured out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics meant that it was possible to figure out a way to use chemistry and modern machinery to make heat flow  in such a way to cool things down, even in a tropical environment.  Amazing.

But modern, or should I say "post modern" man has become so irresponsible and lazy that he just takes this modern convenience for granted.


I'm pretty sure that anybody reading this has experienced a power failure and has had the experience of losing food and having to clean up the mess of thawed out freezers and refrigerators. Imagine the cleanup in New Orleans after Katrina.  Sorry for that mental image, but I've got a point to make.

What if refrigeration wasn't just temporarily gone for a few days? What if you were pretty sure that it was gone for the indefinite future?

Canned tomatoes and pickles

That's what we are planning on.  We still freeze stuff.  But we "can" a lot of stuff.  I put the word can in quotes because I have no idea how many people might come to this site and not understand this archaic term.  It's funny because the home, or do-it-yourself process doesn't involve cans, but rather jars.

Anything you see or buy in the grocery store that comes in a can, you can "can" yourself. (Why do I suddenly have this image of kicking legs and ruffle skirts?)  We haven't done it yet, but one of the next things we will can is chicken.

Left hand

Two things I need to type out at this point:  I just came back from a seminar about butchering animals.  I hurt myself pretty badly yesterday around noon. I was cutting up my spent tomato vines and other plants and in a rush I snipped my pinkie.  Okay, I really snipped my pinkie.  OKAY.  It's darned lucky I didn't hit the bone.  Picture to follow.  Shut up.  You know you want to see it.  It's a good thing there was a nurse in the house. She had me bandaged up and back to work in about 15 minutes.

So I'm sitting here trying to type and I've got duct tape on my left pinkie and it is seriously slowing me down.  Normally I can just type my thoughts, but this is like having a stroke or something.  It's taking forever to get the words out.  Now I know how stroke victims feel.

UPDATE:  Now I'm back to typing okay, but before I go back to doing any more gardening, I will have to bundle up the finger again.  So, where were we? Ah, the canning thing. I have to admit right here that Twyla is the one doing the canning.  I might help out with some of the prep work, like peeling and slicing, but she's the one who pays attention to the recipes and the time in the hot water bath. I chose to write about canning today because I went to a seminar last night at the church on butchering domestic and game animals, and the subject came up in passing when the risks of contamination were talked about.

Life is full of risks, but they are manageable when one uses caution and that rare thing called "common sense."  Sure, there is a possibility that you could get botulism poisoning from canned goods, even from store bought, factory produced food, but there are warning signs.  It wasn't that long ago that I opened a national brand can of tomato sauce and it turned out to be under pressure.  "DANGER!" I threw that can away.  Just use your head.

sliced for drying on silicone silpat

Canning is one of the safest and easiest ways to preserve your own food for long term storage.  With rare exceptions, most bad bacteria and other microbes that can harm you will easily die when exposed to temperatures of 140° - 160° F. Canning involves immersing the food and container in boiling water for anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes.  As the jars and lids cool down and you hear that distinctive pop as the vacuum sucks the lid down tight, you know you've got a good, airtight seal.

Apples, Tomatoes dehydrated

Another method of preserving food that takes up a lot less space is dehydration. For example; tomatoes are about 90% water, and it's the existence of that water that provides a medium for the microbes to rapidly decompose the fruit. Remove almost all that water and the remaining acid and other protective components will make the food last longer.  Vacuum pack the product and it will last for years.

Volume wise, this method is great because of how much food can be packed in such a small area. The jar of tomatoes you see on the right is approximately a dozen, and they are not even tightly packed.  I could add almost a dozen more and re-vacuum pack the jar.  There are more than a dozen apples in the other jar.  All the nutrition is there with no added chemicals or artificial preservatives.  These were done just using the gentle heat of the pilot light in the oven, since we have propane for the stove and oven and central heat.  And while the tomato is not really "sun-dried" I dare anyone to tell me they can taste the difference.

dehydrated tomatoes

Since we only have a couple of silicone silpats, another way to lay out fruits and veggies for drying without sticking, is to crumple a sheet of aluminum foil and then flatten it out, then swab it with a vegetable oil.  You don't want to cut the tomatoes too thin. You will be amazed how a slice of tomato nearly a quarter inch thick will shrink down to a paper thin piece.  My next project is to create a dehydrating box out of some relatively cheap materials.  I plan on taking step-by-step photographs of the process, in case anyone would like to duplicate it.

Another thing you should know is that there are lots of things that don't really even need refrigeration.  Chances are that everybody reading this has mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup in their fridge.  None of those things need to be in there.  Seriously. Did you know that even eggs can go two to three weeks in just moderately cool temperatures.

Stay tuned.

An Ambitious Project

If you've never had to pay a huge bill for electricity or natural gas or heating oil or propane, you've either been miraculously blessed or you haven't lived long enough. I have nothing against fossil fuels and I don't resent the companies that produce and deliver them. Such fuels are incredibly efficient at delivering unbelievably great amounts of "work" with unbelievably tiny amounts of waste. In fact, we've become rather too efficient at making them burn without leaving enough carbon dioxide to replenish the supply in the atmosphere.  Currently, the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is less than 4/10ths of one percent.  It would be far more beneficial to plant growth around the planet if it were closer to about a full three percent.  More on that subject further down the page.

A house on the way there

Twyla and I traveled to a remote spot in western NC to buy an old porcelain on steel wood cookstove. The house it was in was being renovated rebuilt, by a 70 year old Viet Nam veteran who served with special forces and Navy SEALS. (Hang the ridiculous celebrities of today, this is the kind of person that impresses the socks off of me.) The house was probably built sometime before 1900, judging by the exposed timbers and such.  I wish I had taken more pictures. It was at the very end of a road that was only gravel a half mile after the winding blacktop ended.  I'm talking about a single lane blacktop that you could only go 15 mph on, not because of a sign, but because of necessity, and you wouldn't want to go any faster than that for fear of missing out on the great scenery.  It was somewhere north of the French Broad River.

1913 Karr: most parts removed

The stove that we bought from this gentleman was a KARR model built in Illinois in 1913.  A comparable model stove in really good condition on eBay would sell for about $3,000. Twyla spent enough time looking on the internet when we were trying to decide on what stove to get. We found the add for this particular stove in a publication at the grocery store.  The stove is quite a bit worse for wear than most, as you can see in the picture, but I'm Mr. Fix-it, and the sweat equity and challenge made the $350 price seem very reasonable. The first pic of the stove shows it after we unloaded it in the driveway.  The top sections and 100 pounds of other parts are sitting elsewhere waiting to be de-rusted.  There are a few things that need to be repaired; new hinges, etc.  I've got a vendor working on the estimate for all the exhaust parts I'm going to need to install this thing.  You can't see it from the front, but it even has a water jacket with plumbing connections so that it can heat water.  The next set of pics shows the place in the house where this baby is going to set. It's like the breakfast area off the kitchen, pretty much centrally located relative to the whole house.

Step one was to take out this built in shelving unit.  This is where you get to see the late 60s/early 70s decorating style. That nasty pattern was there originally, and then somebody built the shelving in a long time ago. The more neutral looking linoleum was installed around the shelving several years ago.

Then we went to Home Depot and found some 12" tile on sale for just 90 cents a square foot to install. Dark grout was a must. I've got a lot of experience doing ceramic tile, so it only took a couple of hours to install it, and the next day I put the wood trim around the perimeter.  Our hope is to eventually have all the carpet ripped up and replaced with hardwood. I'm pretty good at that as well, and some 3/4" red oak would be perfect in here.

With some hard work and the blessings of Adonai, we will be pumping plant food out of the chimney come November.That's right; plenty of wonderful CO2.

If that information shocks you, you might want to stop reading right now, because this blog is going to be a big defender of genuine science and not give any quarter to the idiotic crap that passes for science in the major media. Consensus of people with Ph.D. behind their names is not scientific. And in case you didn't know, most of the "scientists" who have signed on to the global warming hoax have their fields of study in things other than meteorology or earth sciences that would be relevant to the atmosphere.  And even among those who seem to have relevant credentials, the information leak on the East Anglia University data fraud demonstrates that such people don't really care about facts, they just have an agenda to promote global socialism.  Facts are facts independent of opinion. Computer models that don't include vital variables such as water vapor and solar cycles are just so much nonsense. This is why over 17,000 credible scientists have signed on to a petition debunking the belief in global warming.  You should be able to find plenty of links on the internet by reasoned, rational scientists who have thoroughly debunked this hoax.  You can start with Dr. Ian Plimer.  If you want more links, just ask.

The thing that I love about real science is how experimentation and observation makes it so easy to debunk the garbage out there. My favorite example in this case, is that you can seal a greenhouse and pump more than ten times the normal amount of CO2 into it, and in a matter of hours the chloroplasts in the plants will detect the extra level of carbon dioxide and respond by stepping up absorption and conversion to energy storage, thus returning the atmosphere inside the greenhouse to the previous gas ratios.  This has been demonstrated over and over.  If we produce more CO2, the planet won't get warmer, we'll simply have more plant growth.

I could go into details about chlorofluorocarbons and ozone, but this post is long enough, and if you are really interested in this stuff you probably already know that it's a hoax, but if you need more information, I'll help point you in the right direction.