Monday Message

"My brothers and sisters, I feel our anxieties are justified. It is the opinion of many that more difficult times lie ahead. We are deeply concerned about the welfare of our people and recognize the potential privation and suffering that will exist if each person and family does not accept the word of the Lord when he says, 'Prepare every needful thing.'" (D&C 88:119)  (Victor L. Brown) 

Prepare every needful thing is quite a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. Just take it a step at a time.

Look at your budget. It may be tight but look at areas you can cut down on and use the difference to get a bit stocked up. When you go to a store pick up one item extra for storage or don't go out to eat and use the money you would have spent to stock up. I am sure you will find a way...I know some have used tax returns so whatever method you use it is important that you do it.

This also means be working on building those skills.

Ask yourself - if I had no money what would I have wished I had stored? What would I wish I had learned?

Dry beans - do you know how to fix them? 

https://www.thesimpledollar.com/save-money/a-guide-to-using-dry-beans-for-cooking/ or ... 

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-itm-001&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=itm&p=how+to+fix+dry+beans#id=3&vid=8d3f655d54726ee462739578b05da3f9&action=view - here she shows using an electric pressure cooker. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdkgF4uKOQY - she shows how to can dry beans. Why would you do this? Because it is way cheaper and a big convenience.

Now if you already know how to do this or you learn these things, you can check them off your skill building list.

There are two reasons why I mentioned dried beans... One is that at the moment they are a cheap storage item, a cheap protein, and they are easy to store. You can fill buckets with beans but they can just set on the shelf as they come from the store. The second reason is if you follow the farming news beans didn't do well with all the flooding.

If you intend to store beans then know how to cook and use them.

At this point I will bring up spices and herbs...they last a lot longer then you are led to believe. So be sure to store them! You can grow some and dry them too.

Rice do you know how to cook rice?

https://www.delish.com/cooking/a20089653/how-to-cook-rice/ - rice is another value food to store.

I store my rice in several ways, in buckets with three bay leaves set on top the rice and I also have some in jars vacuum sealed.

My favorite way of having rice is with sugar and cinnamon and milk, no doubt from my Nordic roots.

This brings me to powdered milk, sugar, oatmeal, salt, oil and shortening, flour and wheat etc.

Making sure you have baking soda, baking powder, YEAST!... all the basics and then add to them.

For example, if you store the ingredients to make bread, also store peanut butter and jam and honey. Also canned chicken, relish and mayonnaise... see where I am going? So I guess what I like best is to store ingredients.

One time there was this wonderful sale on hamburger helper stuff in a box. I got tons, it was a great sale. Guess what? As time marched on we noticed they tasted saltier and saltier till we could no longer eat them. Yep, I no longer store those but store the ingredients to make up my own when I desired to have them.

https://chickensintheroad.com/cooking/homemade-hamburger-helper/ - you can see her recipes, basic ingredients that I have in storage...what about the hamburger? I have canned hamburger so canning in all it's forms a great skill to learn.

Hopefully this gives you a way of looking at food storage differently. 

You probably have all the ingredients to try some of the recipes already on hand.

On my skill building you all remember my getting a sock machine for my birthday.

I have always wanted one and my sister remembered and found this for me, what a great sister!

I worked and worked trying to figure it out, after all how much harder then my knitting machines could it be????

But it was not as straight forward as all that...

I read and read, then attempted, Nope.

Read and read some more and watched on YouTube. One was on cleaning it. So carefully I took it apart and cleaned every part, oiled it, put it back together...

Nope.

So I changed out all the needles cleaning them...

Nope.

I dropped many stitches, I just couldn't make it work...

This went on all year. I got really good at making messy yarn nests but still nothing.

I got so fast at hanging and casting on I could probably do that in a minute or less.

I kept working my way through my waste yarn but each time was a fail. I continued to read, attempt, fail, watch YouTube and fail.

In my mind it should work. This is so basic, every video I watched they never ever dropped a stitch, so then why do I??

I knew I needed to learn more on tension, perhaps that was it...

Then I got the cold flu that lasted four weeks. I am finally just better now...but since I had to rest so much I took my books on sock machine to read but after three days holding a book wasn't going to happen. So I opted to watch YouTube over and over on the CSM (circular sock machine). 

I watched and watched and watched, nobody dropped stitches but then while rewatching several someone finally mentioned tension. They said your working yarn should be same as the space between rows. Finally, was that so hard?? It wasn't in anything I read or watched till then. So I wrote it in my book, watched another and they said oil the latches...what?? I oiled all but those thinking I shouldn't. I wrote it down too.

Then I did both and...

I was able to get it to work but kept dropping two stitches every time so I changed out the two needles remembering to oil their latches and...

That was the problem and I was off...

So here is my very first sock tube. I stuck to it and because of it all I now know the CSM inside and out.

The tube became a pair of socks. I hand knit the heels, toes, and cuffs.

If you are working on a skill just keep working and you will master it. Keep working on your storage and remember store what you eat.