I love a fresh, hot biscuit slathered with butter and topped with jam for breakfast. But, making fresh biscuits has always been a struggle for me. Even after all the work of cutting in butter, gently working the dough, cutting out the biscuits and baking them, they'd tend to be flat and not as flaky as I like. Then, Lynne pointed me to a recipe for 5-Ingredient Freezer Biscuits and life changed!

Biscuit and (local) jam breakfast!

You can find the recipe in our recipe database or the original on the budgetbytes.com site.

The beauty of this recipe is its use of heavy cream for the fat component, as well as the ease of preparation. I made a batch the other afternoon. I didn't even have to put them in the freezer. Instead I put the freshly cut biscuits on a sheet pan, covered them with plastic wrap, and put them on the front porch. They were frozen solid in a couple of hours.

Now, they are in a zip bag in the freezer and all we have to do to have fresh biscuits is take a few out of the freezer and place them on a sheet pan. Preheat the oven. Pop them into the oven for about 20 minutes. And, we have nice, hot, flaky biscuits for breakfast!

Frozen biscuits, right out of the freezer, on a sheet pan waiting for the oven to preheat.

Nice, hot, flaky biscuits right out of the oven.

Today, we went into Laramie and did our "final" shopping for emergency provisions for this coming winter.

While we can quite likely always get into town within a week or so of any major storm, it is also possible that back-to-back storms with high winds could strand us at the cabin for several weeks in a row. We have heard that year-around residents in previous years have gone as long as 7 to 8 weeks without being able to get into town. The last thing you want in that situation is hearing your spouse yelling "Crap, we are out of toilet paper!"

The back of the truck after our first provisioning trip to Sam's Club for bulk items.

If you follow this blog, you know we've taken a few steps to ensure our ability to get out in an emergency--such as putting tracks on the Polaris Ranger. However, absent an emergency, it would be best to just hunker down and ride out any bad storms.

The highest likelihood for such storms is in February, March and April of next year. But, we decided to create a list of non-perishable items that we could use to create dozens of meals, and stock up on those items "just in case". Maybe we can highlight some of those recipes in the future. For now, here is a copy of our winter provisioning list. Feel free to suggest additions in the comments.

A few weeks ago we drove to Sam's Club in Cheyenne where we purchased items we needed in bulk. Today, we shopped at the WalMart in Laramie to get the items we only needed one or two of. It was a heavy load as most items are canned. There are some frozen items and dry ingredients too, of course.

And, as you know, I have fully insulated and sealed up the storage shed just outside our back door. Most of these items go in there. Because there is a propane refrigerator and electric freezer also in there (giving off heat), it is staying around 40°, even when the temperatures outside are in the teens. (We are about to get some single-digit temperatures next week, se we'll see how it goes.) Here are a couple of photos of the stocked-up storage shed.

Obviously, we can't have fresh vegetables, so we have some canned and frozen. We do have potatoes and onions. They are in the laundry basket on the bottom shelf. I am hoping that storing them in that cool, dark place with the open air will keep them fresh. I hate soggy, limp potatoes. Again, a learning experience.

Items that might be chewed upon by critters (although I think I have the storage shed critter-proof), go into plastic storage bins (flour, boxed items, etc.) Everything else goes onto the shelves in what I hope is an organized way. We are not making an inventory of the shed (like we do the freezer). Instead, we can refer to the original shopping list to remind us what we have bought, and then rumage around to find it.

Now, if we don't get snowed in and are able to buy groceries weekly for planned meals, we'll have all this stuff stored and we will need to then eat from that stock next spring. We will keep you informed.

If you are also provisioning for winter and have suggestions for us, or questions about our strategy, shoot us an email at otg@rickandlynne.com.

Just a short post about our Thanksgiving.

It was a cold day (mid-20s), windy (gusts up to about 30 mph at the cabin), but sunny. We took the dogs for a short walk, then started meal preparations. Somehow, we survive in our tiny kitchen. The main problem we have is counter space.

All burners going!

We had fresh turkey from the Butcher Block in Laramie. Stuffing. Mashed potatoes with gravy. A cranberry/apple relish. And, a new brussels sprouts recipe. It looks pretty good on a plate:

Everything was fantastic except we didn't care much for the brussels sprout recipe we used. We'll use our old standby next time.

We took time to talk about what we are thankful for: friends, family, our health, and the opportunity to live our dream at the cabin. We also took time to think about those who are not having the Thanksgiving they probably hoped for, including our neighbor who spent the day in the hospital.

We are also thankful that dinner got cooked. We've been having a lot of problems with our new appliances. We love the mechanical designs and functionality. But, their quality suffers. I am becoming quite the appliance repair guy. The oven had been "acting up": at first not starting at all; after replacing a toggle switch it would start but would then go off after some time; an adjustment fixed that but left the oven unable to regulate the temperature; backing off the adjustment seems to have fixed it. We were able to cook several items in the oven and it performed well.

The refrigerator is another issue, and a good topic for another time. After all I want to stay positive and thankful in this post!

As you can see from Lynne's previous post, we are expecting a change in the weather. Thursday's high temperatures will be in the 20s and it will get down to around 10 degrees at night. That is a bit different from the daytime 50s and nightime 30s we've been having. Today is bright and sunny, in the 50s already (10:00 a.m.), and a bit breezy. It is also supposed to accumulate snow, and I think we are ready.

Since I'm sure the ponds I like to fish will freeze up, I went fishing yesterday to see if I could make a last nice catch of the season. And, I caught one nice rainbow trout. He was 14" long and weighed a couple of pounds. He was plump from a nice summer in the pond. His flesh was very pink ensuring a great flavor. 

The dogs were particularly interested in the fish. (But they got their normal kibble with some Alpo on the side.)

We decided to ditch our dinner plan and have the fish. It was big enough to filet, so we had trout filets fried in seasoned flour with a topping of crumbled bacon. First, I fried the bacon. Then, most of the bacon fat went into a cast iron skillet where I heated it up and tossed in some cubes of potato. Once that was mostly cooked to a nice crisp brown exterior, I dredged the fish filets in flour seasoned with salt and pepper. The filets then got fried in a little of the bacon fat supplemented with some canola oil. When done, after only a few minutes on each side, I removed them from the pan and deglazed with white wine. I added a few drops of cider vinegar and some chopped fresh savory (from our pitiful herb "garden"). We also heated up a can of mixed veggies--tomatoes, corn and okra. I served the fish with sauce and crumbled bacon on top with the potatoes and veggies on the side. The result was a fresh, yummy, and unplanned dinner.

As our winter preparation projects wind down and we move into winter, you are likely to see more food-oriented posts on the Off the Grid blog. Here is what we had for dinner last night:

This is a Pork Chile Verde (Green Chile Stew) recipe that you can find on the web site.

It is pretty easy to make with minimal ingredients. You just need about 4-5 hours to let it cook. Since it cooks at a low temperature, we decided to cook it in the oven of our wood burning stove.

The "old fashioned" wood burning stove.

The stove actually has a large oven. We've done a 13 pound turkey in there before!

Of course, keeping the oven at 225° means adding a stick of wood now and then. And, eventually, the cabin gets quite warm. We had the front door open by the time the stew was done.