Homemade crackers from your stored food? and I didn't really jack-knife the truck and trailer, did I???

Kris over at http://krissimplyliving.blogspot.com wrote about making homemade crackers.  I think that's a great idea.  I do have store bought large boxes of crackers in our home storage but they do get stale and not great tasting after about a year or two.  Then they become very expensive chicken food if we don't finish them and rotate new boxes in.  I've made home made crackers before but the two recipes she linked to look really good.  One is for Wheat Thins, the other Cheez-its.  http://www.twopeasandtheirpod.com/homemade-wheat-thins/ and
http://www.happysimpleliving.com/2011/05/13/make-your-own-amazing-homemade-cheese-crackers/. 

I was looking at the ingredients and wondered if we'd be able to make these crackers if TSHTF and we had to only use our home storage and what came from the garden.  Let's take the Cheez-its first.  Grated cheddar cheese, unsalted butter, shortening, salt, flour, water.  I have freeze dried grated cheddar and also canned cheddar, butter flavored shortening (I wonder if that would work) otherwise hopefully I'll have goats by that time for real butter, regular shortening, salt, flour - I have white flour and lots of wheat for whole wheat.  I wonder if this would taste good with whole wheat?  And all shortening rather than a mixture of butter and shortening?  Would I want to use my cheddar cheese for making crackers?  Probably because you need good treats every once in a while.

How about Wheat Thins?  Whole wheat flour, sugar, salt, paprika, unsalted butter, water, vanilla.  Again I'd have everything on hand except the butter.  And, the whole wheat can be made on the spot by grinding some of my stored wheat.

One of our family favorites for crackers is a Whole Wheat-Peanut Butter cracker.  Since we are able to grow peanuts, not only do I have many jars of peanut butter in our home store I can grow more to replace what we have if I can't resupply from the store.  The ingredients are 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 cup peanut butter (either creamy or chunky), 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup warm water, 2 cups whole wheat flour.  Mix it up, roll it out, score but don't cut thoroughly through until finished baking and cooled, bake on ungreased baking sheet for 7 minutes at 350 then flip and bake for another 5 minutes.  These are simple ingredients that can be made from your home storage.  If you don't want to use peanuts you can use almonds or any other kind of nut butter you want.  I wonder how sunflower seed butter would be in this recipe? 

The basic, basic, basic cracker recipe is so simple and you'd better have the ingredients in your home storage!  2 cups flour (whole wheat, white, or unbleached), 1 1/2 cups water, a little salt if you want.  Kneed the dough until it is firm.  Take a handful and roll it out.  Prick on one side with a fork.  Sprinkle with salt if you want.  Place it on the baking sheet and bake at 500 for 10-15 minutes (just watch it).   

Crackers are a good snack or as part of a meal.  In fact, tonight for dinner we had artichokes from the garden, new potato/broccoli/onion cream soup from powdered milk and garden vegetables, and home made basic plain crackers.

It's a good thing dinner was good because after dinner was disastrous!  I hadn't been able to put the trailer away because Grandson's truck that he's rebuilding was in the way.  He came over today and moved it but apparently not far enough out of my way.  It came time for me to pull the trailer onto the other side of the house and I had a very small area to pull into then try to get the trailer backed up into it's "stall".  The reason the turn around/back up area is small is that if I mess up I run over the well and pressure tank.  That would be bad!  So as I was trying to pull the truck up then back it and turn it and pull it up and back it and turn it, somehow I got it so close to the garden fence that I could no longer pull forward or back up.  I was jack-knifed.  

This is not a good way to end the day.  I unhooked the trailer from my truck so I could at least get the truck away from the fence without scratching it all up.  As I was taking the trailer off the hitch I was thinking to myself this is probably not a good idea.  How will I ever get it back on the hitch?  Then it hit me.  You have a tractor.  Use the bucket to lift the tongue of the trailer and back it up.  I did.  It worked.  Then the tongue fell off the bucket and the whole front end of the trailer came crashing to the ground and dug the tongue into the mud.  The back end of the trailer was way up in the air.  This is not good.  It's a good thing it's getting dark so there are no witnesses to this little fiasco.  I then used the bucket on the tractor to dig out the trailer tongue.  I was able to lift the bucket up enough to shove two boards under the post.  It's now up and in position for my pickup to hook back onto the trailer and back it to where it needs to be.  Tomorrow, when I'm not feeling so incompetent.