For those of you who cook, garden and can, I would recommend The Complete Guide to Pressure Canning. It has recipes for canning complete meals and I found it fascinating to read through. We haven't gotten into canning mode yet as most of our garden isn't even in yet, much less preserving food, but I believe we will find it very useful when we do get to the harvest. Here is the link
If I Iose my microwave and electricity I'm done for. I don't want to cook so I buy everything I need for the microwave and I am happy with that. I eat less and less as I get older and still can't rid myself of the kangaroo pouch that showed up while I was asleep. Well got the next storm moving in so I ate early this morning just in case power goes off. Lucky lately with the power, it goes off and on but in the past it has gone off for 4 hours in these light storms. Maybe they trimmed all the trees lately, a couple years ago they said that the state pays around 4 million a year to trim trees near utility poles. I say it would be cheaper to force a non tree easement on all highway property fronts. Every time we have a hurricane it causes terrible damage to the power supply.
I have a pressure cooker. I don't use it hardly anymore, but I canned for many many years. At one time, we had a huge garden and I canned, froze, and preserved whatever I could. I use to think all the different kinds of canned jars of food looked beautiful sitting on the pantry shelf. Plus, it tasted pretty darn good too. Just can't get young people interested in doing things like that anymore. Gardening, canning, home-cooking or cooking from scratch has become a lost art.
I'm not sure how much of that I agree with and how much is spot-on. I ordered a landscape rake for my tractor, and the lead time is 4 months out (down from 6 months not too long ago.) The sales guy told me that COVID and"other events" have got lots of folks out there back to some form of homesteading, and their factory cannot keep up with demand. He's been in tractor sales for a number of years, and has seen an explosion of folks buying medium-sized plots (30-60 acres), along with the equipment to farm it. On the other hand, my local Walmart rearranged their grocery section several years ago and cut back their inventory of "from scratch" cooking supplies to make more room for the processed stuff that people were buying. And this is in a pretty rural county. I have to do most of my shopping the next county over (a 50 mile round trip.) That depresses me.