Blessings Darlings!
No offense to either all y'all or to Eban Pagan - but I'm multitasking here, and writing this blog while in one of his Webinars. This one is on how to create an information product, specifically how to find a profitable niche, create the product, and into to how to reach your audience. Given that his first, and so far most profitable info product was "Double Your Dating", using the pen name David de Angelo.
Combine his first title with my planned post on buying corn, and that equals the title of this post. It might not make sense to you, but it clicked for me!
So, that done, let's talk corn. I headed over to the feed store this week, in order to try to fix some holes in my food storage. Since none of the local farm and feed stores carry wheat, I grabbed a bag of corn. BTW, the corn was already amazingly expensive. Yes we all know that there is a drought and this years' corn crop is trashed, but I figured I'd be getting a bag of LAST years corn, so the price wouldn't have gone up much yet.
I was wrong.
Not only was the price for the 50 pound sack of feed corn (which I'm planning to use to feed me and my family) already $12.80 instead of the $8.00 I paid last year .... but as I prepared it for storage (in food grade plastic tubes with great lids, adding carbon dioxide gas to displace oxygen, instead of easily permeable but thick paper bags) I LOOKED at the corn. And the quality is BAD BAD BAD. At least 15% of the kernels are brown or black and NASTY. Not stuff I'm going to choose to eat. I've never run into this before in feed corn. Before it's always been really high quality. I'd take a cup of the kernels, pick a FEW nasty ones out, give 'em a quick wash, let 'em dry, grind them, and I'd be baking corn bread. This stuff is going to be more like ... well ... uh .... Like cleaning lids of cheap marijuana from the 1970's. The seedy cheap low quality stuff. Stuff you'd lose 1/2 of by the time you got the stems and seeds out.
I may make a video showing the corn and cleaning it. In my copious free time, eh?
Yeah, I'd feed all this stuff to livestock. I admit I'm pickier about what I feed my family and myself. I'm quite sure that you are, too.
Just a word to the wise.
Frondly, Fern
Showing posts with label corn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corn. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Friday, October 21, 2011
People Food
Blessings Darlings!
As many of you know, my food storage program is built around a base of feed-store bought wheat and corn (and, damn, I wish feed stores around here sold whole soybeans). Some people have wondered about whether humans can/should be eating food that's sold for feed for animals - sure grains sold for direct human consumption are better somehow. Cleaner? Better inspected?
Certainly the same products sold for human consumption are more expensive. But better/cleaner/certified? Nope!
While the Chubby Hubby isn't at all into prepping, really, he DOES bring a serious knowledge base into this part of the discussion. While in college, he worked summers at a Huge Corn Processing Company. They made (I'm sure they basically still exist now, but have been swallowed by an even LARGER Huge Corn Processing Company) most of the types of corn products used across the US: corn starch, corn sugar, corn syrup, glutens, flours, etc. He has told me stories of how things work there.
The corn the company got was the same corn that the feed producers get. The same silo spits it out into the same train hopper cars. The silo tests ALL of the corn for toxins.
The feed companies and the Human Processing company both use the same process to 'clean' the corn - fundamentally, using fans/compressed air to blow away things not the right weight as the kernels should be. After that, the feed company fills 50 pound bags with the grain. Meanwhile, the Corn Processor starts to play.
Corn Processor 'cleans' the corn .... by dumping the kernels water with sulfer dioxide in it, making the water a weak acid. Yummy! This kills stops any mold from growing during the 24 hour soak, but allows enzymatic action in the kernels. They then wet mill it, and the slurry gets divided into it's 4 main component parts - hulls starch, germ, and something I can't recall right now. Dang. The splashing acidic slurry eats away at the concrete around the milling machines, by the way.
Anyway, let's talk about where the starch goes. It gets refined in TONS of different ways, for different purposes. Every now and then, they take out a sample to test it. When they take a sample, some spills on the floor.
How do they clean the floor? Oh, with water. Where does the corn starchy water go? BACK INTO THE MIX FOR PROCESSING. How yummy is THAT?
So, yeah. I grind my own flour, from whole grains meant for animals.
Frondly, Fern
As many of you know, my food storage program is built around a base of feed-store bought wheat and corn (and, damn, I wish feed stores around here sold whole soybeans). Some people have wondered about whether humans can/should be eating food that's sold for feed for animals - sure grains sold for direct human consumption are better somehow. Cleaner? Better inspected?
Certainly the same products sold for human consumption are more expensive. But better/cleaner/certified? Nope!
While the Chubby Hubby isn't at all into prepping, really, he DOES bring a serious knowledge base into this part of the discussion. While in college, he worked summers at a Huge Corn Processing Company. They made (I'm sure they basically still exist now, but have been swallowed by an even LARGER Huge Corn Processing Company) most of the types of corn products used across the US: corn starch, corn sugar, corn syrup, glutens, flours, etc. He has told me stories of how things work there.
The corn the company got was the same corn that the feed producers get. The same silo spits it out into the same train hopper cars. The silo tests ALL of the corn for toxins.
The feed companies and the Human Processing company both use the same process to 'clean' the corn - fundamentally, using fans/compressed air to blow away things not the right weight as the kernels should be. After that, the feed company fills 50 pound bags with the grain. Meanwhile, the Corn Processor starts to play.
Corn Processor 'cleans' the corn .... by dumping the kernels water with sulfer dioxide in it, making the water a weak acid. Yummy! This kills stops any mold from growing during the 24 hour soak, but allows enzymatic action in the kernels. They then wet mill it, and the slurry gets divided into it's 4 main component parts - hulls starch, germ, and something I can't recall right now. Dang. The splashing acidic slurry eats away at the concrete around the milling machines, by the way.
Anyway, let's talk about where the starch goes. It gets refined in TONS of different ways, for different purposes. Every now and then, they take out a sample to test it. When they take a sample, some spills on the floor.
How do they clean the floor? Oh, with water. Where does the corn starchy water go? BACK INTO THE MIX FOR PROCESSING. How yummy is THAT?
So, yeah. I grind my own flour, from whole grains meant for animals.
Frondly, Fern
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Can It.
Blessings, Darlings!
It's canning season again! I've been doing fruit so far, but tomatoes (okay, technically a berry) and corn and beans are going to be canned soon.
It's hot and time consuming work, but not exactly intellectually demanding. Which means I have time to do magic and to ponder things. I'll talk about the magic in this post.
Back in the day, when I was a kid, one of the stories we were told about Benjamin Franklin was that he and his father were putting up barrels of pork (no doubt layered with salt). Ben, who was NOT impressed by the long time spent at each meal saying grace, reported said something along the lines of "Dude, why don't we do the grace thing now, over the whole barrel, and get it over with? We'd get our eat on faster at dinner..."
Well, I'm not taking quite that approach to the canning, but I AM invoking the blessings of the Gods on each batch I can. Working for health. For wholeness. For it to feed us body and soul.
I layer flavors in my cooking (even the peaches I just canned had added cinnamon), it's time I started layering blessings in all I do.
Frondly, Fern
It's canning season again! I've been doing fruit so far, but tomatoes (okay, technically a berry) and corn and beans are going to be canned soon.
It's hot and time consuming work, but not exactly intellectually demanding. Which means I have time to do magic and to ponder things. I'll talk about the magic in this post.
Back in the day, when I was a kid, one of the stories we were told about Benjamin Franklin was that he and his father were putting up barrels of pork (no doubt layered with salt). Ben, who was NOT impressed by the long time spent at each meal saying grace, reported said something along the lines of "Dude, why don't we do the grace thing now, over the whole barrel, and get it over with? We'd get our eat on faster at dinner..."
Well, I'm not taking quite that approach to the canning, but I AM invoking the blessings of the Gods on each batch I can. Working for health. For wholeness. For it to feed us body and soul.
I layer flavors in my cooking (even the peaches I just canned had added cinnamon), it's time I started layering blessings in all I do.
Frondly, Fern
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