Recipe of the Week: K.M.’s Hot Milk Sponge Cake

Reader K.M. sent a quick and simple recipe recommendation that is great for families with both laying hens and a home dairy cow.  She notes: “We are folks who often ask ourselves: ‘What are we going to do with all these eggs and this extra warm milk?’  Here is one answer.” Hot Milk Sponge Cake Ingredients: 1 Cup All-purpose flour 1 Teaspoon baking powder 2 Eggs 1 Cup of sugar 1/2 Cup milk 2 Tablespoons of butter (or margarine) Directions: Combine flour and baking powder. Then, in a bowl mix the two eggs with a hand or electric mixer set …


Letter: Pre-1965 90% Silver Coins are the Best Defense Against Counterfeits

Dear Editor: Those buying  silver and gold coins and bars need to be aware. I work in the industry at a well known coin shop in the mid-west. Time after time…week after week customers try to sell us fake items that they purchased from eBay, pawn shops, Craigslist, and elsewhere. It has become a bigger issue over the the last year and especially so in the last few months. When purchasing coins and bullion from customers we use our scales to make sure items are of proper weight, we use our calipers to check diameters, and we have the benefit of …


Letter Re: Tracking Dogs

Dear Editor: I have some experience with dogs that were specially-trained to track living humans, and with cadaver dogs. I agree with the previous Tracking Dog posts regarding restrictive points of terrain and/or infrastructure. In any escape route, there are always certain areas of heightened vulnerability, which an experienced team of searchers will not disregard. The Texas Rangers at one time (reportedly) enjoyed an annual manhunt in the Texas Panhandle. They would seek volunteers from vetted and trusty inmates whose reward at the end of the day, would be the day’s freedom and a good meal. The inmate would be …


Economics and Investing:

Over at Zero Hedge: Will Brexit Give the U.S. Negative Interest Rates? o o o Over at The Daily Bell:  Brexit Vote Is Great News for Britain, but Difficult Times Ahead o o o Gold Summer Doldrums Risk o o o UK’s departure makes EU disintegration ‘irreversible’: Soros o o o 15 Euro Stocks That Lost Over 10% to 25% After Brexit Shock o o o SurvivalBlog and its editors are not paid investment counselors or advisers. Please see our Provisos page for details.


Odds ‘n Sods:

Mainstream magazine The Atlantic posits: Is Middle America Due for a Huge Earthquake? (Thanks to Peter S. for the link.) o o o Bad news from Hawaii: All registered gun owners are being added to the centralized “Rap Back” Federal crime database. o o o Truly pragmatic training: Tam (one of our favorite gun bloggers) describes learning practical pistol shooting with kids in tow. o o o Oregon standoff: Case of possible misconduct by FBI in LaVoy Finicum shooting now before grand jury




Using Canning Jars For All Food Stores and More – Part 2, by Sarah Latimer

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What We Store In Jars Dry, bulk goods. This category of items includes grains, dried pasta, dried potato flakes, dry beans, and rice for long-term storage. We buy these in 40- and 50-pound bags from the Mormon storehouse, Costco, and online vendors and then repackage them into the half gallon jars, which are then vacuum sealed, using our FoodSaver Jar Sealer connected to an electric vacuum pump system that Hugh installed into my kitchen. It takes less than a minute to put the lid on, vacuum seal a jar, and put the ring on. All I have to do at …


Letter Re: Radical Islam

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Dear James and Hugh, I was just reading the article mentioned on June 18th in SurvivalBlog regarding BHO’s refusal to mention ‘radical Islam’.  There are very few things that I agree with regarding the BHO’s thought process, but I tend to agree that our problem is not with ‘radical Islam’. As Scott Ott suggests, a better term would be ‘Literal Islam’. These people wreaking terror all over the world are taking their book of faith seriously or ‘literally’. Such a shame that more of us that claim to be followers of Christ don’t take His book as seriously. If we …


Letter: My Take on the U.S. Economy and Politics, and Their Implications for Prepping

HJL: I’m a both CPCU and CIC chartered senior insurance agent. I have observed that in a normal [business] year there is all sorts of business formation in the first three months.  I know because they ask for insurance quotes for the pro-forma or just come in and buy insurance, to to kick off operations. That activity has declined over the last three years to the point where it just did not happen this year. In the lead up to Mr. Obama’s election, business activity oriented to expansion practically stopped.  No one wanted to rent a building.  Very few bought …


Economics and Investing:

“Sound as a Pound?” There is now plenty of conjecture about the prospects for UK’s Pound Sterling.  Will the Pound’s post-Brexit plunge in the exchange markets continue?  (As of Friday evening, it had crashed to 1985 levels.) Or will there be a Pound Rebound–making the Pound a “Buy”?  (Some say that the divorce from the EU might eventually put the Pound in the same category as the Swiss Franc.)  In the short term the weak Pound will mean strong exports from the UK. The shares prices of England’s car makers and woolens makers are likely to gallop.  Tourism in the …


Odds ‘n Sods:

Reader T.Z. flagged this: The price of LEDs is falling so fast it’s profitable to farm in a New Jersey nightclub. JWR Adds: We have a couple of 600-watt fan-cooled special plant growth spectrum Growpanel LED units here at the Rawles Ranch that we purchased from Ready Made Resources. These lights do a fantastic job of extending our vegetable growing season.  They can be used indoors, or inside a greenhouse. Just one caveat: The light that these throw is very intense and has an odd purplish-pink tinge, so they can be quite distracting if operated in a bedroom or living …



Notes for Saturday – June 25, 2016

On June 25th, 1876, Native American forces led by Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated the U.S. Army troops of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in a bloody battle near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River. The Battle of Little Bighorn–also called Custer’s Last Stand–marked the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. While complicated, the generally accepted reason for the battle is that the discovery of gold in South Dakota’s Black Hills in 1875 led to the U.S. government disregarding previous treaty agreements. The gruesome fate of Custer and …


Letter Re: Sanitation Issues: Understanding Home Septic Systems

Dear SurvivalBlog Readers, Recently SurvivalBlog has presented several articles on sanitation issues. I’d like to add to those. Many homes are equipped with septic tanks to perform as a holding tank for waste allowing waste decomposition to occur. Reduction of solid waste through bacterial action works, but is a slow process and often incomplete; additionally, a large number of chemicals we regularly introduce into our septic tanks, such as common soap, dish washing and clothes detergents, bleach, commercial toilet cleaning solutions, etc., are toxic to the bacteria performing the job of decomposition. Septic tanks are one part of the equation, …