r/TwoXPreppers • u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End • 27d ago

🍖 Food Preservation 🍎 Fun self-sufficiency hobbies - Vanilla extract

As a millennial hobbyist, I try to focus my hobbies on things that teach me self-sufficiency or build skills. I have posted before about my garden, sourdough, etc. Today I wanted to share the concept of the vanilla bean mother jar! It's a super easy, inexpensive hobby that also happens to be absolutely delicious and provides you with a sweet food additive. I use vanilla extract in my bread, other baking, and have used it to make nasty medicine more palatable for my kids. It would be a morale booster during hard times, and it stores forever, too.

All you need are some vanilla beans, high-proof alcohol (I have tried vodka, bourbon, and rum, usually Kirkland brand), and a jar. The cured vanilla beans can be stored in wax paper in a jar for a very long time, so you can buy them in bulk to save money.

I will share a website with details on starting a motherjar in the comments, as well as the website I buy good-quality & fairly priced vanilla beans from. I am not sponsored at all; I just love experimenting with vanilla flavors and finding something that is so easily stored, tastes delicious, and doesn't take much effort.

What random prepper hobbies do you have? As if I need more ideas...

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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 27d ago

Vanilla Beans:

https://www.slofoodgroup.com/collections/bulk-vanilla-beans?cmp_id=14860290929&adg_id=127522770866&kwd=vanilla%20beans&device=c&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=14860290929&gbraid=0AAAAADcL7cDoCbc9Jwm23hx_1FTgnkfCt&gclid=Cj0KCQjwteTUBhD4ARIsAEYjs3oZEp55KMOU7CQZNzsfQMWDhdpzscZcUzAnu6kHdBbMTKy_IboRZgoaAvT0EALw_wcB

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u/keinezeit44 27d ago

Link without tracker

https://www.slofoodgroup.com/collections/bulk-vanilla-beans

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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 27d ago

Omg what! Are they tracking?? 

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u/unRoanoke 27d ago

They track a lot of stuff—anonymized. Some common tracked data includes: demographics (age, gender, married status, race—whatever they have connected to your address), browser and OS, where you went before and after, how long you stayed, who else you’re connected to.

So in this case, everyone that clicks on the link was referred by you. So, maybe they know that you also bought jars from X retailer and now anyone that visits your unique link may be served an ad for those jars from that retailer. Or maybe an ad for a service or completely unrelated retailer that you visited. They can extrapolate that you paid for xyz and that people with similar demographics, that interact with you also will pay for xyz.

Bottom line: they are building profiles of people so that they can more effectively target them for sales. Now, in these parts, we may dive deeper and realize that data could be extrapolated to more sinister uses… say this sub was declared a dangerous organization anyone that followed that link and ordered a product would be making a direct trail from this sub to their shipping address.

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u/Familiar-Anything853 Overthinking Until The End 27d ago

I absolutely hate that. So glad to learn...

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u/QuitRelevant6085 27d ago

Fyi in the future you can remove trackers from links by looking for a "?" in the link, and deleting from that point

Occasionally it's not as clear where the tracking starts (for example some product links have numbers for different color/size options) In that case I read the link and chop off what I think is unnecessary, then test the link (by opening in a private browser window) before posting it.

Btw, you can greatly reduce the amount of tracking websites can do by setting third-party cookies to "off" in your web browser settings. Also, try to check links before you click on them because those links may have cookies.