The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports its latest unemployment figures as of January 2009 as 7.6% of the workforce, compared to 7.2% in December of 2008. We all know that jobs are being lost by the hundreds of thousands across the nation. We also know that these statistics account only for those workers who file and are eligible to receive unemployment benefits. Which makes the real unemployment figures at least twice as high, now more than 15%. That’s definitely edging into ‘Depression’ territory, and there will be no let-up any time soon.

Whether or not you qualify for unemployment benefits – which aren’t enough to pay the mortgage for most people – if you are out of work you and your family probably qualify for food stamps, or what is now termed by USDA as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP]. The Social Security Online website also has good information about eligibility for food stamps, and we most certainly hope that readers of this weblog aren’t too proud to make good use of this program if they find themselves in need. You may hope that another good job will soon be offered, but don’t let your family go hungry in the meantime. DO something!

This blog has examined issues of health and nutrition in trying economic times in several post series. 3 Easy Ways to Eat Cheap outlines best strategies for stretching food dollars without sacrificing nutrition. What’s For Dinner? examines fast-rising food prices and ways to get around paying so much. There are some good resources linked in those posts and their follow-ups, but today I discovered a whole new resource that is dedicated specifically to getting the most from minimal food budgets and food stamp allotments.

The website is called Cook for Good and it breaks things down for all to understand. Food stamps in most instances offer a mere $1.50 or so for a single meal per person in a household. It is difficult to figure out how to feed a family on so little as the price of food goes up every single day at the supermarket, and most government subsidies won’t cover fresh foods, farmer’s market purchases, etc. In this website a host of questions and answers can be found on just how to stretch those fake food dollars to not only keep your family fed, but fed well and without the gross extra calories that have turned the “face of poverty” in this country from rail thin to seriously obese in a short 50 years.

Cook for Good even offers a month’s worth of menus to demonstrate exactly how to feed a family for an average of just $1.25 per meal. Including desserts far less fattening than Twinkies! Going with the “green” menu adds just 53¢ to the cost per meal, but includes fresh and organic foods. Between this example of a month’s worth of menus and the shopping hints, recipes and hints on the website, anyone recently out of work (thus with time to spend), on food stamps and concerned about health and nutrition can plan ahead and feel much better about the whole situation.

Who knows? Perhaps if enough people have to go through figuring out how to eat well on much less money, when the economic situation improves we’ll be generally slimmer, healthier and more involved in eating good food than we ever were before. That would be something very good to come of these trying economic times. So go on over to Cook for Good, check out the links here at Shoestring Budget, and if you know of more resources out there please offer them in the comments.

Eat well, be happy!

Links:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Food Stamp Facts
Cook for Good
Month of Menus
3 Easy Ways to Eat Cheap
What’s For Dinner?

More than 40 million Americans – including children – have no health insurance. As the economy continues to weaken and good jobs are outsourced to countries where universal care exempts businesses from having to carry the health care burden, millions more are being thrown into the ranks of the uninsured. Then there are those who have changed jobs, and encountered insurers who simply will not cover them due to pre-existing conditions. These days if you’ve ever had treatment for things like acne, high cholesterol or carpel tunnel you can find yourself on the growing list of the “Uninsurable.”

Now, if you don’t mind jumping serious hoops and get an early start in the fiscal year, states do have sliding scale plans and Medicaid allotments. If you are covered by one of these, you do NOT count among the officially uninsured. In my officially “economically depressed” region, approximately two thirds of the citizens qualify for food stamps and medical care, but there’s only enough money to cover less than half of them. The rest simply do without, at least until they simply can’t do without anymore. The cost of indigent care at our few public hospitals is yet another perpetually unpaid bill.

This blog offered many good tips and links to useful resources for the uninsured in a previous 3-part series Inexpensive Health Care Tips, Part 1, including in Part 2 some strategies for getting necessary prescription medicines, and in Part 3 how to negotiate access to primary and emergency care.

Now that approximately half of the citizens of the US are either uninsured or underinsured (have high deductible “junk insurance” or coverage that is routinely denied), we cannot expect that things will get any better any time soon, at least not so long as the inside-the-beltway crowd has unlimited free health care. The progressive political website Daily Kos is hosting a Thursday series by diarist ‘nightowl724′, part 1 of which is 10 Survival Topics for the Uninsured.

There are some good resources, advice and strategies presented (topics 1 – 6 of the promised 10). The project arose from the Daily Kos Health Care Google Group. The posting schedule for this month is worth noting:

August 14: Survival Tips for the Uninsured, Part 1
August 15: Uninsured and Lucky to be Alive Part 1
August 21: Survival Tips for the Uninsured, Part 2
August 22: Uninsured and Lucky to be Alive Part 2
August 28: Living with a Chronic Illness

Interested readers can subscribe to the series here.

Links:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips, Part 1
nightowl724′s page
Inexpensive Health Care Tips: Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2: Necessary Medicines
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3: Primary and Emergency Care
Basic Health Maintenance: Part 1
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism

Awhile back this blog featured a three-part series on Necessary Household Basics for keeping a clean house by concocting your own soaps, scouring powders, metal polishes, starches, fabric fresheners, bug repellants, etc. The list of ingredients were all common, inexpensive substances like salt, vinegar, borax, baking soda and corn starch. Saving serious money on soaps begins with saving the last of the bar soaps (and motel bar-lets) and turning them liquid by dissolving them in water.

Part 2 of that series offered some easy recipes for making the useful products. Like making an excellent metal polish by mixing vinegar and salt into a paste, or a fine scouring powder by mixing borax and soda. And of course, if you haven’t enough liquid soap to produce the laundry detergent or diswashing soap, you can always go ahead and purchase a jug of good ol’ Dr. Bronner’s organic liquid soap for making your mixtures. It’s not the cheapest of ingredients, but it’ll certainly go a long way! The money savings are significant all around.

I personally tested the recipes. I liquified my large collection of motel soaps that a friend who travels for a living gave me last Christmas (dozens of little bars) in a large Coleman cooler, because I didn’t feel like cleaning out one of the garden 5-gallon buckets at the time. Then mixed in the recommended amounts of borax and soda (purchased in the largest sizes available at the store, basic generic brands) and still haven’t put much of a dent in the resulting cooler full of laundry soap. Of which I use two kitchen soup-ladels per load, gets the clothes as clean or cleaner than any commercial laundry soap I’ve ever used, and produces clean clothes that smell almost as good coming out of the dryer as they’d smell coming in off an outdoor clothesline! I figure my batch will last 4 or 5 months at least.

Thus it was with some interest I read an article from ScienceDaily entitled Toxic Chemicals Found in Common Scented Laundry Products, Air Fresheners. Seems a University of Washington began a study due to reports from regular people that bathroom air fresheners and smells from laundry products that cling to their clothes were making them sick. The researcher found that all six top-selling products tested emitted at least one chemical regulated as toxic or hazardous under federal law. Not a single one of those toxic or hazardous chemicals was listed on the product labels. Whoa.

The chemicals identified included such nasties as acetone (if you can smell it, brain cells are dying), limonene, acetaldehyde, chloromethane and 1,4-dioxane. In all, researcher Anne Steinemann identified nearly a hundred volatile organic compounds emitted from the six products tested, and NONE were on the label. Five of the six emitted one or more “hazardous air pollutants” known to cause cancer, all considered by the EPA to have NO safe exposure level.

Yet another good reason to do it yourself and save a lot of money in the process. Dr. Bronner’s soaps (I love the peppermint particularly) do have scents, there from organically grown plant substances like… peppermint. Or lavender or lilac or… well, you get the picture. Borax and soda don’t release volatile organic compounds, they just clean and freshen clothes while getting out some persistent stains. Your health will certainly thank you for it – asthmatics reported adverse reactions to scenting chemicals at a rate of 20% – and health care isn’t cheap these days either.

Isn’t it nice that people doing things for themselves and saving money can also be living happier, healthier lives in the process?

Links:

Necessary Household Basics
Dr. Bronner’s
Toxic Chemicals Found in Common Scented Laundry Products, Air Fresheners

In response to increasing unaffordability of health insurance in America and justifying his repeated vetos of State Children’s Health Insurance Program [SCHIP] expansions, President George W. Bush declared during an appearance in Cleveland last July that:

“The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

As if that weren’t clueless enough, the New York Times reports today (April 23) that one of the nation’s largest health insurers, UnitedHealth, announced disappointing first-quarter earnings (profits), saying the weakening Economy Has Dented Its Prospects. In short, as premiums rise, employers are dropping insurance plans for their employees, more employees are opting out, and rising unemployment is reflected in increasing numbers of uninsured.

The for-profit industry has also shot itself in the foot by increasing premiums to protect its profits over the quickly rising cost of care, not covering people who may have health problems, and simply refusing to pay for health care for the insured. Medical bills now account for a full half of all bankruptcies in the US, and ER treatment is NOT “free.”

So in this installment in the series of inexpensive health care tips, let’s look at some resources out there for people who don’t have insurance, or have “junk insurance” that doesn’t actually cover anything, and those who simply cannot pay cash for doctor’s visits, eye care, dental care, hospitalization or any other aspect of health care in this country.

The readers of this blog have access to a computer (or they wouldn’t be reading). There are some searches you can do through Google or some other search engine to access information on free or sliding scale health care in your area. I did this for my state and locality, western North Carolina. Here are some of the results…

On a search for “free eye care NC” I found Unite for Sight’s Free Health Coverage Program Portal, with hot links to every state. It also links to many sites out there for free basic health care resources, SCHIP coverage programs for children, free eye care, veteran’s insurance by the states, Medicaid and Medicare, free prescription medications, and the states’ free health coverage programs generally. This is a valuable resource page which is featured weekly on CNN International.

In North Carolina, I was also returned a Blue Cross Blue Shield Association page listing a total of 69 free clinics across the state supported by the foundation. North Carolina has the nation’s largest association of free clinics, but it also has a high number (~1.3 million) of uninsured and working poor who don’t have access to insurance. The state Medicaid and Children’s Insurance programs are capped due to funding shortfalls, leaving thousands who qualify for the coverage out in the cold.

The clinics are often traveling, available only on certain days or months. But if you plan ahead and do your homework, this can be a good way to get basic primary care. The NC Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Medical Assistance administers our SCHIP program. The waiting list is long, usually ‘forever’ long in that emergency situations take precedence (as they should), but you never know. Keep applying, someday you might get your children in. The coverage is for all regular and emergency medical needs, and is supposed to be available on a sliding scale to 200% of poverty level income. At that level, it’ll only cost your family $567 per month per child! At poverty level, it’s just $50 a month for one child, $100 for two or more. Plus there are deductibles you must pay out of pocket. I know… not much of a deal, is it? I mean, if you had an extra $100 a month, you could probably just go to the doctor and pay cash.

A better bet when you need help and there are no free clinics available is your local Health Department. Most cities (or counties) offer immunizations and flu shots, cancer screening, child and adult primary care, dental care, and physical examinations for work and school requirements. This is government medicine at its bureaucratic worst, but it is honest-to-goodness medical care. It’s worth bookmarking your area’s health department site for when you may need it. If your family has some income, expect to pay on a sliding scale. So have your income and expenses list ready, along with pay stubs, utility bills, etc. Keep them in a folder or envelope to take with you whenever you access a free or sliding-scale provider.

All I can say is that until and unless America offers single-payer coverage to all citizens, there will be tens of millions of American citizens who have no health care. Estimates of up to 80,000 people die every year due to lack of medical care – don’t let that figure include you or your family. Be prepared to get what you need when you need it, and do NOT take ‘no’ for an answer.

In the most extreme – if you or someone in your family is in serious need and access is being denied, go ahead and bookmark your area’s free legal services association. When in real need, there’s no sense in standing on pride if that means you lose your life or your child’s life. Every other civilized country on the planet offers universal care to their citizens (and most also offer it to visitors). The only reason the US doesn’t have universal care is corporate greed.

I do not believe that some corporate greed-head’s golden parachute or multi-million dollar salary is worth even one person’s untimely death. More people in this country are victims of the “Death by Spreadsheet” industry than fall to terrorists or either of our current wars. This is simply unacceptable. Be a Boy Scout – Be Prepared.

Links:

Economy Has Dented UHC’s Prospects
Free Health Coverage Program Portal
Department of Health and Human Services
Discount Drug Company Assistance Programs

Previous Posts About Health and Health Care:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism
Basic Health Maintenance: Part I
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II

The New York Times reported on Monday, April 14 that Co-Payments Soar for Drugs With High Prices as the nation’s largest health insurers struggle to keep their profits high and their payments for health care low. The new pricing system forces patients taking name-brand medications to pay a percentage of the cost rather than a fixed co-payment of $10 to $30 a month for each medication they take.

The situation, and plans for a public demonstration in San Francisco during the AHIP annual meeting on June 19th are outlined in Insurers target the sickest: Say bye bye to $20 prescription co-pays.

This means that the burden of increasingly expensive health care now affects the insured, who may now have to pay thousands of dollars a month for medications in addition to their high monthly premiums and treatment co-pays and deductibles. America’s sickest citizens are once again being abandoned by a system that was originally designed to spread the costs of their care across a large pool that includes healthier people. Insurers say the new system will keep everyone’s premiums down, just at the time of year that Americans are discovering that they must pay double or more for the same health insurance they had last year. That’s not a very impressive system, considering that all other developed nations on the planet have universal health care.

Thus this installment of the series of inexpensive health care tips will offer some alternatives for obtaining drugs that may be beyond your ability to afford.

Because large public hospitals and smaller hospitals serving the public in smaller towns make up the backbone of the American health care delivery system are also being driven to bankruptcy by greedy insurers who increasingly refuse to pay for covered services [see Health Insurance Racket as Organized Crime and People of New York vs. Vampires], the gaps in our system are quickly widening and threatening to sink doctors, nurses, hospitals and clinics in the process.

The first place a strapped citizen should try to contact, even if s/he does not qualify for Medicaid or other subsidized health care plans is the Department of Health and Human Services in their area – the good ol’ Health Department (search for “health department” and your state or city). Most health departments offer both sick and well child services, just call ahead to find out what days they are available – you don’t want to be taking a well child in for immunizations or flu shots on sick child day, where they’ll be exposed to God knows what. Immunizations and flu shots are one of their specialties. The same services are available on certain days for adults, just make your inquiries ahead of time. If medications are prescribed, the patient is usually informed of generic alternatives, referred to pharmacies that partner with HHS for low cost, and some will give brochures for pharmaceutical company free drug programs if the medication is expensive or long-term.

Some localities also offer free or low cost clinics staffed by volunteer doctors and nurses a few days a week. Again, these physicians will usually know if there are generic drugs that can substitute for higher cost name brand drugs, and prescribe accordingly. Walmart offers $4 prescriptions on a general basis, and some states also have drug assistance programs. Often, just getting prescriptions filled at Walmart or another participating chain pharmacy is cheaper than using the deductible schedule, even for the insured or Medicare/Medicaid patients.

If you or someone in your family suffers from a condition for which the best drug treatments are solely brand name and very expensive (or you take a sufficient number of prescriptions to put a serious dent in your income), the big pharmaceutical companies offer free and low cost prescriptions directly via funded programs. If your doctor or health department doesn’t give you the information you need, you can search on the manufacturer’s name and go to their website. They usually have readily accessible links to their programs, or you can do an internal search. SelectCare Benefits Network has some programs and offers useful links for health care professionals as well as patients to get them started on finding free medicines and prescription assistance programs.

In the next installment in this series, we’ll take a look at ways to gain access to doctors, tests and (not prescription) treatments for conditions without going broke. Good luck to all out there as we weather the necessary growing pains that accompany our shift from private, for-profit health care to a modern system that offers health care to all citizens without fomenting class warfare. Keep your chin up, there ARE alternatives!

Links:

Discount Drug Company Assistance Programs
Department of Health and Human Services
Walmart $4 prescriptions
SelectCare Benefits Network

Previous Posts About Health and Health Care:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism
Basic Health Maintenance: Part I
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Shoestring Budget: Nutrition Posts

A few months after moving to our mountain retreat I got bit by a tiny deer tick while working to clear the neglected garden for planting. Soon I had fever and swollen glands, seriously painful joints and a nasty rash surrounding the bite site. After a few weeks of this we finally got a little ahead on basics, so I went to the local doctor. He has a little clinic next to the grocery store, comes to town twice a week.

First thing was to check in and lay $60 on the counter up front before the doctor would see me, given that I had no insurance. If I’d had insurance, it would have been $10. Then the assistant took my vitals and I was asked to wait in an overcrowded room with a lot of obese locals and their obese children. I guessed immediately that the primary cause of illness in this rural area had to do with America’s basic poor-person bad diet. But that wasn’t my problem…

$150 worth of in-office blood tests and a ‘scrip for a week’s worth of antibiotic later (plus the original $60 just to see him), I found out I’d contracted Lyme disease. He made another appointment for his next in-town day, said he’d give me another week’s worth of antibiotics every week until I was cured. Ha!

So I went home, opened up my handy-dandy Merck Manual, and looked up Lyme. Treatment was 3-6 months’ worth of constant antibiotics. Quickly adding up the doctor’s plan for $60 a week just to get the prescription for antibiotics I could barely afford told me I was much better off just getting the antibiotics and skipping Doctor McGreedy. Because we had quite a bit of experience dealing with our pets’ health issues, I knew I could purchase a full three-month’s supply of the very same antibiotic he prescribed from a veterinary supply firm, for less than the cost of just one more unnecessary visit to his sometime clinic. So I did.

Merck gave the dose too, and luckily the vet tablets were at the right dosage. I found that they dissolved too quickly and upset my stomach, so purchased some gelatin capsules to encase them. Sure, the medicine is generic, but it’s the very same antibiotic that humans use, in just the right dose, for not very much and without having to go to the doctor once a week to get the prescription. It worked just fine, so I’ll thank that doctor for the diagnosis and not for his greedy abuse of uninsured patients.

CNN has some good generic advice for people with high blood pressure who can’t afford the high costs of “New and Improved!” brand-name drugs. I predict we’ll see a lot more of this sort of advice as the recession deepens, so I’ll collect some of it here on this blog.

Stay tuned for further posts to the subject!

Useful Links:

HHS: Free and Low Cost Health Care Referrals
The Merck Manuals
Physicians’ Desk Reference: Prescription Drug Information
Ask The Nurse: Health & Medical Resources
MedHelp: All Ask Doctor Forums & Support Communities

Previous Posts About Health and Health Care

Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism
Basic Health Maintenance: Part I
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Shoestring Budget: Nutrition Posts

As the recession kicks in – and looks to be a long, deep one extending well beyond this fall’s elections and possibly through 2009 as well – the health and wellbeing of all our families are going to be something at the top of the list of “important” considerations. Worse, there are strong hints of a coming Worldwide Food Shortage caused by expanding droughts in grain growing regions as well as diversion of cropland and crops for the production of ethanol.

So in this post I want to talk about bread. That generally most ignored of foods in the modern world, turned into nutrient-sapping paper maché paste by giant food processing conglomerates. Yet bread is traditionally known as “The Staff of Life,” the most important staple food for human beings since ancient prehistory.

My father was a big fan of “meal bread,” what he called breads that form the belly-filling ‘meat’ of a day’s diet to supplement any vegetables or cheeses that are available. Breads that sop up the “pot likker” liquids left from boiling greens or stewing meats, breads that offer complementary proteins to spreads like nut butters or flavored oils and butters, breads a person can live on if need be while not causing drastic shortages of necessary nutrients.

These breads are quite different from your basic Wonder Bread loaves of bleached white bread with the consistency of thin mud pie. They often come with a variety of nuts or seeds, sprouted whole grains, grated cheeses, diced garlic and onions, even wildings such as acorn or bark flours. Bread can also be made with potatoes, beans, dried squash, corn or even fruits, enriched with sun-dried tomatoes and laced with herbs like rosemary and basil and oregano and mints. Made from any combination of wheat, rye, rice, soy, barley, amaranth or millet flours, preferably with grain-heart and bran included, meal bread is a solid, heavy loaf with a lot of body and plenty of personality.

We’ve examined some of the most immediate ways to save money, and one of the most important of those is learning how to cook meals from scratch. Not only does this save a lot on prepared and processed foods and eating out, it also allows people to get more involved with their food – which tends to translate directly into a healthier diet and fitter body. Bread is probably one of the best foods a person can commit to making for themselves and their family. One can go whole hog with the project or simply purchase one of those handy dandy bread machines that so many Yuppies swear by these days. But if you want to try your hand at real live meal breads, your best bet is to do it by hand. That way you can be creative day after day after day, and your family – including those kids who think the world revolves around Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs – will learn to love it.

To save the most money on the project while obtaining the most bulk for your buck, you can purchase whole grains by the pound at health food stores and organic co-ops. You’ll need to bring your own bags and have ample well-sealed containers at home to store them in. The best I’ve found are those plastic 5-gallon buckets with tight-fitting lids you can recycle from construction sites (they hold drywall mud) or perhaps get from your local deli – those big kosher pickles come in these buckets – or even from your local school cafeteria, as many bulk foods are packaged this way. Wash them thoroughly and sterilize them with boiling water, let them dry thoroughly and line with a white plastic garbage bag. Once your grains are in the bucket you can twist the bag over it (this helps defeat weevils, mice and other vermin) and then cover firmly with the lid. The grain will keep for more than a year this way. Do keep out a quart jar of whole grains (and mung beans/alfalfa seeds) if you can, as these can be sprouted in a day’s time to add green-growth vitamins to your breads.

If you purchase just a few pounds of different kinds of grains at a time, you can go ahead and grind it (I use a nifty countertop hand grinder from Poland) and store it in canister jars with screw-on lids in your freezer. Label the jars so you know what’s in them, most flours look pretty much alike when they’re ground! Or simply purchase bags of pre-groud flour (and artisan flours) at the grocery store and store them in the freezer.

After awhile you’ll develop some favorite combinations of flours you’ll want to use over and over again. In a 3-cup loaf recipe I like to include half a cup of bean flour (garbanzos and blacks grind up nice or can simply be added mashed), half a cup of serious whole grain (like acorn or cracked wheat) with fine-ground rye or soft wheat flour. Oat flour isn’t as good in “meal bread” as whole rolled oats, but that’s personal taste. You’ll also want to get supplies of flax seed, unsalted sunflower seeds and unbleached sesame seeds to include. If you like poppy seeds go for it, but be forewarned that they’ll make you flunk a drug test!

It takes 3-4 cups of flour to make a standard round bread or loaf. You can always double a recipe so you don’t have to bake so often, and for a little less than $100 you can get an efficient solar oven that will bake bread fine as long as the sun shines – thereby saving you money on that electric range oven!

Now I guess we should examine leavening. Some combinations of flours are quite short on developed gluten, which is the wheat protein that allows bread to rise and become fluffy when yeast is added. Some people are sensitive to gluten and/or yeast, so there are recipes for no-yeast breads out there that use baking powder instead of yeast. Sourdough is my favorite penny-pinching leavening, but it relies on natural yeasts. Anyone sensitive should avoid sourdough and just stick with non-yeast recipes.

I say sourdough is my favorite cheap leavening because once you start shopping for breadmaking supplies, you’ll find that yeast is an expensive item. And it takes at least one whole packet (or tablespoon equivalent from a jar of dried yeast) per loaf of bread. You’re not just keeping healthy with meal bread, you’re also trying to feed your family well on a shoestring budget! Sourdough is the best answer I’ve found.

I’ve heard tell of sourdough starters out in San Francisco that are more than a hundred years old! No, the sourdough itself isn’t that old, as it’s “fed” daily as it’s used to make bread, but that’s an impressive batch of leavening! Sourdough is basically just a fermented mix of flour and water. The yeasts that thrive naturally on the surface of grains, fruits, vegetables and in the air are what causes the fermentation, or you can take the shortcut like I did and start your starter with a packet of store-bought yeast. I use a starter that has a bit of added sugar (used a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses) and a bit of milk (for its lactic acid), but you can make a good starter with just flour and water.

My recipes usually call for 2 cups of liquid (starter or starter plus warm water) per loaf, which means that I have to feed the starter with that much more flour and water – and maybe a spoonful of sugar – every time I bake bread. Weekly I pour it out into a bowl and let it sit bubbling for an hour or two, while thoroughly washing the jar and letting it dry. Then I put it back into the jar and pop it into the fridge to use next time. It needs shaking or stirring regularly to mix the beer-like liquid with the settled flour, and I do let my dough sit out for a couple of hours to develop well before kneading and shaping the loaves.

Heavier breads take longer to rise than breads made with fine-ground unbleached wheat flour alone. The more additives (veggies, nuts, sprouts, seeds) in the loaf, the longer it’ll take to get a good rise. For some really rich meal breads I go ahead and put the dough in an oiled pyrex bowl with a tight lid in a slightly warmed oven and let it rise overnight. Sourdough doesn’t have to rise twice (though sometimes you’ll want to do that), and should be baked at a hot temperature. 450º for a basic semi-white light loaf, 425º for whole wheat and mixed grains, 400º for heavy loaves with seeds and veggies. Cook it covered if you can for the first half hour, then uncovered until the crust is brown and the loaf sounds hollow.

I’ve listed some great sites for information and recipes below, and hope my readers will take the time to check them out. I know it doesn’t sound all that important to talk about bread when there may be a major food shortage as well as economic depression in the next couple of years. But again, bread is the most important of the foods we need to keep us and our families alive in hard times. A basic plain loaf of sliced whole wheat sandwich bread is now $3.50 at my local grocery store – and while I don’t remember when bread was a nickel, I do remember when it was a quarter a loaf. Once you become adept at making your own breads, you’ll find that by buying ingredients in bulk you can have a fine heavy loaf of serious artisan bread for less than a dollar a loaf! It’s some work, but the kind of work that is most satisfying. If you plan well, you can bake up to 6 loaves over a single weekend, enough for the coming week and high in nutritional value. Bread can be frozen and re-heated before serving.

If you make 6 loaves of meal bread – very much gourmet specialty items, by the way, which cost 7-10 dollars a loaf locally – for about $6, that’s some serious food value! If you can get your children to love it, you’ll find that they can be very creative in their lunchtime trading with friends. My grandchildren always pack extra slices of bread and trade them for apples or carrots or cookies, or sometimes a fine mac and cheese. Kids are ever more environmentally and nutritionally aware these days, so encourage them! Let them help make bread with you on the weekend and they’ll be even more proud of their lunches!

Links:

Sourdough: History, Science, Recipes

NPR: More than a bread

No Yeast Bread

Hungry Monster: Types of Bread

Breaducation

Ancient Egypt: The Staff of Life

Food Reference: Bread

Science of Bread

Click through background sites for great recipes, and create your own!

In Part I of this series we looked at the actual current situation with health care in America, the impossibility of purchasing usable health insurance by increasing millions of citizens barely getting by, and what regular people can do to help themselves. Now that increasing inflation is fully evident – mostly due to $100+ a barrel oil – more and more people whose incomes are not increasing as fast as the costs of living will find themselves beneath the floor after “falling through the cracks.”

Thus it is increasingly important for people living on a shoestring budget to take care of themselves – to do what they can to prevent disease from striking, which translates directly into less need for expensive treatment after the disease has them in dire straits. And the best way to do this is to make the healthiest affordable choices for the food you and your family consumes on a daily basis.

If anyone reading has seen the documentary film Supersize Me they are already aware of the outrageous damage to one’s health that consuming a steady diet of good ol’ American Fast Food will do to even the young and healthy among us. The dangers of a high-fat, red meat, white bread and indestructable fries diet provide already rich doctors with a never ending stream of obese, seriously health-challenged patients. Direct contributions of such a diet to liver and kidney disease, diabetes, obesity (and all its accompanying problems), high cholesterol, high blood pressure and other general metabolic disorders should be telling us something about the connection between diet and health that too many in the modern world ignore.

Basically, if your diet can kill you, it can also enrich your life by maintaining your health – You Are What You Eat. One of the oldest, most welcome healthy diet staples is the humble garlic. Recent research has established some of the details about why garlic is so good for us, as reported in the New York Times Health Blog. Seems that eating garlic increases the body’s supply of hydrogen sulfide, which acts as a potent antioxidant and helps transmit cellular signals that relax blood vessels and increase blood flow.

Boosting the body’s production of hydrogen sulfide could explain why a diet rich in garlic appears to protect against such ailments as breast, colon and prostate cancer and heart disease. It may also help control cholesterol levels as well as boost the efficiency of other metabolic functions. Ancient Greek athletes would eat garlic before participating in Olympic games, and garlic was a staple for warriors preparing for battle.

What’s the optimum health maintenance dose? Well, in some parts of Italy where heart disease is rare, the per capita consumption of garlic is as high as 12 cloves a day. Yet even the consumption of 2-5 cloves a day has significant health benefits in easy reach of the average consumer. The trick is to learn how to use garlic whenever you prepare a meal. If your family is worried about “garlic breath” from such a steady intake, chewing on a sprig of parsley or some fennel seeds after dinner neutralizes that problem. Or your basic mint gum after dinner works as well.

Research hasn’t shown that taking garlic oil or powder as dietary supplements provides the same health benefits, and it isn’t very hard to become a garlic-lover. Below I list some of my favorite ways of getting ample garlic in our diet, I’m sure there are others that readers can provide. All garlic recipes welcome!

Some Ways to Serve Garlic

Roast cloves. This is an easy way to serve garlic as a snack or accompaniment to any meal or all by itself. Just break the cloves off a head of garlic and put into a little oven bowl or pan. Don’t peel those cloves, leave the skin on. Add enough extra virgin olive oil to thoroughly coat the cloves (stirred or rubbed) and bake at 350º for 10-15 minutes. Just let the cloves cool a bit (they’ll be slightly brown) and serve in a bowl from which your family or guests can serve themselves. The roasted cloves squeeze out easily from their skin wrappers and are delicious. I have friends who fully expect me to roast up at least 2 whole head’s worth of cloves whenever they visit, and they’re more popular as a snack item than peanuts or chips!

Roast whole heads. For this one you simply rub off the outer paper skin until the head’s cloves are revealed. Pull them slightly apart without separating them from the base connection, cover with olive oil and roast at 350º for 20-30 minutes or until slightly golden. Serve these whole on the side. Delicious!

Garlic hummus. Hummus is garbanzo bean mush with lemon juice, olive oil and spices added, that is best dipped or spread on whole wheat or multi-grain pita bread, melba toast or crackers. You can buy it already mixed (and add some extra garlic from roast cloves squeezed and mixed in) or purchase hummus powder that is easily prepared any way you like it. We like it strongly garlic flavored and I also add dried chili peppers (high vitamin C and A content).

I also add a couple of cloves of chopped garlic to soups, stews, homemade veggie-burgers and chili. Garlic bread is always a treat, and for this I add large chunks of chopped cloves to my sourdough bread and bake it right in. Wonderful with beer-cheese dip or hummus!

Let’s hear some favorites from the readership!

Links:

Unlocking the Benefits of Garlic

All About Garlic

Botanical.com: Garlic

The World’s Healthiest Foods: Garlic