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good article from backwoodshome

These days a lot of people are concerned, and rightly so, about their family's economic stability and security. Recently I've become aware of the ways in which I, a stay-at-home mother, can enhance my own family's feelings of security. I'm going to share my ideas in the hope that they will help others find more peace and comfort in their homes, too.

The place I've found that I have the most control, and thus the most leeway, is in the family grocery budget. Many people assume that cutting back on spending here involves either doing without healthy foods or extreme coupon shopping (the kind of couponing where you make a giant project out of trying to get everything free or at almost no cost). Neither assumption is true — as long as you know how to gear up and how to strategically use your opportunities.

First I'll talk about how to "get ready to get ready." By that I mean little things you can do — and in some cases, buy — to take advantage of opportunities to be prepared. The biggest revelation I've had recently is that being set up is the key; once you are ready to be ready, you can prepare with ease and without a whirlwind of back-breaking work.

Prepping to prep

Start with little, routine things. Here are some you can do right now that will make the rest of this series more useful to you:

1. Every time you prepare veggies for a meal, prep double. This means, for example, if you're cutting up one onion, cut two while you're at it and put the second in the freezer for future use. I keep labeled zip top bags in the freezer just for this purpose — a bag of chopped onions, a bag of sliced carrots, etc.

2. Every time you prepare a meal, keep all the veggie trimmings — everything — the onion skins and the celery tops and the carrot shavings and so forth. Put them in another labeled bag in the freezer and add to that bag as you go. Oh, and save the net onion bags. Cut off any metal ends, fold the bags and put them in with the veggies. You'll use these, I promise! If you have starchy items such as potato peels, put them in a separate bag. Apple and pear peels go in a bag together, citrus peels go together. Banana peels go on the compost pile.

3. When you find something on sale (meat or veggies, fresh or frozen), go for it. Don't be shy. Get as much as you can afford or have room to store. You don't have to know what to do with it right away, but when you've taken the steps I'll outline, you'll have plenty of ideas.

Ok, that's the small stuff you can do. Now to the stuff I recommend you have — but you don't have to buy new. Ask family and friends if they have any of these. Maybe they would be willing to share their gear and even work together on some of the steps I'll show you next. Also check your local Craigslist and Freecycle groups. Lots of people are downsizing and you might find just what you're looking for there.

The items that I strongly urge you to have available are:

1. A food dehydrator. You can dehydrate food in your oven but that ties it up and also costs a lot of money to run. Plus, do you really want to run your oven for hours a day in August? A dehydrator can be set up and left while you do other things like plan the exotic vacation you'll take when you retire. In the next section of this article I'll talk a little more about how I use my dehydrators.

2. A pressure canner. Get the largest one that will fit on the largest burner of your stove. This is the only canner you need. You cannot use a pressure cooker for canning unless it is rated specifically for this purpose by the manufacturer, but you can use a pressure canner for canning, cooking, and water bath processing.

3. A vacuum sealer. With this item you'll also need a few accessories to take full advantage of its usefulness — some jar sealers, at least, and a canister sealer if you have a bonus burning money in your pocket. (We'll talk much more about this in the next article.)

Other items you can pick up as you need them are: canning jars with new lids, a roll of vacuum sealer bags, and canning tools.

Those are the basics. You can certainly invest in more convenience-enhancing items such as a food processor, a stand mixer, a mandolin ... whatever. But for now, make sure you have the above items ready to go. I'll explain how and why to use each of these items and I'll give you examples of how to get the most out of them.

Now, on to dehydrating!

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