Check your Spaghetti-Os

Just saw this article about a Spaghetti-Os recall. If they are your canned comfort food spaghetti of choice, you may want to see if your stored cans are among those affected. It won't be much of a comfort food if it makes you sick in an emergency....

In other news of the more local (to me) variety, we finally had to resort to the more expensive option of internet service, and for now it is working well. Nice to have the internet work and work quickly at that. Yeah, the smile is there. :)

On the garden front, it is finally planted. Still looks pretty bleak out there, and that's not really a surprise, considering that there was a frost warning for last night and 42 degrees out the night before. For plants that like warmth, not much of an incentive to come out and check what's going on... And we insisted on planting corn again, because we're basically optimistic about things like that--can't see it being knee-high by the 4th of July, but hey, if it is, I'll take pictures! :)

Hope your garden is going well--our biggest producer at this point is rhubarb, which grows like a (very large and unruly) weed. Planning to hit the Farmers' Market tomorrow and may try to grow even more things. You don't know until you try.....

It's not for lack of trying....

Well, we have made an attempt to change internet providers so that we would stop having so many instances of "Internet not able to display webpage" or the like coming up. Twice, in fact. Come to find out that there are just too many trees in the way, and in both cases the installers didn't know until the day of installation that they weren't able to get service in our area. So our current providers came out and raised the antennae, and so far, a lot better internet connection. The only other options are a lot more expensive, so here's hoping....

Anyway, if you are interested in giveaways, you might want to check out:

-- The opportunity to enter to win a free Bosch mixer over at Deals to Meals. That contest closes June 30th.
--The opportunity to enter to win a variety of food storage items over at Preparedness Pro. That contest closes June 15th.

Yeah, I don't expect to win, but if you do, I would love to hear about it... :)

When it comes to gardening, my husband has now partially rototilled the garden, and some lovely little seed potatoes that I picked up at the farmers' market are going to make their way into the ground soon. Hope that we get them in soon enough that they will have a long enough growing season this year. Am also thinking about picking up some jalapeno pepper plants next time I'm at the farmers' market, but really have no idea about how well they do around here. The other seeds we are holding onto because winter is still around quite a bit--it snowed last Saturday (reminds of me of the joke that there are four seasons in Idaho--winter, winter, almost winter, and construction :) and though it was pretty nice yesterday, hard to know what it will be tomorrow. Need to get the planting going soon, though, if we want to eat anything out of the garden this year.

Hope all is going well with everyone, and if all goes well with the internet service, am planning to do more posts more often...thanks for coming back to read!

Thank you

Thank you to all those who have served and who are serving in the military, and thank you to their families. Memorial Day is the designated day to remember, but regardless of the day, we will never forget.

"Pizza bombs"--version 2

Well, you may recall that we had "pizza bombs"--a dish in which you flatten two pieces of dough and place pizza toppings on one piece and then pinch the second piece on top of it to seal the toppings in, and then bake--because I wrote about it here. Well, the dough from my regular bread recipe was kind of heavy, so I went looking for the pizza dough recipe in my family recipe book. (Thanks, Mom!) Here it is:

Pizza Dough
Let stand 5 minutes:
1 cup warm water
1 package yeast
1 tsp sugar

Then add:
1/4 cup salad oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups flour

Dough may be sticky. Spread with floured hands in greased pan. Add toppings. Bake @ 425 degrees for 20-25 minutes.

It worked well, and it was wonderful not to have to wait for it to rise, etc. like I do for my regular bread recipe. I used olive oil, because that was what was in my cupboard. I also just messed around with the dough like I usually have to, adding a little water, and then a little flour, etc., until it was the consistency that I wanted. Seems like I almost always (if not always ) have to do that--must be me.....

Anyway, I ended up making them too big, and there was some leaking of spaghetti sauce, but they were well-received. And hey, even if you don't want to make "pizza bombs", now you have a really easy recipe for pizza dough that uses pretty much all staple foods. Gotta love something else you can do with the flour, oil, salt, combination. :) If I put some effort into thinking about different topping combinations, I could end up with more variety--any ideas?

Farmers' Market and thinking about the garden

It's been awhile, in large part because our computer is having issues. Sometimes it will log on to the internet, and sometimes it won't. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that sometimes (ok, a lot of the time) the wind is blowing here, so perhaps the connection problems are weather-related. We have considered changing providers, but have not yet. It's easy to keep the same service when it's working.... :)

I have also been thinking about starting the garden, but when the children are still wearing their winter coats to school in the morning, and we have to fire up the woodstove a lot of the time, I am not quite ready to put any seeds/bulbs/starts in the ground yet. That didn't stop me from visiting the Farmers' Market that was held for the first time of the season on Saturday. Unfortunately, I had forgotten about it and got there when most of the people were packing up. There were flowers out, but I am more of a "if I'm going to plant it, I probably want to eat it" person, so I stopped at one stand that was selling vegetable seeds. They were a good price--I asked if they were non-hybrid, but the gentleman there indicated that they were most likely hybrid. There was also a spot on the table for Walla-Walla onion bulbs, but alas, it was empty. I want in the worst (or is it best?) way to be successful growing onions--but have had no edible results from my garden as of yet. Learned something interesting about Walla-Walla onions, though--they are not really storage onions. They need to be eaten within a couple of weeks of harvesting them, I guess. I'll most likely check back this week to see if there are any Walla-Walla onion bulbs (hope that is the right term) to be had, but I also want to get some onions growing that will store well.

Have you started your gardens yet? It seems like here it is always a line to be walked between starting too early and having your plants freeze (or perhaps get snowed on) and not giving the plants long enough to get anywhere because they are planted too late. Ah, well, we'll do our best....

Two weeks already?

Yeah, sometimes I think, "Wow, I could post about that!" and then put it off and put it off--not very healthy for my post numbers, and the further I get away from an event, the more I think that it's too old to post about...

--For instance, on April 6 we had a snow day--as in they actually closed the schools!! Ah, Idaho. I did not see that one coming, even though I have lived here for awhile. :) I was glad that we still had some wood left for the trusty old woodstove. You never know when something unexpected is going to happen... I don't think that it was the snowing so much as the blowing, but the result was the same, and the day's plans changed in a moment (or at least as long as it took to realize that there was no one else at the bus stop, and for someone who must have been watching the right news (or the news at the right time) to share the information. Funny thing, it was hard to get official information anywhere--it wasn't on the news when we went to check, and we only saw the list of school closures when we went online--I'm sure that there must be something to be learned from that alone...

--I had already procrastinated about writing about the snowstorm when I found this recipe for Do-Si-Do cookies over at the Harried Homemaker website. Ordinarily, I am not much of a baker, but it was Monday, and I saw that I had everything I needed on hand in storage for this recipe, so we made it. That day. They are sooooo good, although we skipped the frosting for the middle because I just wasn't sure how old my powdered sugar was (did I mention I don't bake that often? :)--again, I'm sure that there must be something to be learned from that alone... It was nice, however, to be able to just bake something without running to the store.

--Sometime between posts I saw something I hadn't seen/noticed before--there are big displays of food storage items in our local national chainstore, and there are cans of things like instant/dried potatoes on the shelves in the lanes as you wait to check out. I am hoping that this means that food storage is a big concern/purchase item right now. Is this happening anywhere else?

Just a few things happening around here--hope all is well with you and yours, and that if you have a later snow day than we have (so far... :) that the snow melts as quickly as it did here. No complaints here--we need the moisture....

How much is it, really?

A food storage expert I know that lives in Utah sent me an e-mail last week about a sale on some food storage items. It was one of those sales where you had to be there in person to take advantage of the prices, and it looked like a great sale. Not long after the sale e-mail, another e-mail was sent, reproduced in part here, with permission from the author:

"It is always wise to be cautious and thorough when you purchase anything, but especially something you will some day need to rely on totally. Here are some pointers for special sales shopping.

Check for dates and don't buy if there is no date on a can of dairy products in particular. If there is no date it could be possible that older product has been re- packaged for a special price sale. Ask questions and get the storage/use time in writing. Save your receipts.

Shake cans of freeze dried foods to determine how many inches of food is probably in there. Check for amounts by weight and by servings on EVERY brand you buy. Sometimes some companies do "special" packaging for sales and the ounces will be correct on the label but the can will only have a couple of inches of product in it. We have all seen the amounts in some store brands shrink over the past few months while the packaging stays the same size. Knowing the number of servings will help you decide if the price is a good one.

As you know I just try to get the best info possible and don't guarantee anything. It is up to you to determine for yourself what you purchase. I hope these pointers help. "

Thank you, food storage expert from Utah! I thought these were some really good things to think about no matter what kind of storage you are doing--especially since my children seem to eat more and more all the time, and I want to make sure that I have enough to feed them. :) It sometimes surprises me how quickly I go through normal and routine supplies, and I would be really unhappy (read: distressed and distraught) to find that what I had thought would last longer had already disappeared, especially if I was totally dependent on what I had stored. I know that sometimes even when I read how many servings there are in such-and-so product, when I look at the size of what they consider to be a serving it doesn't always add up to what I would consider to be a serving size--it always seems that I like my servings a little larger. In any case, it can't hurt to ask, how much is it, really?