This is the last part of my diary from last week:
I just decided to end this diary here, rather than giving you our inventory of canned goods and other food we have on hand. Something to look forward to for next week.
So, let me give you a brief inventory of our food, before I tell you about the backyard activities mentioned in the title.
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We have about 500 cans of canned food, mostly vegetables: potatoes, corn, green beans, peas, and mixed vegetables.
About seventy cans of beans, about 35 of them kidney beans, about 35 of them no fat refried beans (no fat! shouldn’t that just be called smashed beans, or bean puree?)
We have at least fifty pounds of dried fruit, including lots of dried cherries and raisins.
We have at least 100 pounds of macaroni, either in jars (to keep the mice out) or in bags (we didn’t get put in jars yet) or in boxes of mac and cheese (we didn’t get put in jars yet).
We have twenty or thirty cans of soup.
We have only twelve pounds of peanut butter (that won’t last long).
Ten pounds of canned chicken breast meat.
We have a few meat items in the freezer.
We have a refrigerator jammed full of food.
The biggest pot of food in the fridge is what we cooked last night, and it connects to the rice we have in the cabinets, at least 25 pounds of rice, some in jars, some still in bags.
Here is what we did yesterday.
To shoot some video for my YouTube channel, Smarter Prepping With Big Jack, I took my camera to the back yard.
I noticed the big sycamore tree there had dropped lots of small, dead branches, lots of curled up bark, and lots of brown, dead, leaves.
My wife and I just moved into this house recently, and I never before lived anywhere with a sycamore tree in my yard, so all this is new to me:
dropping small dead branches
dropping curled up pieces of bark
dropping dead leaves at the beginning of summer, not late in the fall.
I turned on my camera, and built a fire in my old gas grill I’ve been using for years to burn wood.
The lid was melted off at the hinges, years ago.
I built the fire like this:
A pile of leaves, about 12” x 12” x 6” tall;
five or ten curled barks on the side
five or ten branches on the side.
I lit the leaves with an 88 cent Walmart butane grill lighter, and put the bark on the fire, then the branches, broken up.
Forgot to mention, we had a brush pile nearby, that the family wants gone, so we put more wood from the brush pile, to keep the fire going.
We set the top grate across the fire, and set a four gallon capacity stainless steel cooking pot on the grate. In the pot went water, ten pounds of chicken leg quarters, more water, up to more than the three gallon mark, four or five tablespoons of salt, pepper, MSG, sugar, other seasonings.
Then we poured in the rice, about three or four pounds, poured it in from a big, one gallon, pickle jar.
We kept feeding limbs into the fire under the pot.
We had to slow down at one point, because the water was boiling over.
Other family members opened a can of green beans, a can of creamed corn, and we sat down for a great family dinner.
Everyone liked the chicken and rice.
(The rice soaks up the chicken fat, so the experience of eating the rice is rich in seasoned fat flavor, but the family does not complain that it’s too greasy, because the rice soaks up the fat.)
Happy ending to the story.
Thanks for reading.
P. S.
We burned up the rest of the brush pile, as the sun went down, and the night became darker and deeper, and the flames shot up, and the flames died down.
And the red coals shimmered, the way red coals do.
There is something deeply entertaining in watching a fire up close.
Thanks again for reading.