Supply vs. Demand

I only have two graphs to show. Right now crude oil is selling for almost $97/bbl. Of course some of that price is blamed on a falling dollar, and rightly so. What bothers me is that even at these high prices, our national inventory- the amount we have in the tank farms across the country - is falling.

My conclusion from this is that, world wide, we are beginning the slide down the back of the bell curve of production, and that while there is still a lot of oil out there that to have as much as we want, we will have to bid significantly more for it.



This graph show actual production and then a variety of different predictions for the future. Notice the very optimistic EIA and IEIA lines. These are governmental and international agency estimates that assume that supply will not be a problem for the next several decades.

The oil business is very complicated, and very intertwined with the economy in general. Everyone seems to be holding their breath for the minute that crude breaks $100/bbl. and I think that there is probably a some arm twisting from the FED/Treasury to keep it under that mark if at all possible, even if inventories suffer for it. But the truth is that $100/bbl. is just a number, and it's only importance is in our minds. If you correct for inflation oil would have to be closer to $200/bbl to produce the economic problems that we felt during the 1973 oil shock.

While these graphs illustrate the problem, here are a few links that show some promise for the future.

Designer microbes producing fuel from garbage.

New fusion techniques that might have a huge impact on electrification. Go to 'future work'. More on the guy that came up with this new concept- Robert Bussard.


Thin film photovolatics are promising. There are also new improvements in efficiency in standard thick film PV panels that have to do with splitting the incoming light into different colors, and allowing a wavelength specific receptor layer to accept that 'color' of photon. Efficiencies as high as 42% are claimed.

Note that these are possibilities- there is very little in the way of infrastructure. Photovoltaics are not common, they are a curiosity. They show great promise, but are still fairly rare. The garbage to fuel technology is promising, but think about how much fuel is used just in SLC in any one day, and then realize that all the garbage would have to be transported to some central location and then processed before the bugs could eat it.... a pretty big job in itself.

For you who want to wade through an excellent technical article I do recommend 'On Energy Transitions Past and Future'. There is a ton of information there.

So, what do we have here? The end of the world? Nope, but maybe the end of the world as we know it. Energy will become harder to get, and we will have to use it more carefully. If we move to a photovoltaic based energy system, we probably won't have much going on at night. Any power that is produced to keep things going will likely be charged at 20 times the daylight rate. Street lights will be a lot dimmer and probably LED based.... you get the idea. We will adapt, but adaptation is sometimes painful and inconvenient.

We are very blessed to live in a developed country as there is a good possibility that we can live comfortably and well in the future. Many developing countries are experiencing electrical shortages as well as fuel shortages. They often burn heavy oil in their power plants and find they just can't afford it anymore. Some have also installed natural gas stations and find they can't get it, or they have to import LNG, and have the port facilities necessary etc.... bottom line, they can't get that either.

Many countries are already experiencing food shortages, even famine. Food like fuel is available if you have the money, but right now grain stores world wide are at a 26 year low. In the US, they are at a 52 year low. Using grain to manufacture fuel is a bad idea. It makes food scarce and costly, and even if we use switchgrass or some other non-edible plant as a feed stock, fewer acres will be available world wide to produce food as acres are diverted to produce fuel.

I guess that time will tell. Expect the unexpected, prepare as best you can. 2008 might be an interesting year in the Chinese sense.

The Nearer the Bone, the Sweeter the Meat

This was a saying that Spencer Kimball was fond of quoting. They had a large family and limited means, and the shared a chicken each Sunday as I remember. There wasn't much meat left on the bones when they were done with it either. His Mother would tell him to clean up his piece really well because... the nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat.

This post is about bottling meat and non-acid food at home safely. Sometimes you come onto a good buy, or you want to clean out the freezer and don't want to throw good things out, but just don't have room for them. I wish that this was the type of project that you could do with just what you have on hand, but unforutnately it is not. If you bottle food that doesn't have a significant amount of acid botulism bacteria can grow, and the resultant toxins can kill you. Non-acid, or weakly acid foods need to be processed under pressure. These canners aren't cheap, but you won't have to hock your jewelry. They are durable, and well worth having. As long as they have a functioning gasket and the right weight, they are very reliable. It might be possible to break the gauge on one, but ours has lasted for years and we haven't had any problems. They come in 16 quart and 23 quart sizes, and there might even be some bigger monsters out there. We are happy with our 16 quart model.

Over the years I have bottled soups, beans, and chicken. I haven't had any trouble at all with anything ever spoiling, and we always heat everying that we use for 15 minutes as an added safety measure. Last week I bought a beef chuck roast, and two smaller pork shoulder roasts. I cubed them, put a pinch of dried onions in the bottom of each pint jar. After cubing the roasts, I applied liberal salt and pepper and packed them into the clean pint jars. I added a little water and used a table knife to move the meat around and make sure that I didn't have any air voids.


I put about three inches of water in the canner and put the jars in with the lids
screwed on medium tight. Before you put the lid on, run your moistened finger around the rim of the jar. It puts a little film of water on the glass, and cleans off any debris that might be stuck there.

Each jar had meat and water in it up to the begining of the neck of the jar. Don't fill them as full as you do for water bath canning or they will leak.

I ran hot water over the seal and warmed up the lid before I put it on the canner cooker which softens the gasket and helps it to seal better. Once it was in place you just turn on the heat and wait until you have a healthy stream of steam coming out the weight vent, then put the vent on. Pressure will start to build, but it takes probably 15-20 minutes to get up to 15 lbs of steam needed for processing. Once you have reached 15 psi the weight will begin to rock, releasing a little steam, and regulating the pressure. You can turn down the heat then to about 1/2 burner capacity. I process at 15 lbs pressure for 30 minutes with the heat on, and then turn off the burner and let the cooker cool on it's own. This helps to keep the juice in the jar from boiling out. It takes a long time to cool it all down, and mostly I let it go overnight. That way everything is very cool when I take the lid off. If you rush it, the jars will still be boiling and have a little pressure in them. They juice will tend to cook out a little and has a tendency to ruin the seal. If you feel you want to follow another cooking length recommendation, please do so. This is just what has worked for me.

So here is the finished product: 5 pints of canned beef, 4 pints of canned pork, and one pint of canned sausage... an experiment within and expermiment. I have canned chicken drumsticks and thighs by just putting the raw chicken in the jar, and have also precooked the meat and de-boned it so that I would only have meat and juice in the jar.... The jury is still out on what is best there.

Hope you enjoyed this. There are a lot of things that you can bottle this way, and if you can keep them in the dark and fairly cool, they last for years.

Giving Thanks Under the Table

I suppose that this is not where you might expect to find a post about giving thanks, but I try to be thankful for all of my blessings, and I have much to be thankful for.

Being in times that will likely usher in 'The End of the World as We Know It' is not the same as 'The End of the World' or the 'End of Happiness and Light'.... It means that life as we know it will change. It is almost guaranteed to be a simpler life, and one that moves slower. It is likely that we will have to cling tighter to our family members, so while we might lose some independence, family solidarity will become more important. We might find it greatly to our advantage to learn new skills, and re-learn old skills and values.

From here, under the coffee table I find my cup overflowing. I have a wonderful wife, and wonderful children who picked amazingly wonderful mates. So far in life, I have been blessed with good health, a good job and a quiet little out of the way town to live in. I don't know what the future will bring, to me or to my loved ones. But we never really do know no matter how hard we work at guessing. I think that the frantic pace of our lives might slow down somewhat. I remember my dad telling about Sunday afternoons with his grandpa. They would sometimes contemplate a visit to relatives between Sunday dinner and evening chores, and Great Grandpa would send one of the kids out to the car with a stick and have him measure how much gas there was in the tank. If there was enough, they would make the trip. If it was too low, they would spend the afternoon at home.

In the book 'The Hiding Place' Corrie Ten Boom's sister is thankful for the lice that infest the straw they use for beds in the concentration camp they were sent to. Corrie is stunned when Betsie reveals this in her nightly prayer. Betsie explains that the lice kept the German guards from coming into the living quarters and thus the prisoners could keep some medicine and most important, they hand copies of the New Testament. Well, I am not as thankful as Betsie, or nearly as good of a person either, but I am thankful for the many, many blessings that are in my life so far. I hope that I will always be able to see the hand of the Lord in our lives. If a sparrow doesn't fall without his knowledge, we can be sure that we will not be forgotten either.

Riding the Slide

You have to come up with your own Plan 'B'.

We have been Warned

We haven't heard a lot about preparedness in the last few conferences, but I don't think that what we have been told before has been repealed either. Here are a few pages of quotes with references from conferences and talks. I haven't been through all of these yet. There are a zillion of them, but what struck me is that a lot of them reflect the problems and trials of the moment. Which I guess is what we are worried about - the things that pose a threat or danger at the present time. I hope you find these interesting.

LDS Prophecy Part 1
LDS Prophecy Part 2
LDS Prophecy Part 3
LDS Prophecy Part 4
LDS Prophecy Part 5
LDS Prophecy Part 6
LDS Prophecy Part 7
LDS Prophecy Part 8

The Staff of LIfe

If you are serious about ever using your storage, you will want to know how to make bread. Fortunately, bread is not a high-tech food. Although, I guess you can always add bells and whistles until it is hard and complicated.

For me, bread, soups and salads are similar in that they can all be made from a variety of ingredients that you might or might not have on hand. Soups are great for making a new dish out of old leftovers. As long as they aren't spoiled, you can add them to a pot and in a few minutes you can call it soup. When you learn that onions, garlic, and black pepper are almost universal soup spices, you are 90% there. Add celery for chicken and turkey. Add bay leaf for beef. And so it goes.

Gardens are to salads as refrigerators are to soups. If you have some lettuce or cabbage, a few onions, carrots, beets or beet tops.... you are close. Or we have been making a good salad from tomatoes and onions. Mostly tomatoes, a few diced onions, Italian seasoning, black pepper, garlic salt, raspberry vinegar and olive oil and there you have it.....

With bread of course you aren't cleaning out the fridge or the garden, but if you follow a few simple principles you can have pretty good to amazing bread every time.

Start with a sponge. Put some warm water in a bowl. Water that is about the right temperature for a comfortable bath for a baby. I am guessing that you have added from a pint to a quart of water, and will scale things accordingly.

Add some sugar or molasses or honey, something for the yeast to eat. Dissolve it. Add about 2 table spoons or so of dried yeast, kept in the freezer. Mix. Let stand for 5-10 min.

Add flour to the consistency of medium thin pancake batter. This will probably be two cups or so. If you are using whole wheat, and only the whole wheat flour - no white. Also, add plain rolled oats - about 1/2 the volume of whole wheat. So if you put in two cups of wheat flour, add 1 cup of rolled oats. Some people like to chop them fine in a food processor. Whatever floats your boat. You can't see them in the finished bread, but the oats glue the crumbly whole wheat together and give it a better texture.

Add a stick of melted butter or 1/3 cup of oil or, and be strong here, 1/3 cup or so of bacon grease or chicken fat. Yes, I cook with bacon grease. And if you try it, you will probably like it. Your bread will have great texture, and great taste. You will die, as we all will, but not right away.

Add about a generous three fingered pinch of salt. Check the consistency and temperature. Add some water or milk if it is getting too thick, as it will with whole wheat. Check to see that it is just right for a baby's bath, and if it is too cold, nuke it in the microwave for 20 seconds repeatedly until it is warm enough. In the summer you probably won't have to do this. In the winter your flour will be colder.

Let this mixture set for about 30 minutes or until it is all bubbly and looks like a sponge. Then mix in white flour until it is dough, but somewhat sticky. You should be able to mold it into a big ball that is smooth, but a little tacky on your fingers. Too much flour at this stage is not desirable.

Knead it until it feels more like dough and doesn't have the consistency of batter anymore. Make sure it is warm. Microwave for 15-20 secs to rewarm. Let dough rest for 15 minutes if you are making loaves. If you are making rolls you can add just a little more flour and form the rolls.

For loaves, cut into thirds or fourths. Knead in a little more flour and roll with a rolling pin until it is about 1/2" thick or less. This gets rid of bubbles that might form big voids in the bread. Roll up the dough and form into a loaf. Do this with buttered hands to leave a little sheen on the dough, especially on the bottom. Place in a bread pan that is sprayed with pan spray , or smeared with butter. Paint top of dough with a beaten egg and sprinkle on sesame, poppy or flax seed. Place in warm area and let it rise for about 20 minutes or so. It should start to look a little soft and have expanded some. If it rises too much it might collapse in the baking. If you put it right into the oven without letting it rise, there won't be bubbles in the dough to expand in the heat and give it a good texture. There might be some trial and error to this, but keep at it.

Bake for 40 minutes or so at 350 deg. White bread can bake for a few minutes less. Remove from oven and the pan and let it cool. If you cut it too soon the knife will break the dough and you will have a crust with smashed bread inside. I like to let it cool for an hour or so, and turn it once or twice, then put it into a bag to let the crust soften. We make two little tiny loaves from a toy bread set when we bake, and these are sacrificed right away and slathered with jam or honey and butter. Before we did this we often broke the bread. It is OK if you do for eating with soup, but doesn't ever work for sandwiches.

Have fun!!

Chicken Soup for the Survialist Soul....

Actually, I don't much like the word 'survivalist'. Maybe 'survivor's' would be better. Pixie and the Nurse came down last Wednesday and during the course of our conversation asked for some soup recipes that are quick and easy. So I scribbled them down and made a copy and then forgot to give them the copies.... So I thought I would put them here, and you can either use them or not. And yes, I don't do a lot of measuring.

Minestrone:

1 can corn
1 can green beans
1/2 bell pepper if you have it.
1 med. onion or 1 tablespoon or large three fingered pinch, or less of dried food storage onions, or none at all, but pretty boring.
1 cup of dried pasta or so.
hamburger, browned, or turkey burger browned, or what have you in the way of meat.
2 cans diced, stewed tomatoes, with one or both being pre-spiced Italian

Mix. Cook. Italian seasoning to taste. Black pepper to taste, salt with beef bullion to taste. some pesto if you have it. Mozzarella cheese to taste if you have it.

Prep time 15 minutes (be browning the meat as you put all the other stuff together) , but it is better if you let it cook for maybe 30 mins on low heat.

Very good with bread sticks fresh out of the oven.



Chicken Bone Soup

Yes, sound gross, but it is just fine. Save bones from one chicken and any pork chops or steaks you might eat. Boil for about an hour. Strain and let bones cool. There will be some salvageable meat in there - probably neck and back. If you don't strain it, then the little bones will end up in your soup and it isn't so fun.

Simmer stock with a little onion and about a handful of chopped celery for 30 min. If you have some meat saved, add it. When celery and onions are cooked, and meat is added then season with pepper, and salt with chicken bullion. Very rich taste. Add noodles or rice or pearled barley and cook until done.

If you aren't going to use the stock right away, after you strain it, bring if back to a boil and add about 1/2 packet of Knox unflavored gelatin. Oh, and put the meat in there too. Pour stock and meat into a quart jar and in will keep in the fridge for at least a week. It should have a layer of fat on the top for best preservation.

Beef Soup

Beef soup bone or oxtail soup - cook for quite a while, at least an hour. Season with bay leaf, beef bullion for salt, pepper, onion and garlic to taste.

Carrots (dried, canned or fresh), corn, cabbage, peas, potatoes, pearled barley, noodles, green beans, and even tomatoes can all be added to the soup.


Enhanced Ramen (but still quick and easy)

In boiling water cut some cabbage - not a lot for one person, some onion, fresh or dried, a little celery, and add some leftover chicken, pork, or beef or sliced hard boiled eggs if you have them.
If not, beat one or two eggs in a dish and add to soups, stirring constantly for about three minutes. Add noodles.

Quick and Good Chili:

Hamburger browned, 2 cans diced stewed tomatoes ( Mexican style with chilies is good), 1 can black beans. Season with dried onion, garlic salt, chili powder or cumin - very important, cilantro if you like it, black pepper. If you don't have the Mexican style tomatoes then add more chili powder, or Cayenne pepper, or some other gut flaming pepper of your choice, to your taste.

Prep time, about 15 minutes. Brown the meat while you warm the tomatoes, beans etc.

Pozole

Start with the head of one hog.... actually that is how they do start, but you can use a pork or chicken or pork and chicken base. Chicken bones stock with some cubed pork chops or pork roast would be good. Salt with chicken bullion, use black pepper, onion, garlic, and any other peppers you might like. From bell to habanero. Add 1 can of hominy.

Garnish with some cilantro if you like but DO NOT cook it in the soup. You will be sorry, and we will laugh.

Cube some avocados, slice some radishes very thin, chop some leaf lettuce very finely and add to hot soup when served. It is kind of different, but good. Sour cream is good in this soup too.