The Urban Survivalist

If you grew tomatoes this year then you've probably already picked all of them and you're most likely trying to ripen the green ones before they rot. The green ones that are still green by now aint gonna ripen. So what do you do with them? Fried green tomatoes are the obvious solution but I can only take so many of those. Last year I made green tomato pickles out of them. I ended up with at least a dozen quarts. They're fantastic but I still have a ton left. This year I decided to can up some green chili. Someone asked for my recipe in the comments section of one of my other posts so here it is...kinda. I've said before that I don't follow recipes. I follow guidelines. Green chili, like red chili, is really easy to make without following a real recipe. Here's the basic guideline that I use. You can multiply everything depending on the size of the batch. The amounts don't have to be perfect. There are a lot of mexican spices that you can add to...

There's a campaign going on in NY District 23 right now. The current representative of the district, John McHugh, was recently chosen as the new Secretary of the Army. Now they have to hold a special election for the district. They'll be electing a new congressional representative in just a few days. The Democratic candidate is endorsed by SEIU. The Republican candidate is endorsed by the Working Families party which is an arm of ACORN. From what I've read the Democrat is more conservative than the Republican in this race. Luckily, there's a conservative candidate who's gaining a lot of traction. His name is Doug Hoffman. Considering that the other two candidates are fully backing their two candidates (Obama actually held a fundraiser in NY for the Democrat) the guy is way behind in fund raising. This is a chance to get a true conservative into Congress. Go check out his website here . If you like what he stands for then throw him a few bucks. This guy i...

With no garden to tend to I've had a lot of time to devote back to prepping. I've been canning and freezing a lot of the stuff from the garden. Last night I canned up a few quarts of green chili out of the last of my green tomatoes and some pork chops that I had in the back of my freezer. I ended up falling asleep in the middle of the processing. Luckily, my wife turned off the stove after a couple of hours. Unfortunately, she didn't take the jars out of the canner or even open the lid. Anyway, I woke up several hours later and took the cans out. They were still very warm but they'd sealed very nicely. They were just a little darker than they should be. Hopefully they don't taste too terrible. Tonight I'm making red chili out of about half of my tomatoes that actually ripened. Tomorrow night I plan on using the last of them for tomato sauce. I really need to get a juicer. Peeling them the old fashioned way (by boiling them and then peeling them by h...

So it's snowing here. Since I don't normally mark the date of the first snow I'm not sure how early it is (if it's early at all). I did read yesterday that some CO resorts are opening up earlier than they have in 40 years. Some Idaho schools are already calling in snow days. If this is a sign of things to come then we might have a pretty heavy winter. I don't mind too much. I'm kinda surprised that global warming hasn't completely destroyed our chances of ever seeing a snowflake again, though. It's been getting pretty cold at night so I went ahead and ripped out most of my garden the other day. My squash plants were all dead. My zucchini exceeded all expectations and I've been drowning in it all summer. I canned some of it, gave some to neighbors and friends and ate a ton of it. I also found out that my dogs love it. I made quite a bit of dog food out of it. I just mix 1 part zucch with 1 part rice and 1 part meat (usually scraps or meat...