Subtitle: Simple Cooking Skills
Many people practice survivalism every single day--they just don’t think of it that way. Survivalism is more than just learning what to do if the apocalypse comes. Survivalism is knowing how to make the best of any situation. It’s knowing how to make do with the resources at hand. And this is where survivalism intersects with the notion of “sustainable living.” Living sustainably is survivalism. In this group, we’ll not only talk about how to survive TEOTWAWKI--we’ll talk about how to survive from day to day. We talk about everything from fixing a broken zipper to knowing how to stockpile food. Join us for the whole wide range of practical survivalism and sustainable living.
Food manufacturers and advertisers have done an outstanding job of making the simple skill of cooking look intimidating and complex. It doesn’t help when they show a person (usually a man) ineptly trying to make a very simple dish like a sandwich or pancakes and ending up at a local restaurant either alone or with their kids.
Cooking is a very simple skill. People have been doing it for thousands of years successfully. Men and women have been pretty equally responsible for cooking, it’s not a gender based skill. If you eat, you cook. Preference for certain cooking methods may be gender based, but really, anyone can master the basics of cooking. A heat source, a food container, a spoon (or stick), a protective cloth if the food container doesn’t have a heat resistant handle, a knife, and food is all it takes to cook.
The simplest cooking methods are "raw", “onna stick” and “inna pot”.
“Raw” of course, is salads and snacks. A lot of vegetables can be eaten raw as well as most fruits and nuts. For a salad, simply chop up the ones you want, toss them together, and sprinkle on some olive oil, a dash of vinegar, and maybe some salt. Top with chopped nuts or shredded cheese and maybe some dried fruit like cranberries, blueberries, or raisins. Most fruit can be eaten out of hand – apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, apricots, plus, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, currants, elderberries, gooseberries, cherries… A few need to be peeled – kiwis, bananas, for example. Pair fruit with nuts or cheese for a quick snack or mini-meal. You can usually eat in 5 minutes – less time than it takes to order a fast food meal and clean up is simple – just rinse the knife if you had to cut anything. There's very little prep or effort in prepping raw foods for eating.
Just picked from my garden, simply washed of dirt and ready to eat:
Chopped, cut, shredded, but still raw and ready to eat:
The “onna stick” method isn't much more complicated. It's usually done over an open flame: fireplace, firepit, camp fire… You cut the food into bite sized chunks and thread it on a skewer, then prop it over the fire, turning as needed, to cook it. That’s it. Fast, simple, delicious. Meat, fruit, and tender vegetables are best cooked this way. You can get a bit more complicated if you like. If you don’t have an open fire, this can also be done under a broiler or even baked in an oven or fried in a skillet on top of a stove. You could fancy it up with marinades, brines, rubs, and partially cooked sturdy vegetables like potatoes or turnips, but at its core, stick cookery is the simplest cookery there is. You can eat it straight off the stick or push the food onto a plate. From chopping to eating only takes 20 – 30 minutes – faster than any fast food restaurant. Clean up is fast and simple – burn the stick (if it’s wood or bamboo), rinse and dry your knife, douse the fire, and you’re done.
Stick a raw and cleaned chicken on a stick, suspend it above a fire, turn occasionaly, rip into it and enjoy:
Slightly fancier: asparagus wrapped in bacon on sticks, cooked over a fire pit:
Fancier still: bacon roses, served dressed up with artificial foliage:
The third simplest cooking method is “inna pot” cooking – making soups or stews. Again, chop the food to bite sized pieces. If you heat the pot with some oil or butter first, you can caramelize (that just means slow cook onions, garlic, peppers, etc until they are soft and brown and smell outrageously good) some veggies like onions, garlic, bell peppers, celery, carrots, parsnips, rutabagas, jicamas... Once you do that, toss in the meat and sear it until it’s brown on all sides, then add water and the rest of your vegetables and let it simmer until done. You can add anything to a pot: meat, vegetables, fruit, herbs, spices, grains, pasta. Just taste and add as you go. There’s no recipe because it all depends upon what you have available. Simmer (that’s heat it just below a boil) until everything is tender and cooked through. You can eat straight from the pot or ladle it into a bowl. From chopping to eating usually takes half an hour and you can simply let the pot simmer all on its own for most of that time while you do other things. Clean up is fast and simple: rinse the knife, pot, bowl, spoon, douse the fire, and you’re done.
A pot of my infamous Backburner Soup, prepared nearly every winter:
You can get fancier than that (much fancier!), but these three cooking methods will see you through a huge variety of meals and snacks. If you grow vegetables and fruits, sometimes all you need to do is pick and eat. How simple is that?
There are lots of good reasons to eat at home, to cook for yourself and your family:
1. You can save a lot of money
2. You can save a lot of time
3. You can do other things while the food cooks
4. You don’t have to dress up or even be dressed or wear shoes
5. You can eat the food you grew
6. If you eat food you grew, it’s usually tastier and certainly fresher
7. You can fix it any way you like instead of taking what the restaurant serves
8. You have greater variety, including far more vegetables
9. You’re less likely to get food poisoning from contaminated foods
10. You know what’s in your food – important if you have food sensitivities and allergies.
Many people discover they aren’t allergic to foods they thought they were – they’re allergic or sensitive to all the additives and extras put in the food: MSG, HFCS, artificial smoke, artificial colors, artificial flavors, artificial preservatives, oils, salt, sugar, and more. Perhaps the food isn’t quite so fresh – restaurants have been known to serve food past its expiration date and even past its safe-to-eat date. If you’ve watched Chef Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares show, you’ve seen just how horrible even some of the finer restaurants can be back behind the scenes.
Cooking at home is comforting. If you tally up all the time you spend driving to a restaurant, waiting to order, ordering, waiting for the food, paying for the food, and driving back home, cooking at home is fast even when you add in the weekly/monthly shopping and cleaning up afterwards. Eating out should be a treat, a special event, not an every day affair.
Cooking at home is practice for those times when you have no other option but to prepare your own food because you’re too sick to go out, the power’s out all over town and no one is open to feed you, or one of the worst case scenarios pops up – nuclear disaster, electronic blackout (everything’s run by computers, if those go, so do most businesses, including restaurants and grocery stores), pandemics, or worse.
Even if eating is at the bottom of the essential survival needs (in order: clean air, clean water, shelter, food), it’s still in the top five on the list of essentials. Every single person over the age of 4 should know how to prepare something to eat, no matter how simple it is. For a 4 year old, it might be spreading peanut butter on bread or pouring milk on cereal or peeling and eating a banana or tearing off some lettuce and adding a carrot or radish for a small salad or picking out an apple – and that’s a lot of food for a 4 year old to know how to prepare to eat. The older you are, the more involved and complex the foods can be, but every single person needs to know how to feed themselves something.