My kid just started their first job. Same restaurant I worked at when I was seventeen, a small town diner in Texas with a bell over the door and a jukebox that only ever played country. Watching them tie on that apron sent me straight back twenty years.
I spent almost ten years in that kitchen before I moved into other work, and most of what I picked up never made it into any prepper article I’ve read. Not the obvious stuff about rotating stock or prepping ingredients ahead of a rush. The weirder stuff. The things you only learn because a grease fire almost took out the line, or because the walk-in fridge died on a Saturday night and somebody had to figure out fast what to do with four hundred pounds of food that couldn’t sit out.
How S*** Saved My Life
It was a Friday, two weeks into the job, and I had the flat top loaded with chicken fried steaks. Off to the side sat a shallow pan of oil I’d left over a burner and forgotten about while I was plating. It started smoking. I remember thinking I should move it, and then a flame came straight up out of the middle of it, about a foot high.
The dish sink was three steps behind me with a sprayer hose hanging over it. I had my hand on that hose when Ramon caught my arm. He’d been cooking on that line since before I was born and I never once heard him raise his voice.
Then he took a sheet pan off the rack and laid it flat over the burning pan, which killed the flame inside it. He reached over my head for the salt tub and poured it out along the line until there was nothing left to burn. The whole thing took maybe ten seconds.
He explained it later, out back on a smoke break. He’d watched a kid do the water thing at a place he worked in the eighties. The way he told it, the fire came up off the pan and went into the vent hood and they lost the rest of the night.
Salt works because it sits on the burning surface and keeps oxygen off it without pushing any oil around. Baking soda does the same job and gives off carbon dioxide as it heats.
Salt earns its place in your stockpile twice over. It seasons and preserves food, and it can smother a grease fire before the flames reach your cabinets. History backs it up on the value side too – salt held real trading power in times when paper money stopped meaning much, and it will again after SHTF.
That makes it one of the more useful items you can keep on hand, and it’s only the first of the 17 things you should be stockpiling for survival (wait until you see #3).
A Sink of Water Could Be Better than a Vacuum Sealer
Our vacuum sealer died sometime around my third year and never got replaced, because Darlene, who owned the place, had a rule about spending money on machines that did jobs hands could do. Wade ran prep in the mornings and he was the one who showed me the workaround. He filled a bus tub with water, put marinade and fajita meat into a zip top bag, sealed it almost all the way across.
➡️ This Is Better Than a Vacuum Sealer⬅️
The water pressure pushed the air up and out through the gap he’d left at the corner. Once the bag was down to nothing but liquid and meat, he zipped that last inch shut right at the waterline and pulled it out. It looked shrink wrapped.
I’ve used that trick at home more times than any gadget I own. It works for portioning out dry goods, and it keeps freezer burn off anything you’re putting away long term. All it costs is a bag and a few inches of water, and it gets you most of the way to what a machine does.
Darlene Nearly Fired a Dishwasher For Throwing Out a Can Of Grease
We kept coffee cans by the stove, and every bit of fat that came off bacon or a beef trim got strained into them. A new dishwasher poured a full one down the drain on his second day, and I watched Darlene take him out back and explain at length what he had just wasted.
She grew up on a place outside town where nothing went in the trash. Her father kept rendered fat for the oil lamp he lit when the power went out in an ice storm, and Darlene still cooked with it every day. Fat burns clean and slow in a simple lamp with a twisted cotton wick.
Rubbed into boots and left in the sun to soak in, it keeps leather from cracking and helps it shed water. Rendered clean and mixed with a little beeswax, it makes a plain salve that works fine on hands that have split open from cold.
A jar of fat in your pantry is cooking fat and lamp fuel at the same time, and it comes out of trimmings that usually get thrown away. Once you start saving it, you stop looking at a package of bacon the same way.
Miss Ada Put Bay Leaves in Every Bin and in Our Morning Tea
Miss Ada came in on weekends to make biscuits, and she ran the dry storage room like it belonged to her. Early on we found weevils in a bag of cornmeal that had been sitting too long, and after that she went through every container on those shelves with a box of bay leaves, tucking two or three into the flour and pushing a couple down the side of each rice bin.
She also made a big pot of bay leaf tea every morning and left it out for whoever was working. Tasting is most of the job in a kitchen like that, and by mid-morning you’ve put a spoonful of a dozen different things in your stomach that were never meant to go together. You end up feeling heavy and puffed up, and it slows you down. Her tea took care of it. We’d all start the day with a cup and get on with the shift.
After I left that kitchen I kept making it at home, but mine never worked the way hers did. She called it bay leaf water, never tea, and she’d tell me there was a little secret in it she wasn’t ready to hand over. If I wanted the real thing, I’d have to come see her about it.
She did tell me in the end, and I found that amazing recipe in one of the best-selling holistic books around. ➡️ You can find the bay leaf water recipe here.
The Night I Was Told to Stick My Bleeding Thumb in a Bowl of Flour
I cut my thumb open on a can lid during prep, and before I got near the first aid box, Darlene had dumped a handful of flour in a bowl and pushed my hand into it. The bleeding stopped in two minutes, and I told that story for years as proof the old tricks beat anything you buy in a box.
She wasn’t wrong about the mechanism. Dry powder pulls plasma out of the blood and clumps into a paste the platelets can build a clot against, which is close to how hemostatic gauze works with kaolin clay. What I always left out is that she also wrapped the thumb tight and made me hold it above my heart for ten minutes. The flour got credit for the pressure.
But before using this method, you need to know that flour brings its own problem. It’s milled from field wheat and never treated for pathogens, which is why the CDC keeps telling people to quit tasting raw cookie dough. Baking kills what’s in there; packing it into an open cut does the opposite, and the dough plug you pick out later reopens the wound.
So, the flour trick is worth knowing when SHTF. But not while you still have a clean cloth and a drawer you could have put gauze in. Without a doctor, there’s a high risk of infection.
Ramon Threw Out a Jar of Garlic That Looked Perfectly Fine
Travis spent a whole Tuesday peeling garlic and covering it in good olive oil, then set the jar on the dry shelf and wrote CONFIT on the lid in marker. Ramon told him it belonged in the cooler. Travis said confit keeps for months, he’d read about it, and left it right where it was. It sat there through the weekend looking beautiful. Friday afternoon Ramon walked past, picked it up without breaking stride, and poured the whole thing down the drain. Travis said that was four hours of his life. Ramon said, “You want a name for it? Call it lawsuit.”
Garlic sitting in oil at room temperature is one of the few things in a kitchen that will actually put somebody in the ground. Botulism doesn’t smell, doesn’t taste like anything, and doesn’t cloud the jar. Nothing looks wrong right up until somebody can’t swallow. Same risk sits in every low-acid batch coming out of a home canner, which is most of what preppers put up.
Curious how to keep fresh garlic for 25 years?
➡️Click here to find out!
Darlene Made Her Own Degreaser out of Vinegar and Lemon Peels
There was always a jar going on the shelf above the sink with citrus peels sitting in white vinegar. Darlene started it to cut down what she spent restocking chemical cleaner, and it stayed because it worked as well as the bottled stuff. Peels soak for two or three weeks, then you strain the vinegar off and cut it with about an equal amount of water in a spray bottle.
The vinegar does the work on grease and hard water buildup, and the oils that come out of the peels help it cling to a surface while covering most of the vinegar smell. It won’t sanitize the way a bleach solution does, so it isn’t a substitute for that. For everyday grime on a stovetop or a counter, it holds up against nearly anything you’d buy.
The part that matters for a pantry is that you can keep making it. Commercial cleaner takes up shelf space and eventually runs out, while vinegar keeps indefinitely and citrus peels are something you were already throwing away.
What My Kid Doesn’t Know Yet About the Job They Just Started
Their first shift ended around ten that night. They came out smelling like fry oil and dish soap and complained about his feet the entire drive home, and I remembered that feeling exactly.
What I couldn’t have told him, and what nobody standing at that counter would have guessed, is how much of what he’s about to learn from people like Ramon and Miss Ada is going to matter twenty years from now, in situations that have nothing to do with a restaurant.
And because I’m proud of my kid, I wanted him walking in already knowing a few things instead of learning them the hard way – how to deal with a burn, what to do about a cut that won’t quit or how to get himself out of a zip tie (this is an interesting one).
Of course, I can teach him at home and we will, but I wanted him picking it up in a way that didn’t feel like a lecture from his father. So I got him Claude Davis’s new book, The Lost Skills of Independence. The pictures are really good, it’s easy to read and follow instructions. It also comes with extra material he can actually work through.
He loved it. He tried the burger in a jar, and for a sixteen-year-old, it wasn’t bad. I told him to take the dark psychology part carefully, but to keep whatever’s useful for him once he’s out in the world.
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