Onyxrising's Journal

I've been going through this morning and evaluating the canning supplies which I have on the shelf.
So, just to throw it out there to my PDX peoples- if we were to do so, would anyone else be willing to go in on the purchase of a cow? A lot of the farmers outside of Portland will sell a pre-dead (internal organs and skin removed) cow, and it's usually pound for pound cheaper than buying the meat. There's also the advantage that it's not, y'know, factory farmed meat. I'm sure I'm not the only one who can taste the difference. It is, however, a lot of meat, and certainly more than we could sit down and eat at a time.
Why, yes, this does mean that I finally got a respectable recipe for corned beef brisket. By respectable, I mean it's scaled to the 100 lbs of beef, and is given on the assumption that the user needs to break down and preserve an entire cow at once. Sadly, since I'm not back north, I don't have a smokehouse or the means to do dry curing.

I need to get around to organizing the dry storage area this weekend. I miss the 5 gallon jars and buckets that seemed to be available for storage everywhere back north. Sven and I are still in the habit of buying dry goods on the same scales we did growing up- and those assumed that the roads into the store might be too dangerous (or in Sven's case nonexistant) for lengths of time. We're running low on flour and rice. It was time to buy more anyways. I suppose buying it by the 50 lbs isn't a bad habit to be in with grain and oil rationing being done by some retailers as demand outstrips supply in certain cities.
Regardless, actually organizing things means I need to find containers to stick about 30 lbs of dried beans in. And then I'll need to order in a fresh round of everything we need more of. On that note, we could kind of use more beans. (Most of what we have his garbanzo, mostly useless to us since the food processor broke and there can be no hummus.)
It still feels weird to me not to have the jars of barley in storage that my family used to keep. I wouldn't have the same use for it now. The hand crank flour mills we used to use are expensive down here, seen as a curiosity. I don't brew beer, so I'd not have use for barley in that.