Baking mixes

After looking at the Bisquick type recipes in your new book am wondering, other than shelf life, is there any difference in how these mixes work? Shortening compared to dehydrated shortening.

Betty Anderson
Berryville, Arkansas

No differences other than possibly having to add a bit more liquid in some recipes to create the most workable dough when you use the dehydrated shortening. I use both with equally good results. — Jackie

Storing dry pasta

What is the best way to store dry pasta? I really would like to store it in glass jars but I don’t know how. I guess the other way might be in the bags that I see in the survival write-up web sites.

Charles Hancock
Hazel Green, Alabama

Dry pasta stores very easily with no extra frills and supplies. You can simply pour it into glass jars and screw down the lid. I used to store mine in gallon glass jars for years. Now I store mine in used, clean popcorn tins, like you get around Christmas. I’ve never had any get rancid or in any way damaged. Works great! And it’s cheap. — Jackie

Root cellar

I have a question on root cellars. My wife and I have finally managed to buy a piece of land on which to build our retreat. It does not / will not have electricity but I would like to be able to store some foodstuffs and canned goods there but obviously they need to be kept from freezing. Unfortunately the home site is literally on the side of a mountain so digging a cellar is out of the question due to ledge rock. My thought was to build a small room from block and cover it with earth. Would this work and if so how deeply must it be covered?

Allen Foster
Northfield, New Hampshire

Yes, this will certainly work. If you would insulate the sides of your root cellar with dense insulation board (below grade quality), you can probably pile dirt over it about three feet deep in your location. You will have to play with this a little by keeping a thermometer in it for the first couple of years. You may have to add some more dirt later if your cellar gets down too close to freezing. Snow on the dirt will also help insulate your root cellar. Be sure to add a double door system with an air lock between to help protect your cellar when you enter and exit during the winter. And don’t forget to insulate your doors and add a vent through the roof that can be opened and closed as needed to keep the cellar cool, not freezing, and keep the condensation down. Pick up a copy of Bubel’s book, ROOT CELLARING. It is very good and a complete book on many different methods of construction. — Jackie

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Even though it’s snowing like mad, (five inches already) Will and I drove our car to the dump on Saturday, and found that a contractor had dumped a whole truck load of lumber from a remodeling job. There were 2x4s and a whole lot of knotty pine paneling. So this morning, while I worked at home, Will ran in to see if the stuff was still there. It was! He loaded the truck high with the lumber and brought it home.

Right now, he’s building shelves in the basement for more storage (junk and food), and nearly all that lumber has been recycled. What a good feeling that is! Especially when it didn’t cost us a dime. And what nice shelves, too. They are all built with 2×4 legs and 2×6 and 2×4 shelves, so they’ll be plenty serviceable and strong.

The basement’s been a catch-all for several years now and we’re trying to unravel it and sort out boxes and boxes of stuff. Some of it is ours from when we moved from the mobile home. Some of it is Mom and Dad’s. But it’s piled here and there, all over the place. It’s time to organize and reduce clutter! That new truckload of lumber will sure help and the knotty pine paneling will find a good use, here on our homestead.

So now we’re watching the snow pile up and throwing another log on the fire, getting warm before chore time again. — Jackie

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For our pigs, that is! We have two gilts that need to be bred and we have no boar. Friends of ours, Tiffany and her husband, Nate, had a boar they could spare but needed their three goats bred. So we traded breeding services and we brought all the animals home. Two of their goats are in with our Boer buck, Thor, and the other, which is part Boer, is in with our Nubian/Boer buck. The kids should provide plenty of milk and also extra buck kids (lots of tasty meat). It’s a totally win-win situation, as neither of us will be out any money and we’ll both get our animals bred.

Will’s been working on log siding for our house. Rather than pay $50 or more for a piece of log siding to finish our addition, he’s cutting slabs with our portable Hud-Son bandsaw mill and then using sanding discs on our angle grinder to clean off the pieces after he drawknifes them. So far, he’s got several done and they are looking good! My son, Bill, did this with the interior gable ends of his log home and his turned out great. Better than store-bought siding! Cheaper and better is our motto!

Our winter continues to be GREAT. Today it’s sunny and 42 degrees above zero! This is unheard of here in northern Minnesota in January. The usual temperature is 35 below, so you can see why we’re kind of nuts, here. True, it may not continue, but every mild week is a week closer to spring and a week that it’s NOT cold. — Jackie

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Obviously, we can’t use an electric stock tank heater. Propane heaters are expensive to buy — and to run! Will remembered his dad telling him about his chore, as a kid, of having to fill his grandpa’s wood-fired stock tank heater every day and that got Will to thinking. We have two big tanks for the horses that we fill with hoses, chopping ice out in-between. But, sooner or later, the ice gets thicker and thicker until there’s only a five-gallon basin left unfrozen in the top. Will looked online at some wood-fired heaters and thought he could manufacture one. A trip to the dump brought back a couple of small hot water heaters, which he dismantled for the tank inside. Then he welded an air vent pipe on (square one in photo), cutting a hole in the lower side and putting a chimney on top to vent the smoke. Then he added a piece of 8-inch pipe, welded on top to load the wood, with a flat swinging cap to close after the fire is going.

He tried it yesterday, first in the cow’s tank, which was also frozen pretty badly. By evening, the tank was half unthawed! So this morning, he took it down to the horse pasture and set it in a chopped basin on top of the ice, and fired it up. Now, two hours later, there is a wide basin of water around the heater and all the afternoon to go. (And because it’s forty degrees today, that should help a lot!)

It’s amazing what can be done with very little money to make homesteading on a shoestring much more enjoyable! Thank you, Will! — Jackie

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And now we are waiting for the call to come pick up our pork at the processing plant. Of course, it’s going to be a little longer before the hams and bacon are smoked, but the wait will be worth it! I’m hoping that by next year we will be set up to smoke our own meat again. Both Will and I have done it before, but right now, we don’t have a smoker or facilities to set one up. (There’s always a next year project!)

We kept our two gilts and are bringing a friend’s boar over to breed them. We’re trading breeding services on our buck goat for their boar’s services, so it will work out great for both of us. We’d hoped to breed both to a red wattle boar, but their only red wattle boar weighs 800 pounds. He’d squash our gilts! So we’re using their Berkshire boar this time and have reserved a purebred red wattle boar from the same sow that we got our barrow from — unrelated to either gilt. We don’t want to raise lots of pigs. Grain prices are horrible and don’t look like they’ll ever come down again. But we’ll raise a couple of litters a year and sell the extra weaner pigs to help pay for the feed costs for the pigs we keep to raise to butcher. I really do love the red wattle pigs and our friends say there’s no better pork. I’ll let you know about tomorrow! Mmm.

Meanwhile, I’m working on an article for the magazine on off-grid living on a shoestring, getting ready for a second Christmas dinner with my son, Bill and his wife, while Will is out burning brush piles. As our land was cut-over Potlatch timber land, there were lots of slash piles up on our ridge. UGLY. They were too rotten to use as firewood, so they just sat there. As we’re having an open winter, Will decided to burn them as there’s 3-4 inches of snow on the ground for safety. Last night, he burned six piles up on the ridge and BOY does that look better! And today, he set off the three piles down in our horse pasture. Those were all that was left from clearing the horse pasture, all shoved into one huge pile and two small ones. They all burned nicely, and relatively completely. What a relief it is to have all that gone. Another job done.

On to the next! Will’s working on his bridge, down at the creek. It, too, is coming along nicely, with both ends now down and supported well, rip rap on the upstream side consisting of power poles, boulders, and rock. There’s even planking on top for temporary driving over with the four wheeler! Now he’s hauling gravel to raise the level of the lower ground beyond the bridge, with rip rap to keep it from washing away. This will be a huge improvement over our inaccessible acreage across the creek, except in the winter. Soon, we’ll be able to drive the four wheeler, dozer, or tractor over it year-round. — Jackie

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We did, here at our homestead. My sister and nephew came from the Duluth area to share Christmas dinner with us. As usual, I cooked much more than we could eat, but that only means we get to eat leftovers for days! Not a bad thing. My son Bill, his wife, and my grandson, Mason, are coming this Saturday for a second Christmas dinner so I get to do it again. Lucky I lost the six pounds I gained over Thanksgiving!

Meanwhile, Will’s been busy building his new trailer, made from the old mobile home frame. He’s been cutting lumber and bolting it down to the frame. It’s coming along nicely, with more than 2/3 done already. He’s even making another trailer from the rest of the frame to use to haul firewood logs out of the woods when there isn’t enough snow to use the dray. Not bad from “junk,” eh?

Our weather continues to be mild for the Northwoods. Yesterday, it was more than forty above, and we have only about 3 inches of snow on the ground. We’re waiting for the other shoe to fall, though, as usually it’s well below zero this time of the year, plus we usually have several feet of snow on the ground. I remember moving here in February of 2003, having to have a bulldozer clear a trail in — all 1.3 miles — through three feet or more of packed snow. This year it’s much easier on us, for sure. The unseasonable temperatures make it feel like spring so we continue to drool over seed and nursery catalogs, just waiting for spring.

Have a very Happy New Year! — Jackie

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No, it isn’t an iPod, home theater, or other electronic gadget. It’s a small kitten named Mittens. This fall, Will and I went to a neighbor’s yard sale and noticed a sign for two free kittens. The lady told us her husband told her she had to get rid of the kittens at the sale or he would shoot them. Will asked to see the male. Out came a tiny bit of a 6-week-old kitten and Will tucked him into his shirt. He’s been home now for a month and a half and is one of the family. Even our Lab, Spencer, loves Mittens and that big dog and tiny kitten romp and play like family. (Our animals are strange: dogs love cats, bulls love doeling goats, and goats sleep with chickens.)

We’re having a ball watching Spencer and Mittens play tag and “fight.” Spencer is so gentle with Mittens, it’s unbelievable. We won’t be bored this winter.

And we always find new projects. David picked up a load of new bricks when his church youth group cleaned out a storeroom at school. I didn’t know what I’d use them for…maybe a small entry area by our front gate? But so far, they’ve just been piled up, waiting. Will and I talked about putting them around the wood stove in the living room, for a heat sink, and last night, he started hauling wheelbarrow-loads of bricks into the house. We cleaned and stacked bricks until 10:30 last night and finally, this morning, it was finished. And not only will the bricks hold the stove’s heat a long time after it burns down, but we also think it looks nice.

Will’s planning on rocking up the walls behind and beside the wood stove, but until he gets working on that, our new stove surround will do famously. — Jackie

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Our new Hud-Son portable bandsaw mill (that we got this past spring) is a wonderful addition to our homestead. It’s already sawed tons of beams, floor joists, and dimension lumber quickly and easily. Plus all the slab wood that was left over has been cut up and is now inside, ready to provide nice, dry kindling and kitchen range fuel. BUT winter’s coming. We already have two inches of snow on the ground that will probably still be here, come spring. And our bandsaw mill sits on planks on the ground…soon to be buried in snow. So Will wanted to make a trailer to haul our sawmill around and keep it up off of the ground.

Sure, we could have bought a trailer package for our saw — for plenty of extra cash, which we didn’t have. But he wanted to build our own trailer — at a deep discount.

A neighbor, three miles away, had a ratted-out old mobile home in his yard and Will eyed it when we went by. He called him about the possibility of getting it (free of course, for the dismantling and hauling). The owner was more than happy to get rid of it. The aluminum siding had been stripped years ago and the roof had blown off. It was truly an ugly beast, sitting there.

Will hired a friend (we hope he’s still a friend!) and they went over with the tractor to empty out the trailer and pile the walls into a burning pile, which the neighbor had started years ago. Turned out that the trailer, which had no roof, had been filled several FEET deep with assorted junk. They worked hard for three days shoveling trash, along with dismantling the “palace.” David helped out the third day, then they tried to pull the empty mobile home frame out of the spot where it had been sitting for decades. David’s 3/4-ton Chevy with a Duramax diesel, our 3/4-ton Ford 4×4, and the tractor barely budged it! The tractor tire went flat and the afternoon was past. Will figured he’d have to bring our dozer over to pull it out.

The fourth day it was snowing and Will didn’t have the heart to ask our friend to help. He went over to put a repaired front tire on our tractor (nail from the junk). I stayed home to do some canning and laundry. Several hours later, I heard stomping on the front porch.

Will was home, AND he’d hauled the mobile home frame home — well nearly home — with the tractor! In fact, over at the neighbor’s, all alone, he hooked the tractor on to the frame and tried to pull it. Just for the heck of it. And it came away easily! So he just kept going. All the way home. Kind of. There’s this hill 1/4 mile away and he knew he’d never get up it without tire chains. So he parked it and just came home.

The next day, he took Old Yeller down there and hooked on. Without incident, it pulled home easily. Now it’s cut into thirds. The center third twisted and bent badly during the move and haul. But Will only needs the straight parts for the sawmill trailer. Junk to useful homestead equipment is such a good thing! I laugh and tell him we’re the ultimate recyclers!

We still have a few spots available at our May homesteading seminar, here on our homestead in Northern Minnesota.  If you’d like to have more information, check out the past blog and e-mail for a flyer.  We’d be so glad to meet you! — Jackie

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