Store It Foods

When you come home at the end of the day, you want to be able to enjoy a great meal.  But sometimes, you don’t have the time to prepare anything and will just pop a frozen meal in the microwave.  But you can enjoy real meals in just a few minutes with pressure cookers.It is very easy and convenient to use a pressure cooker.  And you can preserve the flavors and nutrients in pressure cooking.  You can also save on your electricity bills since they cook the food very quickly.  There are different sizes of pressure cookers so you can get the right one for your family size.  Coming home for dinner will now be an easy task.

Here’s a quick and easy recipe for Cream of Mushroom Soup made right in your own kitchen from your own fresh ingredients. 

Easy Mushroom Soup

Serve 2-3
Preparation and cooking time: less than 1/2 hour

Ingredients:

2 tbp Butter
2 cloves Chopped garlic (optional)
3 3/4 cup Chopped/sliced mushroom
2 tbp Plain flour
1 c Water
1/2 c Milk
1/2 c Evaporated milk
Dash of white pepper (optional)
Salt
Parsley/ Marjoram for garnish (optional)

* Change water with chicken stock and milk with cream for better flavour.

Directions:

1. Melt butter in a sauce pan over a medium heat and saute garlic and mushroom until soft. Add plain flour and mix it in until no lumps can be seen.
2. Add water/ stock slowly and stir it into the mushroom mixture. Keep stiring to ensure the mixture is lump free and heat it until it thickens and starts bubbling.
3. Add milk and evaporate milk/ cream and stir it in. Heat it until it is just about to boil. Add pepper and salt to taste.
4. Garnish with herbs just before serving.

The recipe shown above is reproduced from a Wordpress blog, butlerwoman.wordpress.com, that contains this and many other delicious recipes.

If you wished to use food storage items, you could, of course, substitute reconstituted dehydrated mushrooms for the fresh mushrooms, and garlic powder for the garlic cloves. You might even want to introduce your own variants.  In any case, you control what goes into it.

Having said that, though, it must be admitted that there is more time and work involved here than would be needed in plucking a can of mushroom soup from your cupboard, adding water and quickly heating it on your stovetop.  The can of soup probably makes for a relatively nutritious meal, but you would likely lose some of the heartiness of homemade.

An often ignored fact is that you would also lose control of the ingredients that go into the making of that soup.

Here’s a sampling of what you will likely find in that canned soup of yours:

Ingredients: Water, Mushrooms, Enriched Wheat flour, Cream, Corn Starch, Canola Oil, Salt, Modified Milk Product (Modified Milk Ingredients, Modified Palm Oil, Cream, Soy Protein Isolate), Modified Corn Starch, Sugar, Momosodium Glutamate, Coloring, Yeast Extract, Spice, Spice Extract, Garlic Powder.

So there you have it — a little “food” for thought.  Whether or not you are using fresh mushrooms or your own, home dehydrated mushrooms, or some other type of soup altogether, there is often a lot to be said for home made, even though it might take a litte more time and trouble.

Meat grinding is often done to make different meat ingredients for hamburgers, sausages and other meat dishes.  If you like preparing your meat beforehand, an electric meat grinder will suit you best.  Some models even come with attachments for sausage-making.  Most meat grinders have different size meshes so various sized meat cuts can be achieved.  Typically, all kinds of meat can be run through a grinder.

Having an electric meat grinder in your kitchen could be an advantage.  Some meat grinders can even grind up hard fruits and vegetables.  If you prefer making your own meals, instead of buying pre-processed meats and meat by-products, this is the kitchen tool for you.  It is easy to use and easy to clean.  Some are even designed for easy storage.

Here’s a simple but tasty recipe:

Sausage Delight

• one pound beef or pork sausages
• canned tomatoes
• salt and pepper

Take the sausages and canned tomatoes and put together in a pot with salt and pepper to taste.  Boil for twenty minutes.  Serve with potatoes.  (This can make a good sized meal for quite a large family).

That’s it.  It’s quick.  It’s simple.  It’s inexpensive.  It’s easy to make.   It should also be noted that this comes from a Depression era cookbook which had been compiled during the “lean thirties”.  It, and many like it, deomonstrate that meals can successfully be based on very few ingredients.  Note the lack of multiple herbs and spices.

Such recipes might be good have on hand.  When we find ourselves actually depending upon and using our food storage items, we may find that we may be somewhat limited in what ingredients we have available.  So, we will want to do the best we can with what we have.  Thus, those simple, easy to make recipes could be just exactly what is needed.

The time to find them, of course, is before they become a necessity.  Start with a basic few.  Try them and see how you like them.  In other words, be prepared.

Remember, too, that your long term food storage is supposed to be there to benefit you whenever it is needed, and that can include times of unemployment or under employment, times when money is scarce.  You do not need to wait for some sort of natural or man-made disaster to strike.  If finances dictate that you use it now, then now is a good time to use it.

No kitchen would be complete without a flour sifter.  Or would it?

As the name implies, the flour sifter was designed to sift flour, breaking up clumps and removing foreign matter.  These days, however, the flour that you bring home from the grocery store is unlikely to have clumps or contain foreign matter.  Some cooks, however, insist that the usefulness of the flour sifter has not ended, that it can still be used to aerate flour, giving it more volume and thus making for lighter, fluffier baked goods.  They claim that sifting also makes it easier to incorporate other foods and liquids into sifted products.

Even if that were true (and it might very well be) some feel that a sifter is more trouble than it’s worth, and that an ordinary sieve will work just as well and be much easier to clean up afterwards.

The debate goes on.

The reason for raising the matter here is simply to show that when contemplating the purchase of a food preparation or food storage product, it is wise to look at the pros and cons of that purchase.  In other words, why purchase a flour sifter if you don’t think it is worth using?  On the other hand, wouldn’t it be wise to add one to your inventory of kitchen tools if you think it would be of great benefit?

A flour sifter is not terribly expensive, so buyng one just to try it might be worthwhile, even without giving it a great deal of thought.  For more expensive appliances such as grain mills, bread makers, deluxe food processors and the like that might not be as good a policy to follow.  Maybe you should consider doing a little contemplating beforehand.

After all, if you can’t see yourself ever using it, why are you buying it?  If you don’t think the pros outweigh the cons, why make the purchase?  If you aren’t going to be willing to at least try it, is it really going to be that wise an investment?

Yet, if you envision it being a really useful and important tool, why are you hesitating?

 With so many choices in baby items that are out in the market these days, choosing baby shower gifts can be quite confusing. So it is best to base your decision on the usefulness and practicality of the baby shower gifts and you should make sure that the gifts selected by you would be useful to the parents-to-be as soon as the baby is born.

Given below are some of the popular and practical baby shower gift ideas:

~ Baby feeding products. These include feeding bottles, baby dishes and baby food grinder.

~ Baby clothing. You can include undershirts, mittens, blankets, and socks.

~ Baby bath products. A baby bathtub with baby towels and bath robes works well.

~ Baby’s nursery room essentials.

Pressure cookers have been around for a lot longer than many people realize.  Unfortunately, a lot of misconceptions remain from some of those early days of cheap imitations, poor quality, and unregulated production.  So it might be good to point out that today…

Pressure cookers are NOT prone to blowing their lids, denting ceilings, and spreading their contents throughout the kitchen.

Pressure cookers do NOT need to be approached with undue caution when checking pressure levels.

And

Pressure cookers are NOT blowing, hissing, steaming monsters that shudder and rumble on your stove top.

On the other hand…

Pressure cookers ARE safe, reliable and efficient.

Pressure cookers ARE made of qualtiy materials that meet government set standards. 

And

Pressure cookers sold by most online merchants ARE covered by warranties (often multi year) that are backed by reputable manufacturers.

Use of your steam juicer doesn’t need to be a “once a year” type thing.  Though they are great for making juices for jams, jellies, or concentrates, jobs at which they excel, these handy devices can also be used as cookers. 

In other words, you can use them to steam cook vegetables for an appetizing side dish, or even prepare an entire main course. Steam rice, fish, poultry, clams, cakes, puddings, and more. It’s a healthy way to cook and it’s a simple way to cook.

To transform your steam juicer into a steam cooker, simply remove the juice kettle portion of the unit.  That’s it.  You’re done.  You’re ready to go.  You will have left behind the water pan and the steamer basket, and those are what you require for steam cooking.

Would you like even more versatility?  Use the steamer basket as a colander for draining hot spaghetti or other pastas.  You’ll find it similarily useful for washing greens and other fruits and vegetables prior to meal preparation.  The water pan can easily be used to cook up soups and stews, or as an extra large pot for boiling potatoes or other vegetables for those special, family dinners.

Don’t limit your thinking.  Get your money’s worth.  That steam juicer really can become a kitchen utensil that is useful year round, rather than just seasonally.