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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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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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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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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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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