Hello out there. Hope everyone is coping with the latest. It’s true, as some wonder, that our lifestyle is well suited to avoiding any major life upset in times like this. Everything is pretty much the usual for us unless there is serious economic collapse. There are things we think about in times like this like goods that we would want in case of a serious collapse…. We aren’t hoarding anything, it just gets one to thinking. One thing we have always been good at though….feeding ourselves by our own hands, with a little help from the grain and dairy industries. So here you have i.t I’m going to write you a list of what is on my grocery list to take out to the woods with us to survive on for 6 to 8 months without refrigeration or a freezer in the fall.
150lbs of oatmeal, this is a mix of various types to switch things up a bit. Steel cut, thick rolled, quick cooking 9 grain cereal blend whatever suits your fancy for a hot cooked whole grain cereal that is what we eat basically every morning because it is nutritious and easy. I already have to make everything from scratch so I don’t enjoy just whipping up some cinnamon rolls for breakfast very often. Along with our oats we top it with
various dried fruit -about 40 lbs my father in law also dries us lots of apples from his neck of the woods
walnuts 30-40 lbs
butter- 20 lbs
salt-4 lbs though I always bring more salt with because it is a very important resource if you were ever stuck somewhere. You can preserve meat with it …I would never want to live without salt…..salt I do a little bit of hoarding with.
So that covers breakfast except a maybe one breakfast a week that we have pancakes because we are so sick of oatmeal.
I’m not going to cover what we eat every day except to say that there is almost always a fair bit of meat involved. Moose, Rabbit, Fish Lynx, Beaver Caribou, whatever we can get a hold of when we need it. Side note here, we didn’t get a moose last winter because Tyler was guiding too late into the season for us to get our own moose before the end of the rut and we ate rabbit and lots of rice and beans for the first couple of months out in the woods. Around Thanksgiving the fur became prime on the lynx in order to start trapping and we started eating lynx meat then and that is how we sustained ourselves in the meat department for the rest of the winter. It wasn’t the first time but yes we lived off of lynx meat last winter. It tastes a lot like …..turkey or pork. It’s pretty good really, just kind of gets old to eat the same meat every day for months but we were super grateful for it after a couple months of rice and beans. When I hear pop stories on the radio about how people are dealing with their quarantine menu I can’t help but chuckle and think how spoiled we Americans can be.
Trying to be humorous here and couldn’t decide to include this since it’s pretty far fetched for most to think of eating this way but is a pot full of lynx, one part being the ‘ham’ …when the tail points you know its done, haha
we have lots of dehydrated veggies from our garden that includes tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, kale, onions,various herbs, broccolli, cauliflower, beets. anb my father in law dries sweet corn for us. To give you an idea of how much we consume from the garden this is what we have growing on our work table in the house right now. 40 cabbages, 36 kale plants, 45 tomato plants, 28 bell pepper plants 18 broccoli, 18 cauliflower. lots of basil. Later we will plant potatoes, beans, peas, chard and Zuccinni squash. Winter squash doesn’t do well this far north and it’s too heavy to pack along up north so we don’t bother. I’m sorry I’m probably forgetting to mentioning something but you get the idea.
These I took 4/17/20 . The beginning of our summer garden takes up a lot of room in the cabin.
I bring along enough baking supplies for all of our breads and sweets.
75lb flour I use barley flour, whole wheat, and regular white.
15lbs sugar…seems to be plenty. Lately I bring a little brown also for baking and something new …powdered sugar so Sydney and I can frost special cookies
1 box baking soda.
1 big sized tub of baking powder
about a pint of yeast
vanilla
a ridiculous amount of chocolate. I can’t report the numbers because it’s too embarrassing to mention especially to people who probably eat a lot of chocolate but don’t have to face just how much. Chocolate saves lives.
about a half gallon of molasses
couple quarts of honey
6-12 pints of jam
3 gallons of peanut butter, though we don’t always use it all it’s really good to have on hand.
powdered milk. quite a bit since we have Sydney drinking milk now. I use organic whole powdered for her and its super expensive. For baking I use something much cheaper…probably about 50 lbs total?
2 large tins of powdered egg product. We rarely eat this as a meal. I use this for baking and occasionally put some in fried rice.
10 lbs popcorn. I love making popcorn and it’s a great lunch or snack if you want something in a hurry
50 lbs brown rice, we also bring white rice for cooking with the salmon for the dogs and I tap into it whenever I feel like some good old white food.
50 lbs beans various types. Its good to have a lot of variety when it comes to beans….so don’t go buying a 50 lb sack of one type or you’ll regret it. The first year we went out into the woods to live I bought 100 lbs of black beans for lack of cooking knowledge and not knowing what we would consume, I guess I figured that it was good survival food if we needed it and I also lacked creativity. We are, seriously, still working on eating that original supply of black beans
I bring a giant box of hashbrowns for a quick food to make.
30 lbs of noodles
4-6 quarts of olive oil
5lb coconut oil
20lbs of cheese. More than this if we can afford the weight limitations. You can never have enough cheese.
24lbs of butter. Tyler and Sydney put it on their oatmeal and I use it for baking.
I always keep corn meal and some barley around though I don’t have to restock every year
Its nice to have a wide variety of spices around as well as various things for marinating meats. These are some things I can’t live without; vinegar(I bring a gallon every year) liquid aminos (which is a lot like soy sauce, I bring a gallon every year) , lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and chicken bullion
Spices I like to have are chilli powder, onion powder, garlic powder, Cayenne pepper, Italian seasoning, seasoning salt, taco seasoning, cajun seasoning, pepper, curry powder and curry paste and lemon pepper I also bring coconut powder for making curry
Lately I’ve taken to bringing a whole bunch of soft tortilla shells because I just got sick of making them from scratch along with everything else I have to cook out there. Though, when there is time and I’m in the mood, homemade tortillas are great. Just imagine when you want to have Mexican night…you cook the beans all day…maybe you want to have a little Spanish rice on the side which you make from scratch starting by re-soaking your dried garden veggies, then there’s the meat dish, maybe grate a little cheese and then….spend 45 minutes making dough, rolling it and frying the tortillas….that gets to be a seriously detailed meal.
That’s about it I suppose. I bring a some other stuff that I just pick at random to have as something interesting or special to eat every now and then but I gave you the basic list.
good friend, the coffee pot on the single propane burner I do some of my cooking on…like making popcorn. We bring about 20 lbs of coffee. Bad habit, I know, but coffee saves lives.
Oh yeah, I did want to mention I don’t bring anything special out for the baby. I have a hand grinder and we just feed him what we eat. I did bring him some applesauce which we had in limited supply and poor Sydney got super jealous over it, even though she got plenty of ‘big girl’ treats.
One of my favorite recipes…my pancakes. I make a whole bunch at once to put in a bag and have handy just needing to add water when we want some.
1 pint white flour
1 pint barley flour (barley flour is very nutritious and best ye,t it grows well here in Northern Alaska!) The barley flour makes the recipe.
1/2 cup milk powder
2 tsp salt
2 tsp sugar
2 Tablespoon baking powder
We fry our pancakes in coconut oil on a hot cast iron griddle. They are so flavorful and fluffy.
Most of you know by now that we have a shop on the drop down menu bar so sorry if this is getting old but we do have a few new items since my last post. Key chains and fur pom poms and hats. https://alaskaseldens.com/shop-the-last-alaskans/
https://alaskaseldens.com/product-category/fur-pom-poms-hats-wolf-lynx-fox-beaver-by-ashley-selden/
https://alaskaseldens.com/product-category/lynx-bone-claw-tooth-key-chains-tyler-selden-discovery-channel-last-alaskans-arctic/
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