Food

In the first article, “Tangibles Investing in an Uncertain Economy: How a 42-Year-Old Book Holds the Key to Beat Inflation,” I wrote about The Alpha Strategy, which is a system made famous by author John A. Pugsley in a book he wrote by the same title published in 1980. He advocated buying ahead and storing several years’ worth of items your household uses all the time, thus defeating the inevitable rising prices due to inflation and freeing up additional disposable income over the number of years’ worth of these items you store.

This article will look at scratch cooking as another way to save significant amounts of money on your grocery bill, allowing you to have more disposable income to purchase and store more household items implementing The Alpha Strategy or for other investments.

Why not learn to scratch cook, which is a valuable skill, using the tools you already have in your kitchen?  Preparedness experts agree that having skills is always more desirable than having things. You can purchase all kinds of equipment and tools, but they are essentially worthless if you don’t know how to use them. It also makes sense because of power outages, to learn to cook with ingredients rather than throwing a frozen entree into the microwave. In an emergency, you will be ready to prepare and cook meals over an open flame, if necessary.

Scratch cooking is how all of humanity prepared food in the days before just-in-time logistics, fast food, and overly-processed foods. It is the skill of making good things to eat from ingredients that are just one or two steps away from the natural state of the food. The steps in processing a foodstuff are to modify the plant or animal to make it edible. For example, flour is ground (or milled) wheat berries, which is one step away from the naturally grown wheat plant. Nutritionists point out that we eat healthier when we eat foods just one or two steps away from their natural state.  Overly processed foods contain ingredients to lengthen the shelf life of the food, but include unhealthy amounts of chemicals. In addition to extending shelf life, modern processed foods add extra calories from cheap filler ingredients along with harmful amounts of salt, and food dyes.

The cooking processes used in the factories that produce such “convenience” foods also destroy the foodstuff’s original nutritional value. For example, most modern breakfast cereals are made by stripping out the intrinsic nutrition of corn, wheat, rice, or oats and replacing it with a processed coating. The ingredients are turned into slush, reshaped into forms (stars, O’s, small squares, etc.), and baked.  In the final stage, “nutritional coatings” (sugars, flavors, and dyes, which are also processed) are then sprayed back onto the cereal before its packaged.  Unhealthy foods like this lead to suppressed immune systems, chronic ailments, and significant disease. By contrast, cooking with simple, nutrient-rich foods improve your overall health and give your body the nutrition it needs to function properly.

You can also save lots of money by learning to cook from scratch. If you stop buying overly processed foods and begin to purchase the ingredients to cook healthy meals, you will discover these ingredients are much less expensive, and you can slash your grocery budget. My grocery budget was once $400+ a month, and by learning to cook from scratch using healthy ingredients, I now spend about $175 – $200 a month.

I started my scratch cooking journey by learning to bake bread at home. It’s an ideal way to learn the basics of cooking using ingredients. Bread is THE universal item on everyone’s grocery list, and as food prices rise due to inflation, learning to bake bread can save you significant money.

The average loaf of regular sandwich bread is now $1.50 – $4.00 or more a loaf. I was used to purchasing an organic whole wheat bread that was $3.89 a loaf. Here’s what I discovered when I started to make bread:

Using a standard recipe, I purchased these ingredients:

• One 5 Lb. bag All Purpose flour – $1.56
• One 5 lb. Bag Whole Wheat flour – $2.74
• One 4 lb. Bag granulated sugar – $2.08
• Four 3-count packets Instant yeast – $3.08
• 1 box (4 sticks) butter – $2.98
• Total  – $12.44

A 5 lb. bag of All-Purpose flour contains between 3 and 4 cups per pound or a little over 17 cups per bag. When I bake bread, I always make two loaves and use 5 cups of flour, (½ All-Purpose flour and ½ Whole Wheat flour, which is a little more expensive that making a loaf of bread from All-Purpose or Bread Flour alone).  I can make at least six loaves of bread from every five lb. bag of flour.

If I divide the total cost outlay for ingredients of $12.44 by six loaves, that equals a cost per loaf of $2.07. Since I usually purchased bread that cost about $3.89 per loaf, I am saving $1.82 per loaf by learning to bake.

On average, my household consumes one loaf of bread per week. By saving $1.82 per loaf each week for the 52 weeks in a year, my total savings equal $94.64 a year on bread alone. This evaluation doesn’t include how often I can buy the ingredients on sale, or with coupons, or in bulk, dropping the cost per loaf even lower. I figure I’m actually saving about $100 a year on bread by making it myself.  Besides, my homemade bread is tastier, and my house smells fantastic on a baking day!

Once I started making bread, I was soon branching out to make dough for homemade pizza. Homemade pizza is far less expensive and tastes better than frozen, carry-out, or delivery pizza, and there’s no tip!  My household would consume pizza about once or twice a month, so I’m saving that cost by getting the fresher ingredients and making pizza myself.  My scratch cooking skills have expanded to include soups, stews, and casseroles – all made from the freshest ingredients I can find.  It certainly added up because now my grocery budget is just under half of what I used to spend, or $2400 saved in one year.   As you can see, this can be a huge savings for most people, since after rent and/or mortgage and car loan payments, the average grocery bill is the next largest cost outlay in most budgets. 

The biggest rap against scratch cooking is the perception that it takes way too much time to produce a meal.  Obviously it takes longer to put a savory vegetable soup together than boiling water for a quick cup of instant soup. It comes down to priorities.  If you are willing to do a little prep work, you will reap the rewards of better health and money saved.  It is possible to do your weekly meal planning with efficiency in mind.  Once you transition to preparing most of your meals from scratch, you can learn to save time by planning your weekly meals and prepping the ingredients ahead of time, and storing them for quick use when needed. Many YouTube videos show you how to do this. All it takes is a bit of organization and time management, and the results will improve your diet, significantly reduce your grocery bill, and not take up too much of your time.   

Overall, my scratch cooking experience has allowed me to finance my tangible investing and has helped me purchase all my long-term food storage. Once you have a repertoire of healthy meals you create from ingredients, you can learn food canning to stretch your savings further and have a store of these items on hand at today’s lower prices, instead of the costs that continue to creep higher during extreme inflation.

Given that experts believe we are entering a time of potential double-digit inflation, I urge you to learn scratch cooking, if you haven’t already. Start by baking bread!  By combining scratch cooking with tangibles investing (The Alpha Strategy), you have a 100% risk-free proven hedge against inflation.  I know of no faster way to improve your health and wealth than the savings and skills you will find by learning to cook from scratch.

Take the Scratch Cooking Challenge!  For a free copy of my Simple Sandwich Bread recipe, email PJ at goldenpagemedia@gmail.com

Author: This is a guest post by PJ Graves. PJ is a retired award-winning radio broadcaster, news reporter and writer, whose reporting has been featured on national radio networks and whose articles have been on Survivalblog, Prepper Website, Rapture Ready and various online news magazines. In addition to writing, PJ runs Golden Page, an email newsletter featuring innovative ways to save money, side-gigs, prepping tips and little-known ways to change careers without going into debt or paying for training.  She enjoys home church, living in Amish Country, exploring historic sites, classic films, cooking, volunteering at a local food bank, and small town living.

If we ever experience a collapse, those who are not prepared will be scrambling to come up with enough food. In fact, most will be scrambling to come up with enough food at some point! Some will turn to a life of crime. Others might try to build an emergency garden. But at that point, there might not be seeds at your local Home Depot or the ability to order from your favorite seed catalog.

What could people do or use to get something into the ground that could produce a crop. What follows is a guest post from Michael. He shared some insights into a “what-if” scenario. After reading his thoughts, what would you add? Be sure to leave some helpful tips in the comments.

An Emergency Garden Scenario

It’s spring 2022! Inflation and job loss have found you with extra family members living with you.  Your stored foods once thought good for a year or so spread out over more mouths, looks grim.  The grocery bill is going to be out of control soon as no employment for the unemployed guests seems available as food prices spiral out of control. You start see the emergency!

Your new guests brought little in the way of food assets but so far, they are listening to your leadership.  

It’s June 1st 2021, you’ve looked over your assets.  You have some potatoes with growing eyes available.  They are no name, white store bought potatoes.  You have a “Survival Garden in a Can” of unknown age, some Roma tomatoes, store bought garlic and some bok choy from the store.

Do You Have the Right Garden Plot?

Things you need to figure out NOW before you start. 

Do you have decent soil?  Roundup or Scotts Yard Lawns will kill your efforts shortly after you plant.  How can you tell it’s a good place to plant?  Dandelions!!  Dandelions were BROUGHT over from Europe by settlers as a Spring Tonic after eating from ever depleting root cellars all winter.  Roundup destroys them. That common weed will lead you to a good site.

What are your growing days?  It’s found by looking up your Last Frost in the Spring and the First Frost of Fall.  With extra effort, you can extend the season and should.

What is your rainfall pattern in your area?  Most places have dry months that fall in the middle of growing season.  What can you do to store up water for the dry days?  

How am I going to get rid of all those weeds where I want to plant my garden? 

Trust me, digging them up by hand is NOT the answer.  Happily, your guests brought with them a couple of large tarps plus the ones you had.  You can solar cook that weed plot into an emergency garden site.  Just chop down the large-tall stuff, check to see how many layers of tarp is needed to block sunshine and cover your soon to be emergency garden plot.

A Water Catchment Scenario

Potatoes and Their Friends

While you are waiting the two weeks to severely stunt or kill off those weeds you need to be planting potatoes.  Common white potatoes are generally a 3-4 month crop. Cut up the potatoes with eyes as so each eye has a good chunk of potato with it.  Let it dry a day to form a scab. Then plant about 3 inches deep with as much well-rotted leaves you can find as fertilizer.  They are more robust than weeds, but you do need to give them a head start and all season weed them while hilling them every week or so, so only about 20% of the foliage is showing.  You cannot eat the leaves, but hilling and keeping them damp, those green leaves become part of the tuber growing roots.  You will eat by the sweat of your brow here friends!  You want as many potatoes plats as you can secure from your food ration at the grocery store. 

Potatoes are not sexy, but they fill the belly and with the skin on, a fair bit of vitamin C to prevent scurvy. 

You also want to plant around, but not where you’re going to hill those plants to plant garlic cloves.  A garlic bulb should have several good-sized cloves per bulb.  Do not remove the “paper” of the cloves. Plant pointy end up also about 2-3 inches deep.  Garlic and potatoes do well together and garlic helps keep pests away from the potatoes.  Garlic, spring planted, will give you small cloves but some left to overwinter will give you the large cloves the next fall.  You can also get nice scapes for cooking in mid- spring unless you want more garlic “seeds.” But those seed pods will take two years to become garlic blubs.

Slimy Goop Tomatoes and Bok Choy?

Now the Roma tomatoes.  Cut a few open, scrape out the inner slimy bits with the seeds.  You get to eat the rest. Yay!  Place the seedy goop into a jar with water.  Let it sit near, but not in the sunshine.  The idea is, a few days of gentle fermenting and you can remove the seeds from the goopy mess and start the planting.  You look around and find you have a cardboard egg carton.  You carefully put the eggs in something else so you can mix up a 50-50 mix of the best soil you have plus well rotten leaf mold, make extra for future potting soil.  Place the egg carton on a sheet pan and fill each cell with soil.  Plant two-three seeds into each cell as one or two should sprout.  Water carefully as to keep the soil moist, but not wet.  Keep in a window with a bit of clear plastic over it as a mini-green house.  The container from the tomatoes will do here.

Find something that will allow drainage but hold soil for your Bok Choy.  You can eat most of the leaves but the base, if not slimy or moldy will grow roots.  Keep in damp, not wet potting soil and sunshine.  This year you might get some leaves to eat, but the plan is to get it to produce seed pods that will become dry and leathery when ripe for a fall and spring planting.

It’s Not Over Till You Pull the Last Vegetable!

You have to protect your emergency garden!  Most of your threats are from rodents, deer and such.  You set a night guard to snooze in a tent in the garden as just your normal noise keeps most pests away.

Research More Gardening Tips

Peace,
Todd