Food storage
Apr 15th, 2008 by Bethany
There have been multiple times since I’ve been married when we’ve had to primarily live off of our stored food supply. As a wedding present, someone (I’m sorry to say I don’t remember who) gave us the awesome gift of one month’s basic food storage. Included were things like cans of wheat, rice, macaroni noodles, bottles of cooking oil, and salt. It’s way up there on my list of favorite things we got for our wedding, even though it was consumed fairly quickly (and we got some amazing gifts!). So, thank you to the person who got us food for our wedding present and anyone who is trying to think of a great gift to give to a newlywed young couple, there you go.
Speaking from some experience with cooking only with stored food, it’s important to store some food and learn how to cook with it. Even if you only eat out every day and every meal and have a tiny apartment, it’s worth having some backup food just in case you have a natural disaster or unemployment hit your family longer or harder than you expect. Even when we’re running low on money, I’ve tried to keep a well-stocked pantry with canned fruits, veggies (tomato products are a staple in our house), beans (I try to store a lot of beans since they’re high protein, low carb, and high fiber and our resident diabetic shouldn’t do too much in the way of carbs), and packages of pasta, dry beans, rice, flour, sugar, some dry milk powder, spices, baking powder, baking soda, and yeast. Some weeks are a lot better than others in our pantry, but I do make some effort.
When we’ve run out of money and had to live on our food storage for a while, the things I miss most are milk, cheese, and eggs. Powdered milk isn’t as yummy as fresh when you drink it or put it in cereal, though it’s hard to tell the difference when you mix them 1/2 and 1/2, but it’s great in anything cooked. I’ve never tried to store more than a week or two worth of cheese or eggs, but I recently found out you can buy them dehydrated and would like to get some one of these days. We also missed fresh fruit and veggies, but it helped that we had a lot of canned ones (and things like jello). Storing things like cake mixes, instant pudding, and other sweets and “comfort foods” helped too, since we only have to survive on food storage when we’re stressed out and having favorite foods around helps make things seem a little less unbearable.
I don’t have a wheat grinder (one of those “someday” items that I’d love to buy myself), but I saw my mom make pancakes with whole wheat kernels in the blender once. I found a recipe for banana bread today that called for whole wheat flour and I thought “I wonder if I could just blend up some of my wheat in that can in the closet and use that in the recipe?” I didn’t ever get around to trying it, but while I was trying to look it up, I came across a really neat site called Walton Feed where they sell dehydrated foods and have lots of ideas on how compile a food storage and then use it on a regular basis. They even have a pita recipe that sounds promising. Another post on pita coming soon…