I’m going to take a page from Jack Spirko here and list the three things that worry us most in life: putting food on the table, keeping a roof over our heads, and clothing ourselves. Food, shelter, clothing. Those are the three staples that, if taken care of ahead of time, will help us to have a comfortable “retirement.” In order to do that, we need to focus on these things:

1. Paying off our homes and turning our homes into producers.
2. Increasing our food production and designing our life to be more simple.
3. Storing up money in an inflation resistant way.
4. Expanding our knowledge/skills to be less dependent on external systems.

The first thing we need to do is focus on getting out of debt and paying off our homes as quickly as possible. The myth that your home will forever increase in value has been exposed. It’s a lie. In reality, it takes constant in-flows of money to keep our homes in good shape, and the market can destroy your home’s value as easily as it increased it. We need to jettison that huge albatross of a mortgage from around our necks. Once you get rid of that $1200 per month mortgage, you have eliminated item of worry number one: shelter. And you’ve given yourself a $14,000 per year raise to boot. Yay!

Next, we need to focus on ramping up our own food production and learn to live more simply. Think about it: if you invest $75 in a bundle of 5 pear trees that will, in turn, produce a harvest of pears every year for decades afterwards, that’s a huge return on your investment. And if you take the time to learn the art of grafting/cloning, you can replicate new pear trees yourself and have a perpetual supply of pears for the rest of your life. Investing $500 in apple, pear, peach, plum, cherry, lemon trees will produce thousands of dollars worth of savings for the rest of your life, and probably on into your children’s lives as well.

The same is true for gardening in general. If you can begin to produce 10-20% of your own food supply, you’ve turned your home into a producer instead of being a constant money pit. You can spend $2 on a packet of heirloom tomato seeds and be able to save enough seeds each year that you will never have to buy tomatos again. These are real investments that pay back huge returns. Instead of dropping $50 into a mutual fund, spend that $50 on the necessary equipment to get started canning and preserving your harvest. Learning these things aren’t just quaint throwbacks to the past. They are real ways to live your life that save money and reduce your dependence on others. Next time you need some yeast, don’t just run down to the store and buy instant yeast. Try your hand at growing your own. It’s these little things that preserve the knowledge of the past that will give you the most freedom.

We, of course, also need to save money. But, if we just shove cash under the mattress it’s not going to do us much good. Those dollars will be losing value at a 3-4% clip every year due to inflation. In that case, we should put our money in the form of things that hedge against inflation. Silver is a fantastic inflation hedge. Let’s use another Jack Spirko example. In 1970 the average cost of a new car was $4000. At $1.64 per ounce(silver price in 1970), that’s 2,439 ounces of silver to buy a new car. Well, today, silver is currently running at about $16 per ounce, but let’s make it $12 per ounce to be really conservative since that’s what it was trading at back at the first of the year. That means that the same 2,439 ounces of silver it took to buy a new car in 1970 is worth $29,268 today. That would still buy you a really nice brand new car. That’s what it means to be a hedge against inflation. The same amount then buys the same amount now.

Jack recommends roughly 10-15% of your long-term savings in gold/silver. I’d say that’s a little low. I’d personally feel better in the 20-25% range, but that’s a personal decision that each person has to make for themselves. The point is, it’s a bad idea to dump all of your money into one thing. Even if it’s something stable like silver. There are other inflation hedges such as commodity indexes and such that are worth investing in. Even local businesses that you believe in. Just do some research and be creative. I showed in the last post how volatile the stock market is. It’s not the panacea it’s been made out to be.

You may think that what I’ve just outlined is strange, but this is the way our great-grandfather’s generation lived. They lived simpler lives and depended on the land more. Everyone loves to wax nostalgic for the simpler times of their grandparents, but nobody seems to want to actually live that way. But, I really think that in the future we won’t have any choice but to go back to that way of living. The good times of the boom cycle are over, and if we don’t want to work ourselves all the way to age 90 in the same ol’ high stress rat race, we’ll have to take these types of steps to do it.

*I mentioned Jack Spirko a couple of times in this post. Many of these ideas are directly influenced by him. Check out his podcast at The Survival Podcast.

Beer Bread:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2.5 Cups of Wheat Flour
• 1 Cup of Bread Flour
• 1 TBSP of Salt

Wet Ingredients:

• 12 oz. bottle of warm beer
• 1 oz. of olive oil
• 2 tsp Instant Dry Yeast
• 2 TBSP of Honey

Instructions:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. Don’t add the yeast to the dry ingredients.
2. Warm the beer by putting the bottle/can in a bowl of hot water for about 10 minutes. Longer if it came out of the fridge. You want it warm. Not hot, not cold. Warm.
3. Now add the dry yeast, oil and honey to the warm beer and stir it around with a fork vigorously until all of the honey is dissolved.
4. Now walk away and let the yeast liquid sit and fester for about 15 minutes. The yeast is going to get really active and start to party. Don’t crash it.
5. Come back and dump the liquid/yeast mix into the dry ingredients.
6. Get your hands wet with some water and begin to mix. You will get messy, but it’s worth it.
7. When everything is mixed thoroughly, flour the countertop and dump the dough out onto the flour.
8. Knead the dough for 6 minutes until smooth, adding plenty of flour as needed. Don’t skimp.
9. Now stretch and shape the dough into a ball with the seam at the bottom.
10. Clean and dry out your mixing bowl and then spray it inside with cooking spray or wipe it with oil.
11. Drop your dough ball into the bowl seam side down and shoot it with a light shot of cooking spray also.
12. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a hand towel and let sit for an hour until it at least doubles in size.
13. After it doubles, uncover and punch down the dough to get all the air out. Don’t punch it hard, just make sure it’s deflated good.
14. Now turn it out on the floured countertop again and knead it very lightly for about a minute. You just want to work it a little to get it back to a good shape.
15. Now, crisco the inside of a loaf pan. Use plenty of lard/crisco. You don’t want the loaf sticking to the pan. That’s a disaster.
16. Cover and let sit again for about 30 minutes. It will rise quite a bit, but don’t let it get too big where it’s ballooning out over the sides of the pan.
17. Lower your oven rack to a little below center and put the pan on the rack.
18. Set the oven to 400° F and set the timer to 30 minutes.
19. When the timer goes off the bread is done. Let it cool on a wire rack for about an hour.

The Scratch Version:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2 Cups of Wheat Flour
• 1/2 Cup of Bread Flour
• 1 TBSP of Salt
• 2 tsp Cocoa Powder

Wet Ingredients:

• 5 oz. room-temp Whole Milk
• 1 oz. of Vegetable Oil
• 1 TBSP Sugar

Pre-ferment:

• 1 Cup (8 oz.) of Yeast Water
• 1/2 Cup of Milled Wheat Flour
• 1/2 Cup of Bread Flour

Instructions:

1. Mix up your pre-ferment 72 hours before you plan to make your bread using the recipe above. On the day of bread making, move to step 2.
2. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl and dump in your pre-ferment dough.
3. Dump the milk and oil into the mix.
4. Get your hands wet with some water and begin to mix. You will get messy, but it’s worth it.
5. When everything is mixed thoroughly, flour the countertop and dump the dough out onto the flour.
6. Knead the dough for 5 minutes until smooth, adding plenty of flour as needed. Don’t skimp.
7. Now stretch and shape the dough into a ball with the seam at the bottom.
8. Clean and dry out your mixing bowl and then spray it inside with cooking spray or wipe it with oil.
9. Drop your dough ball into the bowl seam side down and shoot it with a light shot of cooking spray also.
10. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a hand towel and let sit for a few hours until it at least doubles in size. Give it plenty of time. I’ve even had to leave them overnight before.
11. After it doubles, uncover and punch down the dough to get all the air out. Don’t punch it hard, just make sure it’s deflated good.
12. Now turn it out on the floured countertop again and knead it very lightly for about a minute. You just want to work it a little to get it back to a good shape.
13. Now, crisco the inside of a loaf pan. Use plenty of lard/crisco. You don’t want the loaf sticking to the pan. That’s a disaster.
14. Cover and let sit again for as long as it takes to rise again. You want it to double in size.
15. Lower your oven rack to a little below center and put the pan on the rack.
16. Set the oven to 400° F and set the timer to 30 minutes.
17. When the timer goes off the bread is done. Let it cool on a wire rack for about an hour.

Now, you’ve just made bread totally from scratch. Little House on the Prarie eat your heart out.

Dry Ingredients:

• 1/2 Cup Bread Flour
• 1/2 Cup Wheat Flour

Wet Ingredients:

• 1 Cup (8 oz.) Yeast Water

Directions:

1. Combine flour and yeast water in a medium sized container, something about the size of a pickle jar.  Cover with a clean hand towel and let sit for 48 to 72 hours.  If you can’t use it immediately after the 72 hours is up, just lid it and stick it in the fridge until ready to use.
2. After 24 hours it will start to look like a sponge, with large air holes all in it.  This is the yeast doing it’s magic.

That’s all there is to it. The yeast in our home grown yeast water will take over and begin to grow and produce great flavours as they eat the sugars in the mixture. Remember, it’s the yeast that makes bread taste like bread. That’s why this pre-ferment makes such a big difference in flavour. It’s also very important that you remember to subtract these amounts from your main ingredients list for your bread.  So instead of using 6 oz. of water and 5 oz. of milk, just leave out the water from the final recipe.  Adjust the flour amounts down to compensate as well.  I’ve read that a pre-ferment also helps the bread to preserve longer.  I don’t understand the chemistry involved in that so I’ll just have take that on faith.

In the next post we will put it all together and give a complete scratch bread recipe with full instructions. Now go make your pre-ferment.

Once you have your wheat you will need a grinder(mill). The one we have is the Wonder Mill Jr. It’s a hand crank mill that comes with steel grinding wheels and stone grinding wheels. The stone will get a finer grind for a more authentic flour, but the steel plates are nice as well for things like grinding corn into corn meal. We chose a hand grinder in case we ever got into a survival situation without power. In that case we could still make bread with a gas oven. It’s up to you which route you go. The hand grinder is irreplaceable when you need it, but inconvenient for day to day use. It’s a trade off. Just do your research.

When you first start grinding your own wheat flour for bread baking, you will find out soon that the flour is very heavy. In order to get a good bread it’s necessary to get the grind down very fine. We do that by getting a large basket strainer and sifting out the flour to trap all the large pieces. We then dump the contents of the sifter back into the mill and grind it again. That gets the flour down very fine and makes great flour for bread. If your grind is too big, it won’t rise well or it will come out hard as a brick. Just experiment with small batches to get your method down.

Ok, the first thing we’re going to need is yeast so that’s what we’ll cover today. Have you ever been making bread and wondered what people did before instant yeast? Well, they either didn’t leven their bread or they cultured their own yeast in the form of “yeast water.” It’s actually very simple.

Yeast Water:

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 Handful of Raisins
• Pinch of Sugar

Wet Ingredients:

• Quart Sized Jar full of Tap Water

Instructions:

1. Put raisins and sugar in a jar full of water. Something about the size of a pickle jar should do. But, please don’t use a pickle jar unless you want some dill bread.
2. Leave the jar open and sitting on the countertop for 5 days.
3. When it smells strongly of yeast, you have yeast water!

Yes, it really is that simple. The yeast that is naturally occurring on most fruits and vegetables will begin to eat the sugar and replicate into a nice yeast colony. Now, using the yeast water involves replacing your 5 ounces of water in the original recipe I gave you with an equal amount of yeast water. But instead of mixing it with the milk/sugar/oil, we will mix the yeast water into a “pre-ferment.” I’ll show you how to do that in the next post.

* I learned about making yeast water from this great site: http://originalyeast.blogspot.com/

Also, I want to mention that the technical part of this bread recipe can be made in one of two ways. The modern version that’s fast, or the totally from scratch pioneer version that will blow your tongue off. It’s up to you which route you go. I’ll explain the modern variant in this post and the totally(and I mean totally) from scratch version in the next post.  This is the version I’ve settled on for awesome sandwich bread, but this recipe is very, very changeable.  It’s a great starting recipe to use and adapt to make all different types of yummy rolls, bagels and french breads.

The Modern Version:

Dry Ingredients:

• 2.5 Cups of Wheat Flour
• 1 Cup of Bread Flour
• 1 TBSP of Salt
• 2 tsp cocoa powder

Wet Ingredients:

• 8 oz. warm water
• 5 oz. warm whole milk
• 1 oz. of vegetable oil
• 2 tsp Instant Dry Yeast
• 1 TBSP Sugar

Instructions:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl.  Don’t add the yeast or sugar to the dry ingredients.
2. Mix the water, oil and milk together in a large cup and warm it up a bit.  Not hot, just warm.  A little more than luke warm.  You don’t want to kill the yeast.
3. Now add the dry yeast and sugar to the warm liquid and stir it around with a fork vigorously until all of the sugar is dissolved.
4. Now walk away and let the yeast liquid sit and fester for about 15 minutes.  The yeast is going to get really active and start to party.  Don’t crash it.
5. Come back and dump the liquid/yeast mix into the dry ingredients.
6. Get your hands wet with some water and begin to mix.  You will get messy, but it’s worth it.
7. When everything is mixed thoroughly, flour the countertop and dump the dough out onto the flour.
8. Knead the dough for  6 minutes until smooth, adding plenty of flour as needed.  Don’t skimp.
9. Now stretch and shape the dough into a ball with the seam at the bottom.
10. Clean and dry out your mixing bowl and then spray it inside with cooking spray or wipe it with oil.
11. Drop your dough ball into the bowl seam side down and shoot it with a light shot of cooking spray also.
12. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a hand towel and let sit for an hour until it at least doubles in size.
13. After it doubles, uncover and punch down the dough to get all the air out.  Don’t punch it hard, just make sure it’s deflated good.
14. Now turn it out on the floured countertop again and knead it very lightly for about a minute.  You just want to work it a little to get it back to a good shape.
15. Now, crisco the inside of a loaf pan.  Use plenty of lard/crisco.  You don’t want the loaf sticking to the pan.  That’s a disaster.
16. Cover and let sit again for about 30 minutes.  It will rise quite a bit, but don’t let it get too big where it’s ballooning out over the sides of the pan.
17. Lower your oven rack to a little below center and put the pan on the rack.
18. Set the oven to 400° F and set the timer to 30 minutes.
19. When the timer goes off the bread is done.  Let it cool on a wire rack for about an hour.

That sounds like a ton of steps, but it’s really not that hard.  Try and make it a few times. You’ll get better each time and it tastes delicious. You’ll never eat sandwiches with store bought bread again. Once you’ve nailed down this recipe, you’re ready to kick it up and go old-school.  That involves hand grinding your wheat flour, using home cultured yeast and making a pre-ferment.  I’ll show you how to do that next time.

If you have a gas fireplace that has a wall switch or remote to turn on the flame, you don’t need A/C power in order to use it. The switch itself isn’t connected to the house power. It’s connected to a thing next to the pilot light called a “thermopile.” A thermopile is a device that converts heat into electricity. In the case of gas logs, all it needs is enough electricity to open the main gas valve, which would be just a few hundred milliwatts. So, in case you are in our same predicament you can rest assured that you can at least cordon off your living room and stay warm if you lose power.

Here’s some more info on gas log ignitor design:

http://hearth.com/econtent/index.php/articles/how_gas_works