What’s old is new again

My old stand-by Betty Crocker cookbook.

This is just a prepper sort of post – no politics, but assuredly I’ll be writing more about politics soon. I went to Indiana for my second oldest granddaughter’s high school graduation a few weeks ago and ended up catching some bug. After about a week and a half, with no improvement, it was time to see the doctor. With a round of antibiotics, I’m now finally over the coughing fits and sinus infection, but now I’ve got a different infection starting and will likely have to call my doctor next week. This little bout of sickness got me thinking about preparedness in several different directions.

First thing, I realized was while I have a few pets to care for, which isn’t strenuous, keeping up with watering my little container garden was a challenge. I felt weak and exhausted for over two weeks. In a real crisis situation, well, you can’t neglect your garden for a few weeks or you could end up losing most of your plants. If I had other animals to care for, I would not have been able to keep up. So, despite the main theme of buying this and that around the online emergency preparedness community, I believe preparedness has to include some thinking about how to manage when things start going wrong, which will inevitably happen, no matter how prepared you believe you are. An injury or protracted illness could really throw all your preparedness efforts into disarray. Something’s going to happen that you hadn’t considered or prepared for, because that’s just how real life is.

For a lot of people with existing health conditions, having an assortment of over-the-counter medications isn’t really an ideal solution. I did take some over-the-counter cough and cold medicine, but when I finally saw my primary care doctor, he advised me not to take any of the over-the-counter cold medications or decongestants, because of my medical problems. I assume there are a lot of older people, in this same situation where over-the-counter medications aren’t advisable with their medical conditions and/or prescription medications. My high-level of reliance on the medical system was brought home to me again. Many healthier people could also require more advanced medical care, depending on injuries or illness, so trying to stay healthy and working on fitness should be a key preparedness focus too.

Having gone further down the road on emergency preparedness, especially since 2020, being open to making adjustments and changes is part of my journey. I don’t want to pick on an online prepper guy, but as I watched a few of this one guy’s videos, he comes across like he’s got his isolated ranch all set up and is prepared for every contingency. He has all the answers. Name a type of SHTF type event and he’s got the total plan for survival at his fingertips. I watched a few of his videos and then realized I’m probably more like this guy, with my strong opinions, than unlike him sometimes – especially with his political hot takes, even though my views are different than his. I’ve seen several male prepper online experts, who are like that about self-defense too, some with military backgrounds and some with other backgrounds, but they come across to me as overly confident that they’ve got everything handled. I hope they do have all the answers or some other people do have the answers and survive even the most catastrophic crisis, because I truly want human life to continue on earth, regardless whether I survive or not. For me, the more I’ve thought about preparedness and actually worked on projects to become better prepared, well, it’s been humbling in many ways.

I’m one of those people, who doesn’t have all the answers. My preparedness efforts are full of mistakes, setbacks, having to rethink things, trying other ways to do things. Often things that sounded simple, turn out to require a lot more practice and skill than I thought they would. Watching other people do things on videos is no substitute for actually doing them yourself, so I keep working on projects myself and trying to learn more as I go. There are some successes, so that’s encouraging and it reminds me how much worse off I’d be if I hadn’t worked on preparedness at all.

After this latest bout of sickness, I also realized that I want to prepare and have more freezer meals stocked up for when I don’t feel like cooking or if something happens where I’m sick and having some quick meals, beyond soup, would be handy. During the weeks of having that crud, I ended up buying some meals in the frozen food section at the grocery store. Disappointment followed, both with the high cost of frozen meals for what you actually get and they really weren’t very good. Whenever I hear happy economic news, I feel like I’m living in some alternative reality, because I haven’t seen any sort of great drop in prices at the grocery store, beyond a few items, like egg prices have come back down. It’s still sticker shock at the register every time I go to the grocery store. My freezer dinner experience prodded some rethinking a small part of my food storage and pulling out old and not so old cookbooks to read.

As a young wife, back in the 1980s, I began making some freezer meals and referred to the Special Helps section at back of my red Betty Crocker cookbook, pictured at the top, for guidance. I’ve always frozen extra prepared food, but rarely made a concerted effort to cook with that in mind. Now, I’m going to focus on having an assortment of frozen homemade meals on hand and more easy to heat up homemade soups and stews too.

Getting some freezer meals put together is a small project and I’m not doing some massive freezer meal prep days, like I’ve seen some ladies online do, where they put together dozens of freezer meals at one time. Cooking an extra meal here or there when I’m preparing supper and then sticking one in the freezer will work just fine for me.

While it’s a good feeling to build a prepper pantry and have emergency supplies on hand, I keep trying to use my food and supplies to improve my everyday life. After all these years living with access to online recipes galore, I never thought I’d be back to browsing through my old cookbooks, but thinking about freezer meals brought me back to the 1980s when as a young wife, I was first learning how to manage my own kitchen. My mother gave me that Betty Crocker cookbook in 1980 when I got married and it’s still my favorite cookbook. It’s also still a useful reference to have in my home.