Month Three Food Storage

Some of my plunder

Sam's Club is a very dangerous place for me. I walk in with a sensible list and one grocery cart and I manage to come out with two carts filled to the brim. I'm sure I could get things cheaper if I lived somewhere with more than one small town grocery store. I'm working on couponing, but I am still a rank novice. So a big monthly trip to the "big city" it is for many of my food storage needs.

My food storage area

Here's what my main food storage area looks like now. The top rack has my canning supplies. I've used up quite a bit of vinegar by canning pickles and I need to restock that. One day soon I'm going to do a post on the virtues of storing vinegar.

The next rack down is canned fruits and vegetables. I tried to pick ones I thought my family would eat.

The middle rack has my home-canned pickles and green beans as well as kidney beans, Spaghettios, soup and chili. I have never bought Spaghettios or canned chili before. You're supposed to "Store what you eat and eat what you store", but that is a challenge when you don't normally eat many canned foods. I'll figure out something to do with them.

We've been rotating through the next rack down pretty quickly. I have 20 lb of peanut butter now so I think we're done with that for the time being. At least that's one item I can check off my list!

I have pasta, boxed mixes and the large box of quick oats in plastic storage bins on the bottom. When you live in the middle of a cow pasture, you can't help but get mice running through your house from time to time. We manage to catch them quickly but I'm trying to make things as difficult for them as possible by storing them in the bins.  The goal is to rotate through these items before they have a chance to deteriorate in nutrition or taste.  

Chicken-n-fats. I'm woefully low on fats besides peanut butter

I have a few cans of chicken now. I've never used canned chicken before so this will be another new adventure for us. One of these days I'll try canning my own meats and see how that compares.

Here's what I bought for food storage this month:

• 6 lb macaroni
• 6 lb spaghetti
• 12 cans of chili with beans
• 5 cans of chicken
• 4 lb of yeast (I've frozen this and it will last indefinitely in the freezer)
• 16 cans of Spaghettios
• 12 boxes of macaroni and cheese
• 3.75 lb of baking powder
• 9 lb of quick oats
• 2-2.5 lb jars of peanut butter
• 8 cans of corn
• 8 cans of peaches
• 12 cans of green beans (Next year I hope we will be able to can enough green beans to be self-sufficient.)
• 5 cans of kidney beans
• 36 applesauce cups

Not to mention the 4-6 gallon buckets and 4-#10 cans of wheat that are on their way.

Our homeschooling year began this week and during The Thinker's history lesson, we read the following quote from Lao Tzu:

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

It feels like I've spent a lot of money and have very little to show for it, but I am at least three steps closer to my goal of 1 year's worth of food storage.

What steps have you taken this month to insure that your family will have food in a crisis?