Pay With Ammo

The FBI proudly announced on March 18, 2011 it has sent a U.S. citizen to a federal prison for providing other citizens a medium of exchange that “competes” with the privately printed U.S. dollar.

In fact, citizens that use anything as a medium of exchange other than the U.S. dollar are “domestic terrorists” according to the prosecutor.

Do you understand the U.S. has just equated blowing up a federal building with using a privately made silver coin to purchase goods and services?

Does that suggest that the “experiment” that is the United States has run its course and hasn’t worked out, hence, its time to go to the ballot box and elect anyone that will fix the problem?

Go here to read the full press release.

Wretha noted that Big John Lipscomb has started blogging again.

When I visited his blog, I noticed he has started selling 125lbs of dehydrated food for $825. He claims it’s “1 year of food for two people when supplemented with meat.”

I analyzed the 24 ingredients he loads into the eight, 5-gallon buckets that he sells to you and and found that you are buying only 217,238 calories. For two people to spread that over 365 days, that means each person will get only 298 calories per day.

To get my numbers, I used the calorie count and serving count for each ingredient provided by, who I believe to be his supplier, based on his use of the identical pictures and names of food from a popular web-based food supplier.

Thus, your meat supplement is going to need to be about 4 pounds of 80% ground beef for each person, each day, in order to get about 2,000 calories per day. That’s quite the supplement!

I finally had the time to further experiment with the cheese recipe from Frugal Homesteads. I poured a gallon of lowfat, pasteurized milk into stainless steel pot. After slowing raising the temperature to 180 degrees I poured in a quarter cup of vinegar and mixed gently. It began to curdle and I slowly added another 3/4 cup of vinegar and slowly mixed for about 5 minutes. Once it seemed no further curdling would occur, I poured the whey and curds into a large bowl that was covered by a thin cotton cloth.

Once the whey was removed strained off, what remained was about 1.5 lbs of a soft white cheese that, when salt was added, tasted like a white Mexican cheese. It more than filled a quart mason jar.

My recent discovery, Frugal Homesteads, did a post describing a very useful way to put used cooking oil to work. Dilli suggests using the oil to fill a jar, perhaps mason or, actually, any container and using a wick (commercial or homemade) to create an easy lamp. Because it is using oil, if it were to fall over, unlike a candle, the flame would be extinguished.

This is a timely tip as both Big Money Rawles and Backwoods have touched on using Aladdin lamps in lieu of candles for preparation. Instead of buying, why not make your own?

I just discovered Frugal Homesteads which is immediately at the top of my favorite blogs on homesteading. If you spend a couple of hours reading through every post, I’m sure you’d have 80% of the knowledge you need to set up your own homestead The author, Dilli, covers pretty much everything about living off the grid, and she’s psoting about her experiences living in the mountains of Georgia. Lucky!

I’ve been searching for a non-rennet cheese recipe and stumbled on this blog post from Frugal Homesteads which uses a 1/4 cup of vinegar and a gallon of milk to produce a soft, feta-style cheese. Dilli claims it can be used as is or dried and used as a Parmesan. She uses the whey as a water substitute in her bread recipes.

I’ll be making this and will make a post about it in the near future. I’ll also try using whey in my five minute bread recipes and see what happens.