MAKING A COMPLETE PROTEIN WITH GRAINS & LEGUMES

 or, How to Get Enough Protein When You Can’t Get Meat

All proteins, no matter what food they come from, are made up of amino acids.  Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. And protein is what your body needs to build and maintain your body’s health. And when we think of Protein, we think of chicken, beef, turkey, pork, fish and eggs.

When you eat a T-bone steak or baked beans (or anything that contains any protein at all, even a tiny amount), your digestive system breaks the food down into amino acids that are absorbed into your blood stream. From there, the amino acids are used to build the proteins that make up your muscles, organs, your brain and lots of other tissues.

Your body can make many amino acids itself, but there are some amino acids that the human body can't manufacture.  These amino acids are called the essential amino acids because you have to actually eat foods that contain them.

A deficiency in any one of those 10 essential amino acids can cause the proteins in your muscle and other tissues to deteriorate, as your body seeks to obtain the necessary amino acid it’s missing by stealing it from your own body tissue.

These are the essential amino acids that your body can’t make on its own (so you must consume/eat them): 

Why Doesn't My Bag of Food with Oxygen Absorber Looked Vacuum Sealed?

 AIR is made up of Nitrogen & Oxygen.

 "Air" is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, gaseous mixture, made up of mainly nitrogen (approximately 78 percent nitrogen) and oxygen (approximately 21 percent oxygen) with approximately 1% of lesser amounts of argon, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, neon, helium, and other gases.

 When you put an oxygen absorber of the correct size into a Mylar bag along with food, the oxygen absorber is going to scavenge (aka remove) the oxygen from the bag, nothing else. The bag will still contain all of the nitrogen and 1% other gases, so you will still have 80% of what you were calling "air" inside the bag. What is in the bag is now is nearly 100% nitrogen, which is why this process is nearly identical to the much more complicated method of flushing a bag with nitrogen gas from a big tank.

It will most likely LOOK like you still have "air" (oxygen + nitrogen + 1% other) in the bag because the VOLUME of "air" has only been reduced by 21% (the oxygen). But what is in the bag is NITROGEN, not "air" (oxygen + nitrogen).

The oxygen absorber will remove ALL the oxygen and leave ALL the nitrogen, so the chances of all your Mylar bags of foods looking vacuum sealed is slim. It's just plain physics. If there was a cup of "air" in the bag when you sealed it up with the oxy absorber, then you will have over ¾ of a cup of nitrogen still in that bag after 24 hours, which is exactly what you want.

Occasionally, a mylar bag of dried food with an oxygen absorber of the correct size will appear to be vacuum packed. Vacuum packing is a completely different process than nitrogen packing. Vacuum packing removes most, but not all, of the "air". Vacuum sealing leaves some "air" (nitrogen AND oxygen) in the bag with the food, which is in a clear single layer plastic bag not designed for long term storage (if you are using a Food Saver or Seal a Meal). It is OK if there is still some oxygen in a vacuum sealed bag because vacuum sealing is for short to mid-term food storage, NOT long term food storage.

 

So if your Mylar bags don't suck down hard the way a vacuum sealed bag does, don't worry. What is still in that bag is nitrogen, protecting your food for long term storage.

How Would YOU Fare?

Used to be that we knew who The Enemy was (the Commies) and what to do about it (build a cinder block bunker in your backyard with the help of the government brochure).

Nowadays, tho, there is no single threat but a myriad of threats: terrorist attacks, super volcanos, pandemics, total economic collapse (or at least hyper inflation), solar storms, CME's and just plain old hurricanes, flooding and tornados knocking power out for who knows how long.  Look at Hurricane Sandy - there were people without electricity for well over a month and that was "just a bad storm".

THIS IS A TEST. THIS IS ONLY A TEST.

If your power and water were turned off for a month, and for a month you could buy no gasoline, nor go to any store, HOW WOULD YOU FARE?

What would you eat? What would you drink? How would you make that cup of coffee in the morning? And cook? How would you see once the sun went down? Bathe? What's that?

You want to be able to say Hey! No problemo here! and that is what I'm here to talk about, to share knowledge about, because it IS doable guys (and female guys - we should be friends if we're gonna talk life and death and living thru god knows what).

What I Found in Those Food Storage Buckets from 1989

I started storing food (in a serious way) in 1989. We were told we would be wise to "Store food" and that we should target 2 years worth. Of course it made sense to store food. Now, I have never been one of those people that gingerly dip their toe in the water to see if it's cold or not. Me, I jump in with both feet. And because there was a group of us taking on this task, I got to get a really diverse assortment of grains, beans, peas, pasta, nuts, fruits, seeds, spices and some things that were not really meant for long term storage. Others were probably doing the same thing.

I'd add to the collection of buckets every so often, so there are lots of buckets from 1989, a few buckets from the early 90's, the mid 90's and of course some in 1999 because who knew WHAT was going to  happen with Y2K – yikes! (Took me years to eat the canned green beans and soup that I bought in '99 hehehe. I think I finally gave the last couple of cases of corn to a friend around 2005 since I rarely eat corn.)

Here we are approaching December 21, 2012. That's an even BIGGER bugaboo date than 12/31/1999. I wondered (well, I had been wondering for a few years) how in the heck that food was that I put into buckets in 1989. No sense in continuing to store stuff that was no good. But you don't want to throw something away that IS good (especially if you have MY packrat genes from good ol' Grandma Simpson who lived through the Depression).

So I started going through the buckets. Mind you, the buckets had all been stored in pretty good conditions: you store buckets in a basement were it doesn't get blistering hot in the summer or freezing cold in the winter and that increases the shelf life of your food. And the heat is a bigger enemy of stored food than cold is when you are looking at dried foods like grains, beans, fruits and veggies.

GRAINS

Well, the wheat all looked perfect. Bucket after bucket of wheat that I didn't really have much intention of turning into flour to bake bread with (OK, there are probably some of you that bake your own bread on a regular basis, but I bet the percentage of readers who do is fairly low). But I figured I can grow wheat grass and juice it and since it is a magic elixir having that wheat that was still good is a dandy thing. So I quit looking in the wheat buckets. What I did instead was take a bucket of wheat and rock it back and forth. If the wheat "sloshed" back and forth freely I marked the bucket good and dated it.

I also looked in on buckets of Hulled Barley (a zillion times more nutritious than Pearled Barley), whole oat groats, millet, rye, corn, buckwheat and rice. The first test is 'Does it slosh back and forth, or has it turned into a solid mass, even though it looks OK?'

If it 'sloshed', that is, moved freely like fresh grain kernels should, then did it look OK? Smell OK? Then chances were extremely good that it WAS OK. Any bucket where I could take off the lid and rock the bucket back and forth a bit and nothing  moved, I blessed, banged the lid back on and labeled it Hog Food (no sense in wasting food – I know a person who raises hogs and it is fine for them).

So far I had only looked at whole grains. Then I came across some rolled grains, like oatmeal and 7-grain rolled cereal. It is said that rolled oats and other rolled cereal is only good for about a year or so. Well, the rolled oats 'sloshed', looked OK, tasted OK so I called 'em good and marked the bucket. The same with a bucket of the 7-grain rolled cereal – it looked fine, tasted fine so fine it was.

And then I opened the other bucket of the identical rolled cereal put up at the same time. YIKES! BUGS! BIG BUGS! ( I, of course, screamed like a girl which I rarely do.)  I didn't take time to investigate. I just bashed the lid back on the bucket and labeled it Hog Food (hogs don't mind bugs).

PASTAS

And then there were the pastas. The regular spaghetti looked as good as the day it was stored. The whole wheat spaghetti also looked just fine. The elbow macaroni: 100% corn elbows, whole wheat elbows, regular elbow macaroni – all looked as good as the day it was stored. Elbow macaroni seems like it will stay fine until kingdom come. The only pasta that looked a little iffy, not bad, just not quite as 'right' as it was when stored, was the spiral pasta. The plain regular kind looked OK. The three color spirals looked iffy enough that I labeled them 'barter or hogs'. I'm sure they weren't 'bad' where they'd make someone sick. They were edi  ble food that could save a life, but I already had plenty of elbow macaroni so it was ear-marked for someone else.

FRUIT

I also went thru some buckets of fruit. Now mind you, back in 1989 there was no such thing as Mylar bags or oxygen absorbers. We'd throw a handful of bay leaves into the bucket of wheat, bash the lid on, label the bucket, bless it and call it good. So I was mighty curious about the dehydrated fruits.

I had stored some raisins in jars in my spare room. Yes, it got hot in there in the summer but usually not terrible since we are up in the Northwest. And it got cold in the winter (not a problem, heat's the problem). Well after 5 or 6 years those raisins went right past being "sugared" to being down right gnarly. Nasty looking. I wouldn't try one.

What did I find when I opened the buckets where I had put raisins, figs, candied ginger, apple slices and peach slices into Freezer Ziploc baggies and then put those into buckets, blessed 'em and called 'em good? Well, I was surprised, I'll tell you that.

The raisins? They looked FINE. No kidding. I was amazed. I opened the Ziploc bag and tried a couple. They TASTED fine. Wow. 23 year old raisins ready to go into a bowl of oatmeal or into some cookies (or just snacked on). The figs had sugared just a bit. (Sugaring is where the natural sugars in the fruit crystallize on the outside of the fruit.)  So I tried a fig. A teeny bit more dehydrated than in 1989 but barely so. They were fine too. Holy cow!

The apple rings LOOKED fine but had zero taste left at all. Probably would save someone's life but there was no 'apple-ness' left in them so I marked them food for the hogs.  The peaches were pretty much in the same boat. But the candied ginger? It was exactly as it was when I put it up in 1989, which was GREAT.

OTHER ITEMS

I'd say so far most of the powdered milk and flour from 1989 went the way of the hogs. There were some organic whole wheat fig bars from 1989. Even in 1989 they only had a 6 months shelf life so I didn't even hesitate. Those would be some happy hogs :o)

ANYTHING THAT DIDN'T 'SLOSH' IN THE BUCKET

Anything that didn't freely move in the bucket had become kind of welded together. That's usually a sign that moisture has caused the grain, beans, flour, corn meal, whatever to kind of bind together into a block. Would it maybe save your life if you had to eat it? Maybe. Would it maybe make you sick? Maybe. My rule of thumb is "When in DOUBT, throw it OUT." Better you should make room for something else that you know is good.

NEXT: HOW DID THE POPCORN I STORED IN 1989 POP UP IN 2012? (answer: Just fine!)