Category — FOOD

It’s the middle of winter, cold, dreary, but something I start receiving in my mailbox makes me long for the warm days of spring, the seed catalogs. Those shiny, colorful pages full of picture of ripe fruit and veggies and herbs. I have already started buying some things, a week ago, while on one of my rare trips to town (it’s a 3+ hour drive to town), I was in a Sam’s Club store, I was about to start heading for the check out lanes when I spotted something green and leafy sticking out from an odd aisle. (more…)

Worldwide food shortages and higher gas prices continue to drive food prices up, up, up. And yet there are still massive savings to be had that most people aren’t even aware of.  Please send us your stories of how to cope with food inflation (mail to news@off-grid.net).

One book promises to slash your grocery bills in half.  Supermarket Survival is an expert guide to juicing supermarkets – follow its rules or THEY will JUICE YOU.

Yes, you could say “don’t even use supermarkets!”  But that is not realistic.

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Homesteading, it’s a buzzword that means different things to different people, back in the day, it meant getting land for free as long as you lived on it and improved it for x number of years. It was a way to get people to move west (in the USA), back when travel was slow and painful, even dangerous.
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Going fridgless, to most people would be paramount to going topless, many people couldn’t imagine living their lives without having a 19+/- cubic foot energy eating, leftover storing, inefficient cold box sitting in their kitchen. Now days refrigerators do so much, in my old life, I worked for a big box electronics store, the one with the blue shirts and the little yellow price tag, they were starting to put computers in the door, not just electronics, but a real computer screen that could access the internet and help you with your shopping and let you watch TV on your fridge. (more…)

I love making and baking bread, who doesn’t enjoy eating fresh, homemade bread hot from the oven? The problem is the time it takes to make, the mixing, the kneading, the rising, the kneading again, the shaping, the rising again… it just takes too much time and attention.

 

About a year ago, I started seeing books and recipes for no-knead breads, it looks almost too good to be true, this method makes what is often referred to as “artisan breads”, the kind that cost a small fortune in the specialty bakeries, who knew how easy these breads were to make? (more…)

I like rocket stoves, these are usually small, usually portable, mini-cooking-heating devices that are very efficient. You can use twigs instead of larger pieces of wood, these tend to be safer since you aren’t using a lot of fuel (twigs) and it goes out if you aren’t there to feed the wood into the stove. I have seen a lot of different methods of building a rocket stove, from simple bricks without mortar to very elaborate and expensive rigs. (more…)

Headline stories about inflation conceal the worst of the news rises. But ordinary shoppers know that staple food prices have been rising 10% year on year. We call it Food Shock.
In this major feature we help you deal with rising food prices. Take a look at the 14-part series in our self-sufficiency section – a month-by-month guide to growing your own food. Here is the first one.
If you want to grow some of the food you eat, but also want to minimize the hard work, then you need harvests that produce quickly, harvest repeatedly and require little of your time while they do it.
Mark Keenan spent four years researching the most cost-effective crops – the easiest to grow that would save you most money off your food bill. Here is how he saves up to $2000 per year from your food bill: (more…)

I have been doing research all winter long about how to conserve fuel and keep the cabin warm as the  Ol’ All Nighter woodstove really eats up the wood.

So in the name of pure laziness began my search for a way to get maximum heat for minimum work I found the rocket stove mass heater. They appear to use small amounts of wood(sticks and branches) and retain heat for long periods. These are nothing new —  the Romans used them on a very large scale to heat the floors and water in there bath houses. (more…)

With food prices going up and up with no end in sight, some of us have already started buying extra food to put away for hard times, and believe me, hard times can come at any time for many reasons, from weather incidents to terrorist (domestic and foreign) attacks. It can be something as simple as losing your income because of being fired, laid off, cut hours, downsizing and such. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one less worry, one less thing competing for your hard earned money? Well if you have a store of food, then you can spend your money on fuel, mortgage or rent, insurance and such instead of worrying about where your next meal will come from or having to choose between buying groceries or paying for other things. Food is expensive, buying in bulk is usually less expensive, but you have to have the money to pay upfront for your bulk purchase. I have learned of a place where you can buy foods in bulk and in #10 cans on the cheap.

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