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Week 41- Walnut Meat(less)Loaf

1/25/2020

To help with building your year's supply (this is Week 15 of 26), see this chart.

This month’s focus has been powdered milk, but I tried an unusual and economical recipe I’d like to share this week. Next week I’ll show you how to make either cottage cheese or Queso Fresco. The process is the same until the final steps.

Last week I pulled out a small recipe collection from 1931. It was a supplement to the Millennial Star, and was titled, “Word of Wisdom Menus and Recipes”. (You can find in on pages 17-38 of this pdf, or here if you want to view on a phone without downloading.)

There were some familiar-sounding recipes— Egg Toast. Lentil Soup. Cheese Toast. Macaroni and Cheese. Eggs Goldenrod. There were others I’d never heard of, let alone tried-- Rice Renown. Tomato Surprise. Haricot Beans and Parsley Sauce. Scotch Stew. Ruby Salad (beet-onion-banana-parlsey, topped with lemon vinaigrette). Walnut Roast.

It turns out that ‘haricot beans’ is an old name for regular white beans.
The walnut roast was something baked in a “buttered basin”. What was this food? So I made it for dinner, to find out. I made the Scotch stew as well, since there were several vegetables in my fridge needing used.

The stew was a fairly straightforward vegetable soup. And the walnut loaf? It was surprisingly good. My children all thought it was meatloaf and ate every last bit of it. I even told them what it really was, right off the bat. I didn’t think to take a photo of the finished loaf, but maybe I’ll remember to do it next time.

Here’s the modernized recipe, with measurements and pan sizes you’ll recognize.

Walnut Meat(less)Loaf
Makes about a 1-pound loaf.

1 Tbsp. butter
1 tsp. flour
1/3 c. dry bread crumbs or dry oatmeal
1 cup milk
½ c. walnuts
Half an onion, or one small onion
2 eggs
½ tsp. salt

Heat the oven to 350°F. Melt the butter; add flour, crumbs, and milk. Bring to a boil. (I microwaved it for about 1 ½ minutes.) It should be about the consistency of pudding. Set aside to cool. Butter or spray a small loaf pan.* Meanwhile, mince the onion and chop the walnuts fairly small. Beat the eggs well in the measuring cup you used for milk (why dirty an extra dish?), then mix in the walnuts, onion, salt, and any extra seasoning you like. (I added ½ tsp. oregano.) Pour the milk-crumbs mixture over the top, and stir well. Scoop this into the buttered pan, and bake until set, about 40 minutes.

*Mine was baked in an 8x4” loaf pan, but was only about 2” thick when done. If you want more of a thicker loaf shape, bake this in a 6x3” loaf pan or any other 2-cup ovenproof baking dish. You could also bake this in 4-6 greased muffin cups, for individual servings of a meatless main dish.

This meaty-tasting loaf was delicious plain, and will be making it again! It would be good with a little ketchup, barbecue sauce, or with a baked-on ketchup-brown sugar glaze, or with chili sauce. Next time I want to try it with a little bit of Liquid Smoke added.

Another version of walnut roast, from 1915, uses more crumbs, less onion, one egg, and says the egg may be left out. I haven't tried it that way yet.

This chili sauce recipe is from the same little 1931 recipe brochure.

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Week 40- Free Cookbooks for Using Food storage

1/19/2020

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To help with building your year's supply (this is Week 14 of 26), see this chart.

Do you have some food storage now, but need more recipes to use it? Check out these eleven FREE cookbooks, plus some extra resources like a book that teaches you how to can food, one on nutrition and one on REALLY frugal cooking and homemaking.

1. Bee Prepared Pantry Cookbook. 67 amazing pages.

2. New Ideas for Cooking with Home Storage (also found here)--
created to be used with the foods at the dry-pack canneries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You can no longer dry pack food there, but can still purchase products already packaged.

3. A Guide to Food Storage for Emergencies—compiled by the USU Extension Office. 120 pages.

4.The Wooden Spoon Cooking School collection- this was a pilot program by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The same ladies who created the Bee Prepared Pantry Cookbook were commissioned to create the class materials, so this is basically an expanded version of Bee Prepared. There are individual sections on the following topics:
Introduction (note that the ‘length of storage’ information is outdated, per BYU Food Studies)
Intro- Commodities, Family Assessment, Family Plan, Skills & Equipment
Legumes
Oats, Honey, and Sugar
Wheat
Rice and Pasta
Powdered Milk
Seasonings
A Meal in a Bag- quick meals with everyday, three-month supply foods

5. All Is Safely Gathered In: Family Home Storage Basic Recipes—compiled by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and sent with food storage boxes/kits. 4 pages, 11 recipes.

6. Shelf Stable Recipes-- family favorite pantry recipes submitted by readers of FoodStorageMadeEasy.net
58 pages. Uses long-term storage foods as well as some shorter-term ones.

7. Use it or Lose It— another “food storage cooking school,” compiled by the Utah State University Extension Office. 17 pages. About half of the pages have recipes, with a focus on wheat and dry milk powder; the rest is good information on how to obtain, store, and rotate your food.

8. Cooking with Dry Beans—compiled by the USU Extension Office. 13 pages.

9. Whole Kernel and Bulgur Wheat: Preparation and Usage—compiled by the USU Extension Office. 57 pages, so you know there’s a lot of variety. It doesn’t mention hard white wheat vs hard red wheat partly because white wheat had not quite hit the public scene in 1992.

Short term food storage rotation

10. 3x5 card/photo album cookbook—3x5-sized cards to cut out and fit inside a small photo album that holds 72 photos.

11. Crockpot Freezer Meals with Five Ingredients of Less, from TheFamilyFreezer.com. 25 main dish recipes to use your short-term (“regular food”) storage. Go to the main webpage, https://thefamilyfreezer.com/ for many more recipes.

Other great resources:

Nutrition and Diet—includes charts on vitamins and their role in the body. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 26 pages.

USDA Guide to Home Canning – a self-taught course in how to can.

Frugal pioneer recipes- ten recipes, printed in the July 1972 Ensign magazine.

American Frugal Housewife, 1838. The twenty-second edition.(!)
“Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy” and “Economy is a poor man’s revenue; extravagance, a rich man’s ruin.” The introduction begins, “The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost. I mean fragments of time, as well as materials…and whatever the size of a family, every member should be employed either in earning or saving money… The sooner children are taught to turn their faculties to some account, the better for them and for their parents. In this country, we are apt to let children romp away their existence, till they get to be thirteen or fourteen. This is not well. It is not well for the purses and patience of parents; and it has a still worse effect on the morals and habits of the children. Begin early is the great maxim for everything in education. A child of six years old can be made useful; and should be taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not been done to assist others.”
__________________________

If you like old cookbooks, this website has more than 75 of them, all waiting for you in digital format.

Thanks to prepperssurvive.com for alerting me to the old cookbook digital collection!

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Week 39- Yogurt-- Plain, Greek, and Flavored-- from Powdered Milk

1/12/2020

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To help with building your year's supply (this is Week 13 of 26), see this chart.

If you missed last week's FAQs on powdered milk, take a few minutes and see what's there.

It seems like just about everyone has an “Instant Pot”—a computerized electric pressure cooker. It’s good for more than pressure cooking, too. It can help you rotate your powdered milk! (If you don’t have one, don’t worry- there are non-instant-pot directions down below.)

Many of these pots have a yogurt setting, which is a low temperature at which the milk can culture properly into yogurt.

Here’s a link to instructions, from a lady who has played around with the recipe to learn how to be consistently successful. She uses milk in the gallon jug. To use powdered milk, mix up a gallon (or 2 quarts for a half batch) and follow the directions. https://thisoldgal.com/instant-pot-greek-yogurt/

No Instant Pot? No problem!

This recipe makes 2 quarts of plain yogrts at $. 78 per quart* if you're using your own starter.

Yogurt
1 ¾ c. regular nonfat dry milk, or 3 c. instant
7 c. hot water (not over 120 degrees F)
1/3 c. plain yogurt, with active cultures

Combine dry milk and 4 cups of the water. Whisk or mix in a blender. Add yogurt and whisk. Add remaining water or divide the remaining water evenly between your containers; stir well after adding the milk mixture! Pour into containers, cover, and incubate in a warm place for 4-8 hours or until set. Tip a container after 4 hours to see if it has set. If the yogurt is still liquid, wait 1-2 more hours. It will set up a little more when chilled. Store in fridge. The ideal temperature range for culturing yogurt is 105-120 degrees. The lower of these temperatures you begin culturing at, the sweeter the yogurt will be. The higher, the more tart. Above 120 degrees will kill the bacteria you’re trying to grow. Save 1/3 c. for culturing your next batch.

To flavor your yogurt after it’s made, add fruit, jam, juice concentrate, chocolate milk mix, etc., before eating.

To flavor it before culturing, use 6-8 Tbsp. of sugar per 2-qt batch, or 4-6 Tbsp. honey (dissolve this in your water first, or it will sink to the bottom), or a 3-oz. box of flavored gelatin, or 1/3-1/2 c. jam, or 1 c. chopped or mashed sweetened fruit. The syrup from canned fruit can be used in place of part of the water. If it’s not sweet enough, you can always add sugar when it’s done. 1-2 tsp. vanilla added to the batch is also a nice addition. Make your own combinations- chopped cherries with some vanilla and a little almond extract, blueberries with cream cheese added, toasted coconut with caramel sauce swirled in… let your imagination run wild!

To make firm yogurt that doesn’t become thin after stirring, use 4-6 tsp. unflavored gelatin, or two envelopes, per two-quart batch. Soften it in part of the recipe’s water, then heat gently on stove, in microwave, or over hot water, until the gelatin melts. Add along with remaining water.

*the cost per quart is based on a powdered milk cost of $2.57/lb, which is the current price at the Home Storage Center.

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Week 38 – Powdered Milk FAQs- What? Why? How? What if it gets old? – and storing dairy-free substitutes

1/5/2020

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Photo: Marina Shemesh

To help with building your year's supply (this is Week 12 of 26), see this chart.

What is powdered milk?.
Why store it?.
How much powdered milk is recommended? And how do I store it?.
How do I use powdered milk?.
What if it gets old?.
What dairy-free substitutes can I store?.

What is powdered milk?
Milk begins with a very high water content—about 82%. The water is removed in a couple of steps- a low-temperature evaporative boil is first. Doing this in a vacuum allows the boiling to happen at 135° F rather than the regular 212°. Then it’s sprayed from a very tall tower into very hot, swirling air. A tiny particle of powdered milk is all that’s left when it hits the bottom. (See this article for super-interesting details.) This milk powder is made of very small, nearly dust-sized specks.

Since fat turns rancid quickly and drastically shortens shelf life, powdered milk for long-term storage is fat-free. It’s skim milk that goes through the drying process. That’s also why it tastes watery. Adding a little extra powder when mixing up the milk will help with this. And adding a bit of vanilla helps give it some flavor. Serving it chilled helps, too.

Full-fat powdered milk is available if you know where to look. The only brand I’ve seen widely available is Nido. It’s a whole milk powdered milk you can find sometimes in the Hispanic foods section at grocery stores. In the U.S. it’s mostly used in the food industry, but tons of it per year are shipped to third-world countries, where they have few dairies, little way to transport the milk, and no refrigerators to store it in anyway. If you buy whole-milk powder, use it within 6 to 9 months unless it’s in sealed cans and stored under 75°F. And then use it up within, say, five to seven years.
I have some that’s older than that; I can report later this week on what it’s like, if I remember…

Instant powdered milk is made by making the tiny particles clump together to make a little bigger granules. There’s air between the particles, which allows water to better penetrate when you're reconstituting it. The air also makes the powder less dense. That’s why you’ll sometimes see recipes that specify which kind to use- ‘non-instant powdered milk’ or ‘instant powdered milk’. It takes a larger scoop of instant powdered milk to be equal to a smaller scoop of the regular. (Of course, you can go by weight measurement and get it right every time!)

One pound of either instant or regular nonfat milk powder will make about one gallon of milk.

Why store it?
There are at least four big reasons-

1-To have the minerals and other nutrition milk provides.

2-To have more options in your cooking. Many recipes use milk and products made from milk. Did you know that you can, in your very own kitchen, turn powdered milk into yogurt, cottage cheese, a mozzarella-type cheese, a cream cheese substitute, and much more?

3-No refrigeration is required, unlike fresh milk, which sours quickly at room temperature. This is helpful in emergency situations.

4-For its long shelf life. Fresh milk lasts less than a month in the fridge; canned evaporated milk is best within a couple of years; but nonfat milk powder, sealed along with oxygen absorbing packets, can last for a good 20 years when kept under 75° F.

How much powdered milk is recommended? And how do I store it?
Did you notice that in the list of why to store powdered milk, I didn’t say “so you can enjoy milk three times a day”? That’s because you couldn’t, if you were storing the recommended amount. While you would likely use some for drinking, that’s not its primary purpose. I don’t know about you, but I’d be making most of mine into cheese for recipes!

The recommended storage amount is 16 pounds per person.  You’d need to store almost 70 pounds per person to be able to have the equivalent of three glasses of milk per day.

I like variety in my storage, so I include evaporated milk and sweetened condensed milk—although you can make those with powdered milk, too. 5 cans of evaporated milk is equal to about one pound of milk powder, while it takes 8 cans of sweetened condensed milk to replace one pound of dry milk powder.

Keep long-term storage products at or below 75°F/24°C whenever possible. If storage temperatures are higher, rotate (eat!) the food more often.

How do I use powdered milk?
Go to http://everydayfoodstorage.net/training-cooking/powdered-milk for recipes for evaporated milk, Magic Mix, and Condensed Soups using Magic Mix. She has a great little chart you can print out and tape to the inside of your cupboard so you know how much milk powder to use when you're baking with it:

The Wooden Spoon class handout has a TON of recipes info on powdered milk. It's from some classes that the Church of Jesus Christ’s ‘Welfare Square’ was teaching for a little while. The collection is not copyrighted; the two ladies who compiled it just wanted to spread the information.

When I get a bunch of new recipes, usually most of them get ignored unless I'm already familiar with them. So skim through the recipe booklet and look through my notes on the recipes.

For the recipes that give you whey (this means any of the cheeses, including the yogurt cream cheese), save the whey.  It has vitamins, minerals, some protein, no fat, and some milk sugar (lactose- very low on the glycemic scale).  I use it in pancakes, muffins, bread, etc.  If your whey has vinegar in it (most of the cheeses in there do), you can add 1 tsp. baking soda for every 2-3 cups of whey.  This will neutralize most of the vinegar.  Yes, it will foam up, kind of like those volcanoes you made in 3rd grade…

What if it gets old?

The answer to that has a lot to do with “How do I use it?” If it’s not old, don’t let it all get there.

If it’s already old, it may still be fine. Recent food-storage testing at the BYU Foods lab showed that 20 years can be expected on sealed powdered milk stored under 75°F. Here’s the chart of their findings for milk and other year-supply foods.

If you’ve opened a can and it smells bad, don’t throw it in the trash. It’s good as garden fertilizer! Tomatoes especially need calcium, in order to avoid blossom-end rot. And milk can help prevent the dreaded powdery mildew on plants, as well as to control aphids. Here is an article on 8 ways to use milk in the garden.

What dairy-free substitutes can I store?There are several. There’s powdered goat milk, powdered soy milk, powdered coconut milk. If you’re good at rotating what you store, canned milks are options- canned coconut milk is the cheapest option. Just know it doesn’t contain much calcium. Keep calcium supplements on hand, store lots of white beans in your 60 pounds of legumes, store blackstrap molasses, and/or plan on growing lots of dark green leafy vegetables.
You can make milk-like liquids for drinking or cooking, using rice, almonds, cashews, or oats as the base. Again, these won’t contain much calcium, so you’ll need to account for that.

What do I store for my dairy-free family members?
-Canned coconut milk. I usually have a whole case on hand; I use it on a regular basis in recipes, so it gets rotated. Ditto for coconut cream. The best prices around for both of those was at a local Asian market.
-Coconut milk powder. Also from the Asian market. Check the label; some brands add casein to their powder. Since this is a milk protein, it’s unsuitable for the dairy-sensitive. Other brands don’t include casein.
-Boxes of shelf-stable coconut milk, almond milk, and/or rice milk. These need rotated about as much as the canned ones do.
-Almonds, rice, cashews, oats. Because we like and use them anyway.

What other questions do you have?

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Week 41- Walnut Meat(less)Loaf

Week 40- Free Cookbooks for Using Food storage

Week 39- Yogurt-- Plain, Greek, and Flavored-- from Powdered Milk

Week 38 – Powdered Milk FAQs- What? Why? How? What if it gets old? – and storing dairy-free substitutes

Need a Search bar?
One day I may upgrade my website-- but until then, use your web browser search bar. Type in my web address and what you're looking for, like this--
www.theprovidenthomemaker.com pumpkin -- and you should get results.

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Week 41- Walnut Meat(less)Loaf

Week 40- Free Cookbooks for Using Food storage

Week 39- Yogurt-- Plain, Greek, and Flavored-- from Powdered Milk

Week 38 – Powdered Milk FAQs- What? Why? How? What if it gets old? – and storing dairy-free substitutes

Need a Search bar?One day I may upgrade my website-- but until then, use your web browser search bar. Type in my web address and what you're looking for, like this-- www.theprovidenthomemaker.com pumpkin -- and you should get results.Author

Archives

Categories

Need a Search bar?
One day I may upgrade my website-- but until then, use your web browser search bar. Type in my web address and what you're looking for, like this--
www.theprovidenthomemaker.com pumpkin -- and you should get results.

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