Girls Camp Report

This last week I spent 3 days at Girls Camp. I love Girls Camp. Girls Camp is part of our church's program for teenage girls, and each ward (congregation) is encouraged to hold girls camp once a year. There are camp manuals with various camping/outdoor skills the girls need to learn and pass off each year they attend. For some girls this is review of things their families do, but for some this camp is their main outdoor activity for the year and only opportunity to pick up valuable survival skills.

This year we took our group of girls (all 19 of them) up the mountain and camped with four other local congregations (called a "stake"). The girls were girls, the food was fantastic (we had a couple of award winning dutch oven ladies cook for us), and the weather was pretty cooperative--only rained a little bit during the days and the whole last night (nothing like packing up wet gear just to have to take it home and set it all back up to dry).

There was a hilarious game to test the girls on their first aid skills like how to treat for shock, bleeding, choking, burns, poisoning, etc. One of the leaders had made darts with rubber bands and black pipe insulation. Each dart had the name of an injury on it. Each team was given some darts and some triangular bandages and we shot the darts at the other team. If you got hit with a dart, your teammates had to treat you for the injury that was written on the dart. Now, I don't know about you, but I love shooting stuff, even foam pipe insulation darts, so this was WAY too much fun. You can kind of see the darts on the ground in the picture. Sorry, no pictures of the actual game, I was too busy getting shot at!
The girls also had to sleep in tents, carve with pocket knives, cook food using various methods, light a fire without matches, learn basic outdoor sanitation for themselves and their food, climb across a rope bridge and do some canoeing. I do not love girls camp for the not so relaxing experience of doing activities all day for a group of teen girls with all the drama that entails, but I love girls camp for the experiences it gives them. Heck, I still remember stuff I learned when I went to girls camp as a teenager. I love Girls Camp. So here's your homework assignment. If you can't go to Girls Camp, at least take your family camping and spend a little time while you're out there learning and teaching outdoor survival skills. Your family will thank you later for it.

Bust Out Your Printer

Here's another quick heads up--MD Creekmore over at the Survivalist Blog has rounded up a boatload of fantastic free preparedness downloads on his site. Print off the ones you are interested in and put them in a binder. Build up your library for the cost of paper and ink! :)

Sweet Giveaway

I'm back from girls camp and recovering slowly. I will update with some fun stuff we did and learned in a later post, but right now I just wanted to give you all a quick heads up on a sweet giveaway. A fabulous blog friend of mine is having a giveaway for a Shelf Reliance Cansolidator! You know you want one of those to help your can rotation--I know I do! So even if you don't want it, go ahead and enter and you can just give it to me if you win ;) Entry is easy and painless, but the giveaway only runs until June 30th, so you've got to move fast. Head on over to Olivia's contest post here and follow the directions!

And while you're at it, check out the prepper giveaway widget on my sidebar for more fantastic giveaways running right now! Have a great weekend! :)

Piggies, Camping, and Albino Corn???

A quick one today to let you all know I'm still alive. I have lots to post about and no time to do it--other things on the burner first, so I'll have to do a real catch up post when I've got a little time. We've built a pig pen and remodeled a shack that used to be a rabbit hutch, then was our lamb house, and now it's a pig house. Okay, my sweet husband did most of the work on this one. The pig thing was not my idea. A friend is getting one and so are we, and we get to house them both . . . hmmmm. They're helping pay for feed and bringing garden scraps, etc., they're just an older couple and not home much, so I guess this will work out for us both, right? The pigs should be ready next week some time. We'll see how this goes.

Went to a fabulous class a friend put on about using your wheat and got some really fun ideas and recipes. I'll have to share a few of those also.

We coached our last Tball game for the season last night. The kids are so dang cute, but I'm definitely ready to be done for the year. Now I'm packing and gathering gear for a 3 day camp with the youth girls in our church. We're leaving tomorrow morning. We have about 20 going from our congregation, but we're camping with other groups so it should be quite a large camp. Hopefully I've got enough chocolate to get through it! :)

So until probably next week unless by some miracle I have time to post something Saturday, I'll leave you with this little abnormality that's growing in my corn patch. An albino Bloody Butcher Corn plant. Strange but true. He just popped up in the middle of all the green ones.

The green plants are perfectly happy and healthy and this little guy's leaves are drying on the ends. Maybe he needs a little extra water? Or some chlorophyll? We'll see how he does.

Resourcefulness and the Ugly Birthday Cake

You know usually I put up some sort of information I deem useful. I'm just like that. I'm prone to action rather than much thought (hey, don't take that too far--you know I think occasionally . .). Something happens and I think, "What can I DO about it?" and get busy instead of fretting over this and that and hashing out possible courses of action for too long. I like when things are happening NOW and hate waiting for anything. Anyway, all that aside, I'm posting thoughts today (don't expect them to get too deep) along with a little experience from last weekend (yeah, I'm that far behind).

My daughter's birthday was Sunday, so about Thursday I started thinking about it (did I mention I'm also prone to procrastination?). We had to go over the mountain so I could see yet another doctor on Friday and I took along a long list of things to get at the store. Unfortunately, the Dr appointment ran long and it's 2 1/2 hours one way to get there and we had to get back by 6:00 for a softball barbeque sweet husband had helped plan, so I didn't get much of my list done. Saturday we spent the day fishing with friends, so again I didn't get to the store.

Then Sunday rolled around. Sweet little daughter wanted a 3 layer cake with white frosting. Me and cakes do not get along, but I have pretty good success with cake mixes. On this day, however, I had no cake mix, and I really try not to shop on Sundays (besides the fact that there isn't a store open for 10 miles on Sundays around here), so I opted to use a recipe out of a local recipe book assuming that it would work for my altitude, etc. It sunk so bad it wasn't funny. Now of course I didn't start this project until about 3:00 so I really didn't have time to bake something else, so I cut it up and patched it together and made really the ugliest 3 layer cake I've ever seen. Whew.

Now to frost it. Of course I don't have a can of frosting, so I went to the food room in search of powdered sugar and alas, there was none to be found. (Powdered sugar is one of those "extras" in the food storage, and "extras" haven't been in the budget lately.) Hmmmmmm. How am I supposed to make frosting without powdered sugar??? We surely can't leave the cake looking as ugly as it did--it really did need some sort of covering on it. So I grabbed a cookbook and amazingly found a recipe for frosting that used regular sugar and egg whites (turned out kind of like really sweet meringue). So I whipped up a batch of that and frosted the ugly cake. My daughter was SO pleased to have her 3 layer cake with white frosting, just like she wanted, and I was saved by resourcefulness.

So the birthday cake experience really got me thinking about a couple of things. First, in order to be resourceful, you need some resources. You can't make something out of nothing. If I had no flour, sugar, eggs, good cookbook, etc. I would have had a real hard time making any kind of cake. Resources are also your acquired skills and a bit of creativity. I can't tell you how many times I've been able to "make something up" using skills and information I learned doing something else. Be willing to think outside the box and draw from your resources both physical and mental when faced with a challenge.

Second, it's nice to have the things you need to make what you need to make. It's much harder if you have to improvise certain things. You know, if you need to pound in a nail, wouldn't you rather have a hammer than a rock? It would have been much easier and a lot less time consuming to have pulled out a cake mix and can of frosting and made the cake that way. Or at least had a cake mix--frosting in a can isn't that good. Some things can be improvised if you don't have the tools you need, but some things simply cannot be done without the proper tools. Get the tools you need. Sometimes you don't know the tools you need until you try building/cooking/making, so get busy adding mental and physical resources to your gear.

That's about as deep as it gets around here. :)

Cooking Trout--A Good Day Fishing

This post is not for the squeamish. If you don't like seeing your food in the shape of the original animal, this is not for you (I know you're out there). However, if you want to know about the easiest way to cook and debone trout, read on.

We had a fantastic day fishing with some friends Saturday. The kids caught lots of fish. Mom put lots of worms on hooks, swapped lures out, fixed snagged lines, helped the little one cast, unhooked fish, and finally got to throw my own line out a few times. As luck would have it, I only brought one to shore that was a bit too small, so he got to go back. However, there were plenty of other fish caught, and you know the rule, "you catch it, you clean it" so that left me with exactly zero fish I had to clean :)



So after you clean your trout, there's a variety of ways to prep it for cooking and cook it. I'm all for easy, so here's how I do it:

Step 1, lay the cleaned fish on the cutting board.
Step 2, get a sharp knife and cut the head off. Dispose of the head properly. Do NOT put the pile of heads up the hill behind the bush where your daughter will go that night to take care of business and put her hand in the pile of fish heads in the dark. Nobody needs that kind of panic. Put them farther away from camp than that! (Yeah, mom, I know, you didn't know I'd be using that bush.)
Step 3: Get a piece of foil and lay your fish on it.
Step 4: Season the outside and inside of the fish. Lemon pepper is good. I'm really liking RealSalt's organic season salt on my fish lately.
Step 5: Wrap the fish up in the foil and seal the ends.
Yes, it still looks like a fish. Except it now looks like a fish wrapped in foil. See the fins with red arrows in this next picture? Those will all come off after it cooks--they're actually a good indicator of doneness, kind of like a turkey timer. The tail will stick to the skeleton and you won't have to worry about that either. Hang on, you'll see how it's done.
Step 6: put all the little fish packets on the grill. Or in the oven, or over the coals, or whatever heat you have.
Step 7: cook them about 10 minutes per side. This will depend on the size of fish and the heat of your coals. Don't get distracted like I did and overcook them. Well, actually it didn't hurt them much, the skin just stuck to the foil so they weren't as pretty.

Step 8: AFTER the fish is cooked, pull those red arrowed fins out the direction of the fin lines and they'll pull their little bones out with them. If they don't come out easy, the fish needs to cook longer. If they fall apart as they are pulled out you cooked it a bit too long (like mine).
Step 9: After pulling out the fins, lay the fish on your plate (I just left this in the foil--we weren't ready to eat yet) and locate the vertebrae.
Grab the vertebrae at the neck with one hand and use your fork to knock the fish down onto your plate with the other hand (tough to get a picture of that).
If your fish isn't overcooked, it comes apart from the bones a little nicer than these pictures show. Keep pushing the meat down with your fork and lifting the skeleton until you reach the tail which should leave a nice fillet of fish on your plate. Flip the fish still attached to the skeleton over and repeat with the other side. If you do this right, it leaves very few if any bones in the meat.
Season however you want at this point and eat it. You can separate the bones from any extra fish and put the meat in foil and reheat it in the oven the next day. Happy fishing!

Freezing Spinach

Hi all. I really am here still. It's just summer time and the kids are all home and need lots of things to do, so I'm keeping pretty busy keeping them busy.

I had some spinach in the garden that was still green when I cleaned out the garden last year, so I left it in just to see what it would do. Come to find out that spinach is a biennial, so it's perfectly happy to live through the winter if it's not too harsh of a winter or is covered and start growing again in the spring. Very cool. So we've been eating this spinach, but it's just gone crazy, and then started "bolting" where it sends up a stalk and tries to produce seed. This was some random hybrid spinach, so I really wasn't interested in collecting seed from it, so I pulled all the plants and decided to try freezing it. Never tried freezing spinach, so I consulted my Ball Blue Book (usually a fantastic reference for freezing, canning, and dehydrating food) and here's the instructions:

Pick young, tender, green leaves. Wash thoroughly and cut off woody stems. Blanch 2 minutes and avoid matting leaves. Cool. Drain. Pack in can or freeze jars or plastic freezer boxes. Seal, label and freeze.

Sounds pretty easy. I am NOT a fan of cooked greens, so I figured if this didn't go well, it really wouldn't be a great loss and the chickens could eat my mistakes. Well, long story short, the spinach freezing went fine and is actually better texture than store bought frozen spinach. Might do this again. I put my little assembly line workers to work washing and picking the leaves off the spinach (their attention was intermittent at best--they really just wanted to play in the water in the sink, but I tried anyway). I despise dirt in my spinach (I think it tastes like dirt anyway, so it's not helpful to have the crunchy texture of dirt added in) so we washed it a bunch of times to make sure it was really clean. Then I thought whole spinach leaves wouldn't be too useful, so I chopped them up in about 1-1 1/2 inch squares.

Next was blanching for 2 minutes. That means you boil water and put the veggie in the boiling water and then pull it out after 2 minutes. I didn't want to be chasing little spinach leaves around a pot of water trying to pull them out, so I put the chopped spinach in cheesecloth.

Tied the cheese cloth in a "bag" to hold it all together and put a knot a little higher up so I'd have a place to grab the bag when the 2 minutes were up.

Put it in the pot, boiled for 2 minutes and used my pasta spoon to pull the bag out. Slick.

Opened the bag up and emptied the spinach on a cookie sheet to cool. After it cooled, I put it in freezer bags and stuck it all in the freezer. **Read the comments!--I should have cooled the spinach in ice/cold water to cool it properly before bagging and freezing it (turned out fine anyway, but that's the right way to do it).**

We used some the next night to make quiche that actually turned out very good (should have doubled it and made two). Pretty tasty for cooked spinach . . .

So there you have it. The almost fully illustrated guide to freezing your own spinach! :)

Firearms Basics Part 3: Long Gun Actions

Sorry for the trouble, but this post has moved to our new blog location.  Click here to go straight to Long Gun Actions.  Thanks!

Amazing

Couple of quick chicken updates. The kids and I went out last evening to toss the chickens in their house (the kids actually really enjoy this) and were shocked to find them all already IN the house (with the door still open). Strange. The kids were sure dad had snuck out before us and put them in, but it wasn't him. They actually went in the house by themselves. AMAZING.

AND I made my first meal worthy of feeding to the chickens a couple of nights ago. Absolutely nasty, way too salty, hard as a rock little biscuits and sausage gravy. Okay, the dog got the gravy.

I need biscuit making lessons . . .

Free Chickens!

No, I'm not giving chickens away--sorry. They've just been freed from their tool box and are now happily peeping about their big new yard. Sweet husband took most of last week off to use up some excess vacation time before he lost it and we were busy in the yard and garden most every day (hence the sparse posting). Anyway, here's one of the fruits of our labor last week:

Now you might not think this looks like it should have taken very long (we only built the yard, not the house--it's borrowed), but you didn't build it with my perfectionist husband. The yard slopes, but all the posts are perfectly level and the chicken wire is tight all the way around. Really, this is not an easy task. We sunk our corner posts in the ground that was super hard (he did the digging) because of wind around here. The door is 1" steel frame with 1/2 inch hardware cloth, brick underneath and still waiting on a latch (bungees doing a fine job in the meantime). Oh yeah, and it exactly fills the doorway with no gaps when it closes. Did I mention my building partner is a perfectionist? Still need to build our permanent coop on the temporary end by the door and cover the whole mess with bird netting to keep everybody in and everybody else out, but those are projects for another week off ;-).

The crazy chickens don't know to go in the house at night, so we have to go gather them up and throw them in there. The food is in the house, but they don't go eat it until I pull it out and show it to them, then they ambush the feeder as I try to shove it back in the house--you'd think it might occur to even one of them to go in the house to eat or sleep, but as my mom told me: "you'll constantly be amazed at how dumb chickens are." I was hoping my chickens would be above average! Maybe they'll figure it out sometime . . .