Food Storage: Week 1

It’s time for our Food Storage journey!! I got this information years ago from the blog Totally Ready.

Where to begin Food Storage: Lesson 1
Ask yourself:
a. What food do I have access to for free or nearly free? Is there a farm or neighbor where you can glean? Do you or a family member have fruit trees?

b. Are the fruits and vegetables available to you good candidates for preserving, canning, or drying?

c. Do you have the room to plant a garden and harvest your own food?

d.Do you have friends you can share a garden with? Perhaps you will grow the tomatoes and they will plant and harvest the green beans. Now you are learning skills of provident living; caring for your needs while helping others strengthens both giver and receiver.

e. What is your current food budget?

f. What is your current entertainment budget?

With those questions answered, and the answers written down, you are ready to begin.

First Step, you must decide how long a period of time you will be storing for. Are you going to begin with one week and work up or are you going to work toward a month or three months of a complete supply and then move on to more? This will be a critical decision as we move forward next week so give it some thought. I like to start with one month and then increase but if you can afford to invest a little more money or if you are very anxious and feel you need to get it done
now I would recommend going right to the three month goal, three months of the foods you normally eat.

Second Step, YOU must decide what to store. No one should ever tell you what to store. This is a decision only you can make as you evaluate your family’s likes and dislikes, assess allergies and other medical questions and understand your storage challenges. To determine what you will store on the shelves of your General Store begin by making a list of your 10 favorite meals. Get all the family involved and ask their preferences also. Be sure to include menu items for breakfasts, lunches and dinners. I can hear you all saying "but you said don’t plan a few meals and purchase the ingredients”. Right! You were listening. Once you have the list gather your recipes and sit down with a binder and some paper. You will now begin building your own family food storage reference binder. First, add the pages containing the answers to the questions at the
beginning of this post. Next, take your paper and beginning with the first recipe. List all the ingredients down the left hand side of the page. Move on to the second recipe and do the same. When you have an ingredient that is a duplicate make a check next to the item. Do not forget to record the spices. When all the recipes have been recorded count the checks next to each
ingredient. You will now understand which ingredients your family enjoys the most. For
example: Your family has listed chicken and rice, chicken pot pie, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, spaghetti, chicken stir fry with peanut sauce, tacos, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, mac and cheese , and chicken noodle soup. You now know your menus include chicken 4 times, beef twice and peanut butter twice. As you work on the protein section of your General Store you now know you will want to store more chicken than beef. You can also see that you will need more pasta than rice when you stock grains. Remember we will be storing portion sizes from each food group when determining how much to store. Of course, this is not an exact science but it will give you a guide to follow as you stock up. Notice there was no tuna on the list. If your family likes tuna you will want some for lunches but not as much as peanut butter since that did make the list. The more your family enjoys an ingredient the more often you will be able to serve it without protests from your crew. Since your menus may not include fruits and veggies be sure to ask the family to list their three favorites. This will again be the basis for deciding what
percentage of your General Store shelves are stocked with peaches and what percentage are pears. Notice I did not tell you to purchase those ingredients. This is just meant as a
guide. As you shop and add ingredients your family loves you will be able to create many, many more meals than your original 10. You can be assured your family will eat them because you now understand they like each individual item in the dish and thus, will give the meal a try and they will like it. There will be some items on your ingredient list that are not used up in a recipe,
catchup for example. All these take your meals from ordinary to extraordinary.
I suggest you plan to store three months of these since often three months is only one or two bottles. How do you know how much to purchase of these? That is part of your homework assignment.

Homework assignments
1 Make a list of the meals you enjoy and your ingredient list.

2. Date the items you do not finish when you use them one time. Again, this would
include mayo, salad dressings, oil, pickles, dried onions, and all those
miscellaneous bottles on the door of the fridge. Take a permanent marker and
draw a line at the level of the contents. At the end of a month you will check to
see how much you have used. If you open a new one calculate how long it took
you to finish the first. If it takes two weeks to use a bottle of salad
dressing you know you need 6 bottles for a three month supply. That would be
plenty for my family for a year but your family may eat more salads and use
more. This is why no one should tell you how much to store. They should teach
you how to calculate the needs of your family so you can store according to
your needs, not some chart.

3. Keep track of every penny you spend this week. Every family member should have
a small notebook or record in another way, everything they spend. This will
help you to determine what you can cut out to free up the funds to stock your
General Store.

That’s it! Next week you will be ready to start purchasing food. Once we have finished
food we will move on to non food items such as hygiene products, cleaning supplies and medications.
As you get started please ask for help. We were all beginners at one point and
there are no stupid questions.