Rockridge Press - The Preppers Cookbook

Regardless of what reality TV would have you believe, preppers arent paranoid people rushing around gathering food in underground bunkers and spouting conspiracy theories. Most are real-world people just like you, who simply want to be prepared to survive any emergency that may arise. These emergencies include natural disasters such as hurricanes or blizzards, as well as global emergencies such as economic collapse or war. For that matter, what if you simply lose your job and dont have grocery money? If you have food stored away, your family wont go hungry during those lean weeks.

Stocking enough food in advance is practical, too. When news of an emergency such as a hurricane or blizzard is announced, people rush to the store and clean the shelves. If youre at work or otherwise unable to get to the store, there may be nothing left by the time you get there. If you stock up in advance, you dont have to worry about any of that, because youre already prepared.

There are several different ways to build an emergency food supply, including buying canned and dry goods, canning your own food, and dehydrating products. This book will teach you how to stock your pantry using a combination of these methods.

Home canning and dehydrating are great ways to build an emergency food supply with a minimal investment. The best part is that you can prepare your own delicious, nutritious recipes instead of relying on tasteless, chemical-laden, commercially canned foods. Its also significantly cheaper to can your own foods, after the initial equipment investment.

Two huge advantages to making your own food include the fact that youll know every single ingredient that goes into your recipes, and although most commercial products have a two-year marked shelf life, your products will retain their edibility and nutritional value for many years. As a matter of fact, there are documented cases of people eating food 100 years after it was canned. Although certainly not recommended, it goes to show that if you do it right, your food will last.

The following short checklist is to get you thinking about your emergency-preparedness plan. While the focus of this book is preparing stores of food for emergencies, this list will help you with your overall planning. At the back of the book, also see a , contain small amounts of food and supplies for quick get-aways.

These basic points will help you start building your emergency food supply. The next section focuses on different food-preservation methods and how to properly use each. Youll also find some great recipes to get you started.

As already discussed, you may not have access to modern amenities during an emergency, so youre going to need food thats been preserved in a manner that doesnt depend on refrigeration or possibly even cooking. There are several different ways that you can do this, and this chapter previews some of the most popular and successful methods of food preparation and cooking featured throughout this book.

Many of the foods that youre going to prepare are ready to eat, but if the emergency event extends beyond a day or two, youll get pretty tired of cold food. Also, if youre a coffee drinker or a person who likes to wash in warm water, youll probably want to have a heat source handy that doesnt require electricity. There are several options out there, and all of them have their ups and downs. It is best to have more than one cooking method available, just in case.

Without a doubt, this is the most popular way to cook without power, especially if you need an alternative source of heat for more than a day or two. If you plan to cook over an open fire, you can either use a campfire-type pit or you can build a fire pit that already has racks, a flue, and whatever other accessories youd like to build into it.

If you decide to cook with wood, youll need to have a plentiful stock of dried wood and a way to light it. Wet wood wont burn and it will create an excessive amount of smoke that can affect the flavor of your food. Also, you can only use it outside, so plan to cook in all weather conditions if this is one of your methods.

Tools that youll need:

Wood

Rocks

Rack, tripod, or special cooking rack with legs

Iron skillets, a Dutch oven, iron or copper kettles, or any combination of these

Wooden or metal spoons and spatulas with longer handles

Pot holders or towels to move your cookware

Cast iron or other metal fire poker or wooden stick

You can always use your barbecue grill to cook with. Stock up on charcoal or fuel, and as with an open fire, be prepared to cook in inclement weather. The downside here is that fuel supplies are limited to what you store, although you can always burn wood in it if you run out of charcoal or propane. If you opt to do this, though, make sure you remove the fuel tanks completely prior to building a wood or charcoal fire in your gas grill.

Supplies that youll need:

Fire starter if youre using charcoal or wood

Fuel

Barbecue utensils

Skillets, Dutch ovens, pots, or a combination of these to cook foods that you cant prepare on the racks

The advantages to using your fireplace or wood-burning cookstove as an alternative cooking method are many. The biggest two advantages probably are that you can cook inside in any weather and that as long as you have wood, you have a fuel source. However, if its hot outside, your house is going to become really hot from the residual heat. Youll need the same equipment that youd need for cooking on a campfire.

The advantage to using a camp stove is that its portable. If you need to leave in a hurry, you have a heat source that you can toss in the car or strap to your bug-out bag without adding much weight. The downsides are that you need fuel for it and you cant use it indoors. Expect to get about an hour of heat from a 16.4-ounce fuel bottle.

A solar oven consists of solar panels and a black pot that holds your food. The solar panels trap the heat and direct it to the pot. It doesnt require any fuel other than the sun, but if its a cold or overcast day, it wont be effective enough to cook with.

A rocket stove is a small, single-burner stove that uses wood to efficiently trap heat in a high-temperature combustion chamber. The smaller ones are portable, but youll need wood to fuel them.

These are wonderful gadgets to keep in your emergency kit because theyre light, portable, self-contained, and extremely efficient. You can use wood, charcoal, or propane, and many of them already have racks on them. The concept is that the heat is funneled directly to the food instead of being lost to the environment.