August 2011 in Review and September Preps

I'm a bit late with my monthly summary, but here it is. To cap off a very interesting August, both of our water heaters died last weekend. It took five days for the parts to come in and for the water heaters to get fixed. No hot water when you have four young children home making messes all day in the middle of canning season? Life gets complicated and everything takes about twice as long to get done. It's going to take a few days to unearth my house from under the debris of dirty dishes, kids, and laundry.  I'm hoping September will be a better month.

August Garden:

Here's the bad news: the germination rate hasn't been great for our fall plantings.

Cauliflower hanging in there

We have a few tiny cauliflower and broccoli plants.

The Box of Death

This is the box we have christened "The Box of Death". All the strawberries we planted last spring died and now only one cabbage seedling remains. Lots of seedlings sprouted, but they mysteriously died. What gives?

Brandywine tomato plant gone wild

Our tomatoes are in a holding pattern. The insanely hot weather of July and early August caused the plants to drop flowers rather than produce fruit. Now the weather is better and flowers are setting, but we have to wait until the fruit is produced and ripe.

But there's good news.

The pumpkins are looking great. It won't be long before they're ready to pick. Our cucumbers and cantaloupe are consistently producing, too.

I'm harvesting and drying tons of cayenne peppers.

Green beans in September?

And, miracle of miracles, we have fresh green beans! Lots of them! Hubby Dear picked nearly two pounds just yesterday.

I reported last month that the green beans died, right? Well, in two of the boxes, the green beans bounced back and began producing with the mild weather we've been having.  How strange is that? It's fun to have some garden serendipity instead of garden catastrophe.


August Preps:

• In addition to the odds and ends I picked up at Cabela's, I bought some more items for our long term food storage: local honey, oil, mayonnaise, molasses and evaporated milk. I broke down and shelled out the mega bucks for a case of dry milk. We are getting so close to having a full year's supply of food. Exciting!
• I also added to our three-month supply: dry carrots, dry fruit, cornstarch, granola bars and cereal. My family is a crazy bunch of cold cereal addicts, so we have to build a big stockpile of it. Cereal is getting more and more expensive (like everything else these days) so it's a challenge to find bargains. 
• Speaking of stockpiles, my budding toiletry stockpile was getting out of control. I had been just pitching items in the cabinets in our master bathroom and it was pretty chaotic. To solve this problem, I bought five storage bins and divided the stockpile into five categories: oral care, body wash & soap, skin care, deodorant, and hair care. The bins should hold about a year's supply of these toiletries for my family and items are much easier to find now.  

The beginnings of my hair and skin care stockpile

• I added these two books to my library:  Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition and The Organic Fruit Gardener. 
• I've canned a bit of salsa, spaghetti sauce, pickled peppers, and cucumbers. I have two dynamite recipes to share with you soon. 

What's coming up this September? 

• I'm so excited! Global Sun Oven is lending me a Sun Oven to take for a test drive.  I can't wait to put it through its paces. Will it really work? Is it worth the hype? Is it better for baking cookies than my mini-van? You'll be along every step of the way.
• Of course I'll continue building our food storage. I plan to dehydrate a bunch of herbs and freeze pesto. Apple season is upon us so I'll begin canning applesauce, apple butter, and try my hand at dehydrating apples, as well. 
• The advent of cooler weather reminds me that we need to get a back-up form of heat for our house. We plan to get a wood stove at some point, but for now, a propane heater will have to do. 
•  I'm cutting back a bit on my prepping budget this month to start saving for my chicken coop. Hubby Dear and I are going to begin building the chicken moat this month. Since the two of us are ridiculously un-handy, that should be fun times indeed. Thankfully our marriage is strong enough to survive the trials and tribulations that are sure to unfold. ;) 

What did you do to prep or in the garden during the month of August? What do you have planned for September? 

Staying Sweet: Sugar as part of your Food Storage Plan

Sugar is one of the "no-nos" of the typical American diet. If refined sugar is supposed to be so bad for you and have very little nutritional value, why should you have sugar as part of your food storage?

Lots of reasons!

First, you need at least a bit of sugar for most types of baking and many items that you can (jams, jellies, pickles, etc.). If you are cooking exclusively from food storage, you need to have all of the basic building blocks available to you. Like it or not, sugar is part of that.

Not only is sugar an essential in many made-from-scratch items, but sugar is also something that is difficult to make on your own. Unless you have a bee hive or sugar cane field and processing equipment, you need to store it. If you look back to the time of the pioneers, they treasured sugar because it wasn't always readily available. Store it today, because tomorrow it might be unavailable or ridiculously expensive.

Speaking of ridiculously expensive, we all know that food storage is a way to fight inflation. Stored properly, white sugar and honey will last practically forever. If you buy sugar at today's prices, you are guaranteed to save money since food prices are continuing to rise. 

Lastly, sugar can be a useful addition to your first aid kit. Really! Check this out regarding the uses of white sugar and this link about honey. Some people report success in treating their allergies by ingesting locally-produced honey. Hubby Dear encourages his patients to use honey instead of cough syrups and cough suppressants, though it is important to remember to never give honey to babies under the age of one.

Now that I've sold you on storing sugar, what should you be storing and in what quantities? If you look at the LDS Food Storage Calculator, you'll notice that it suggests that you store a wide variety of sugars.

For a year's worth of food storage, you need:

3 lb honey per adult, 1 lb per child*
40 lb white sugar per adult, 20 lb per child
3 lb brown sugar per adult, 1 lb per child
1 lb molasses per adult or child
3 lb corn syrup per adult, 1 lb per child
3 lb jams per adult, 1 lb per child
6 lb powdered drink mix per adult, 3 lb per child
1 lb flavored gelatin per adult or child

*A child is defined as age 6 and younger in this calculator

The addition of Jello and corn syrup to this list perplexed me at first. The Jello began to make a bit more sense after I read somewhere that Utah is the number one consumer of Jello and it is even the official state snack. The food storage guidelines were drawn not only for cataclysmic emergencies but also for everyday eating. If Jello or corn syrup is part of your regular diet, by all means store it.

I decided to use the LDS quantities as a guide for how much to store total, but to personalize it for our family.

• We do not eat Jello or corn syrup, so I'm not storing that.
• We do, however, use a lot of real maple syrup. Maple syrup has a decent shelf life; the jugs I buy have expiration dates 2-3 years in the future. We'll easily rotate through them before they approach the expiration dates.
• According to the calculator, our family needs 12 lb of brown sugar. We use more brown sugar than that, so I'm storing more. I repack the sugar in quart mason jars (a 2 lb package will fit in a quart jar) and vacuum seal it with my FoodSaver. You can also mix a bit of molasses into white sugar to make brown sugar.
• We are also storing much more honey than "required". Our favorite bread recipe uses honey as a sweetener and honey is probably better for you than regular white sugar. Honey has an amazing shelf life. If it crystallizes, gently warm it and it will become liquid again.
• The best thing about storing white sugar is that it lasts forever. Store it in an air-tight container but SKIP the oxygen absorbers!
• I'm following the recommendations for molasses, jams, and powdered drink mix. Although we don't normally consume Tang or other powdered drink mixes, they are essential to our food storage plan. First of all, they are an excellent source of Vitamin C, something that we are short on. Second, drink mixes can go a long way toward making stored water more palatable.

What types of sugar are you storing and in what quantities?

Food Storage Blitz Month, Part Four and Month End Results

My Shelf Reliance unit has filled up a lot since this photo was taken

Sorry, I don't have a photo of the remaining items I bought for Food Storage Blitz Month. Every time I went to the grocery store, I bought a few extra items based on what was on sale and what I had coupons for. I never remembered to take pictures of my haul before I had them put away.

I bought:

- Several boxes of cereal
- Lots of canned soup
- Canned mushrooms. This is not something we usually buy, but there was such a good deal on them I couldn't resist.
-Refried beans
-Spaghetti sauce
-A few bags of 15 bean soup mix
-Crackers
-Tomato sauce

So, at the end of our Food Storage Blitz Month, where are we?

• Our Three Month Supply is much closer to being complete. I still need to fill in some items, but we made a huge jump forward this month.
• In terms of long term storage, we have:

        - 957 lb of grains, consisting of wheat, flour, oats, rice, and pasta.
        - 148 lb of legumes, not counting the canned beans (approx. 50 cans) I have stored.
        - About a 6 month supply of miscellaneous fats.
        - 150 lb of sugars.
        - 84 lb dry milk, 20 cans of evaporated milk and 10 lb dry eggs

All told, when you combine our three month supply with our long term items, we have 245.79 days of food storage for our family of six, according to the Food Storage Analyzer. Not too shabby!

Our goal is to have a full year's supply of food storage, so we still have a ways to go. The Food Storage Analyzer revealed that our storage is low in Vitamins A &C, so I need to remedy that, as well. Dried fruits and vegetables, legumes, and oils are my priority for the next few months.

There you have it! I hope you have been able to add to your food storage over the past month. What have you added to your storage lately?

Three-Month Supply Menus

Three months of meals from your pantry

Food storage can seem really intimidating when you're getting started, especially if you start off with the notion that you need a full year's supply of food, stat! I think the way the LDS Church recommends their members go about establishing their food storage makes a lot of sense.

1. Make a 72-hour emergency kit. Have enough food, water, etc. on hand to get you through a short-term emergency and be ready to get out of dodge, if necessary. In other words, create a bug-out bag. See how I made ours here. I would do things a bit differently now that I know more about it, but they are not a bad start.   
2. Build up a store of three month's worth of your regular, everyday foods.
3. Get one year's worth of long term storage items such as wheat, oats, beans, etc.

Today I'm going to share our family's plan for our three months of "regular" meals. To do create our plan, I used Food Storage Made Easy's Excel document. I also did a lot of Internet research. The sites I found most helpful were Prepared LDS Family (check our her Three Month Supply Menus) and Everything Under the Sun. Hopefully it will help you all with your food storage plans if I share an outline of our plan here on my blog. First, my requirements:

1. It must be completely shelf-stable. Nothing frozen or fresh allowed. Most people count frozen foods towards their three month supply, but I felt like I had to make everything shelf-stable. I spent a lot of time collecting shelf-stable food storage recipes from a variety of sources. The majority of these recipes do not require an oven, so I can cook them on my gas stove, on a grill, over a fire, or whatever I have during a grid-down scenario.
2. They must use common storage foods. Lots of rice, beans, and lentils. Nothing terribly exotic. All meats are either canned, freeze-dried, or home canned. (I'll be posting about more about my canning adventures later this month.)
3. Meals must resemble food we would eat. To be honest, very few of the meals I have planned out below are exactly what I would normally serve my family. I use a ton of fresh and frozen ingredients and like to have a wide variety of sides,etc. served with my meals. But I did take into consideration my family's habits and tastes. For example, the only thing we eat for breakfast at our house is cold cereal. I would be lying to myself if I planned all of our breakfasts to be oatmeal. My menu may not consist entirely of "regular, everyday" food, but it's all stuff that's not too far from what we normally eat.
4. We need variety. I don't want to repeat the same seven meals over and over.

So, with these things in mind, here are my menus. Each category should add up to 90 days of food.

Breakfast Menus

• 69 x Cold Cereal, Reconstituted Dry Milk, Carnation Instant Breakfast with Reconstituted Dry Milk
• 9 x Oatmeal made with dry milk, rolled oats and raisins, Carnation Instant Breakfast with Reconstituted Dry Milk
• 6 x Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Muffins, Carnation Instant Breakfast with Reconstituted Dry Milk
• 6 x Apple Spice Muffins, Carnation Instant Breakfast with Reconstituted Dry Milk

Lunch Menus

• 12 x Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches, Canned Fruit
• 6 x Macaroni and Cheese, Canned Fruit
• 9 x Canned Vegetable Soup, Bread and Butter
• 9 x Canned Chicken and Noodle Soup, Bread and Butter
• 6 x Rice Salad, Canned Fruit
• 6 x Cream Red Beans and Pasta Salad, Canned Fruit
• 6 x Lentil Stew, Fruit
• 9 x Pancakes
• 9 x Cowboy Delight, Fruit
• 6 x Chicken Salad Sandwiches, Fruit
• 6 x Indian Lentils, Rice, Fruit
• 6 x Spaghettios

Dinner Menus

• 3 x Fried Rice, Fruit
• 9 x Spaghetti, corn
• 3 x Quick Beef Chili and Corn, Biscuits
• 3 x Beans and Rice with a Bam, Green Beans
• 3 x Pineapple Chicken, Rice
• 3 x Chicken a la Queen, Corn
• 3 x Chili Mac, Green Beans
• 3 x Curry Beef on Rice
• 3 x Chicken Creole, Fruit
• 3 x Chicken Corn Soup, Bread and Butter
• 3 x Vegetarian Chili, Corn
• 3 x Italian Chicken and Bean Soup
• 3 x Chicken Alfredo
• 3 x Puerto Rican Beans and Rice
• 3 x Beef Stew, Biscuits
• 3 x Chicken Delight
• 3 x Chicken and Rice Casserole
• 3 x Chicken Fricassee
• 3 x Goulash, green beans
• 3 x Beef and Beans, Biscuits
• 3 x Homemade Rice-a-Roni, Fruit
• 3 x Shepherd’s Pie
• 3 x Taco Soup, Bread and Butter
• 3 x Tamale Pie
• 3 x Bean and Lentil Pilaf, Fruit
• 3 x Chicken Little Soup
• 3 x 15 Bean Soup
• 3 x Beef Soup

Snacks

• 9 x Granola Bars
• 6 x Fruit snacks
• 6 x Graham crackers
• 6 x Hot Cocoa
• 6 x Popcorn
• 6 x Brownies from mix
• 6 x Chocolate chip cookies
• 6 x Oatmeal cookies
• 6 x Apple Crisp
• 9 x Crackers
• 3 x Homemade Wheat Thins
• 3 x Skookie
• 6 x Pudding or Apple Sauce Cup
• 9 x Dried Fruit
• 3 x Snickerdoodles

Served with
• 48 x Fruit Drink (ie. Tang-like substances)
• 36 x Apple Juice

---------
My Three-Month Supply menus can easily be sized up so that I have a year's worth of menus. Here are the changes I'll make:

• I will rely more freeze-dried/dehydrated foods to avoid the shelf-life/rotation issues of canned food. Use freeze-dried corn, green beans, chicken, etc.
• My three month supply uses a lot of meat. I may have to eliminate some of the chicken meals in favor of more rice and beans.
• I don't plan on storing 1 year's worth of cereal, crackers, etc. 
• Storing survival seeds are a must! We'll need to grow our own food for long-term survival as well as to break up the monotony of our diet.  

So there it is! I hope this is helpful and I welcome your questions and comments.

Month Six in Review and Month Seven Preps

Did you think this past month seemed to fly by? I can't believe November is already drawing to a close. I also am astonished that I've been actively prepping for only seven months. I've learned so much and accomplished quite a bit.

RIP oil lamp chimney

Month Six of my prepping plan was a doozy. I had a humbling experience with primitive technology, bought a bunch of freeze-dried and dehydrated items for my food storage, stocked up on the necessities to have lighting during a power-down scenario, as well as accomplished the other items in my plan for this month.

In the negative column, I'm still not doing very well with adding in exercise, unless you count using my new grain mill. Hey, it does make me break a sweat! Also, the glass globe/chimney on my oil lamp met a premature demise when I was dusting it yesterday. This goes to show that A) I need to have some back-up chimneys on hand with my other supplies and B) My contention that housework is evil does have a basis in fact.   

 
Month Seven:

1. Continue to build food storage basics. Perhaps take advantage of holiday sales and stock up on items like spices, chocolate chips, canned pumpkin, etc.
2. Buy some ground beef and chicken breast and pressure can it. Conduct a taste test and see how my home-canned meat fares vs. store bought canned chicken. 
3. Create a first aid kit for for my purse. I'm thinking of making one in a Altoid tin.
4. Buy an electric grain mill and put it through its paces.
5. Begin the process of organizing some of my canned food storage for easier rotation. I'm going to try out and review one of the can rotation devices on the market.
6. In the category of "Hope Springs Eternal": Exercise 3x per week.

Do you have any prepping plans for December or are you consumed with Christmas purchases and preparations?

Using Your Food Storage: The Best Cornbread Ever

Moist and wonderful! It has a cake-like consistency.

Warning: If you like your cornbread dry, gritty, and tasteless, this is not the recipe for you. If you like moist, sweet, scrumptious cornbread, however, do I have a treat for you!


This is the best cornbread recipe I've ever tried. My family decended upon it like a horde of locusts and quickly ate it all up. OK, I might have given them a little bit of help with that! This is a fabulous, easy recipe that uses a bunch of commonly stored ingredients plus some that have food storage substitutions.


Eggs - Add dry egg powder in with the dry ingredients and put the additional water in with the wet ingredients. See your can of dry eggs for specific amounts.

4 T powder + 1 c. water = 1 c buttermilk

Buttermilk - I rarely buy buttermilk since most recipes I use it in only call for a little bit of it. One option is to make sour milk. Take 1 cup minus one tablespoon of milk (fresh or reconstituted dry) and then add 1 tablespoon of white vinegar. Stir it up and let sit for 5 minutes. You could also use buttermilk powder, a great product that stores practically forever in the refrigerator.

Butter - I think the butter is key to this recipe's moist texture. I keep a bunch of butter in the freezer so I always have some on hand. I'm pretty sure that substituting oil or powdered butter wouldn't work. Canned butter, on the other hand, is a possibility. Have any of you tried that before? Some people can their own butter, but I'm going to side with the USDA on this one and stick to commercially canned butter, available here. I plan on picking up some commerically canned butter and cheese at some point and I'll review it on my blog.

You must try this cornbread! It's heavenly served for dinner with chili or a hearty soup or even nibbled on at 2 AM in your PJs. Not that I know anything about that...

Grandmother's Buttermilk Cornbread, by Bethany (The same Bethany of refried bean fame), posted on allrecipes.com

1/2 cup butter
2/3 cup white sugar
2 eggs (Or dry eggs)
1 cup buttermilk (Or sour milk or dry buttermilk)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease an 8 inch square pan.

Melt butter in large skillet. Remove from heat and stir in sugar. Quickly add eggs and beat until well blended. Combine buttermilk with baking soda and stir into mixture in pan. Stir in cornmeal, flour, and salt until well blended and few lumps remain. Pour batter into the prepared pan.

Bake in the preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Got milk?

If you have played around with the food storage calculators that are out there, you'll notice that it is suggested that you store a huge amount of dairy products. For our family, the numbers work out to 270 pounds of dry milk, 54 cans of evaporated milk, and 57 lbs of "other", which would include dry cheese, butter, and eggs.

Ay chihuahua. That's a whole bunch of stuff that we don't normally use. And aren't you supposed to "store what you eat, eat what you store"? What's the point of storing all that milk, anyway?

Well, dry milk has the nutrients of fresh milk without worry of rapid spoilage or delicious taste. Oh wait...

The truth is that dry milk is a great source of protein and can be used in a wide variety of applications from drinking straight up to yogurt to smoothies to baked goods. It's one of the four basic foods (the others being wheat, honey, and salt) that would be enough to keep you alive.

It is important to note that the food storage calculators' numbers are based on REGULAR non-fat dry milk, NOT instant non-fat dry milk. If you choose to store instant milk, you need to store double that amount.

Crystal from everydayfoodstorage.net has several really helpful videos on YouTube. The following one explains the difference between regular and instant dry milk. I highly recommend that you watch it.




After I watched this, I was convinced that we definitely needed to store regular non-fat dry milk. The space savings alone make that worthwhile. There was only one problem.

Where do you buy regular non-fat dry milk if you do not have access to an LDS cannery? Ever tried to find it in your local grocery store?

A #10 can of Regular Dry Milk from Walton Feed

I did manage to find a reputable source for regular non-fat dry milk - Walton Feed Company. Their prices aren't bad and they come highly recommended. A case of 6-#10 cans of regular dry milk costs $59. The catch is the shipping. It cost me over $20 to get my milk from their store in Idaho to the Harried Homemaker Acres. I did the math, however, and it will still save me a significant amount of money to buy regular dry milk instead of the instant.

Now how about the yuck factor. Again, Crystal has some great tips on how to mix it and doctor it up a bit.




One thing to note out about powdered milk is the shelf-life. Even if you buy all of your milk in #10 cans from a reputable dealer and you store it in ideal conditions (ie. cool, dark, and dry), powdered milk is one of the most perishable of your long-term storage items. I've found sources that say dry milk is good for 20 years, and that's probably true from a nutrition and safety standpoint. If you're wanting it to taste semi-decent, however, you had better rotate through your supply in 3-5 years. From what I hear, it gets pretty funky after that period of time.

My case of 6-#10 cans only adds up to 24 pounds of milk. That's not much toward the 270 lbs we need to store. There's bright side to building up our milk storage slowly, though. If I build our supply by purchasing a case every couple of months, the expiration dates of the milk will be spread out. If we just use a little bit along the way in our everyday meals, we'll be able to rotate our supply for maximum freshness.

Here's a link to the powdered milk section on Crystal's site. You can find a bunch of recipes that use powdered milk here so you can actually "store what you eat, eat what you store". I plan to use our milk in baking and other cooked recipes.

Selecting a Hand Grain Mill

I've had a couple hundred pounds of wheat since August but have been limited in what I can cook with it: blender pancakes, blender waffles, and disgusting hot cereal. Finally the day has come that I get to buy a grain mill. You can buy electric grain mills, hand grain mills, and ones that convert either way. I eventually want to have the capability to go electric for the time and labor savings, but it is most important to have a hand grain mill first. Otherwise TEOTWAWKI could happen and the only way my shiny electric grain mill would be useful is if it just so happened to grind some wheat as I threw it to the ground in frustration with my lack of foresight.

But what mill to pick? There a huge selection available and it's not like I can just walk into a dealership for a test drive. (Not in my neck of the woods, anyway.) So I did A LOT of reading. I read catalogs, reviews, and online listings. I read some more. I cross-referenced charts and watched videos. I gathered so much data that I practically overloaded. Here's some of what I looked at:

A comparison chart of hand and electric grain mills

The selection that Lehman's carries. Notes and reviews about several types

Purchasing the right grinder by Walton Feed Co.

Amazon.com listings and reviews

Grain Mill Comparison Chart (the "German made" one is the popular Family Grain Mill)


To my mind, there are three main considerations in selecting a grain mill:

1. Coarseness/fineness of end product - Will it make a true fine flour?
2. Ease of use - How hard is it to turn? How long does it take?
3. Durability - Will it stand the test of time?

Not to mention

    4.   Price



I read about el cheapo grain mills. 

Victorio Grain Mill, approximately $69

I carefully considered the virtues of the Family Grain Mill and the Country Living Grain Mills, both of which can be motorized.

Country Living Grain Mill, base price $395

I compared the Lehman's Best Grain mill with the Wonder Mill Junior Deluxe.

Lehman's Best, $169.95

Wonder Mill Junior Deluxe, $199.95

I drooled over this Diamant grain mill that costs more than my first car did.

Diamant Grain Mill, $1299

Which one did I select? And will I be pleased with my choice? You'll have to wait and see. My order is in. :)

Humoring the OCD in me

Woohoo! It's pantry makeover time! I love to organize, so this kind of thing is almost as good as a trip to Disney World.  Now that I have large amounts of staples like rice, flour, and beans in my basement storage room, I need a way to store what I bring up for current use. I decided to buy a large amount of air-tight food storage containers and got a great deal on it, even when you factor in shipping.

First I bought what they call a "10 piece Canister Set".

It's only 10 pieces if you count the lids, but it still worked out for me. The small, 4.4 cup ones on the ends are filled with salt and yeast respectively. The canisters are freezer safe and a small one will easily hold one of the pound bags of yeast I keep stashed in the freezer. I've started buying salt in unwieldy boxes from Sam's, so it is also nice to have a more managable container to put it in.

The mid-size containers hold 11.1 cups. They hold regular rolled and quick oats. The largest one holds 15.9 cups and is perfect for rice. Looks like I need to refill these bad boys from the basement.

This set also comes with a bonus of three long handled measuring scoops.

The next item that I needed to find a storage solution for was pasta.

To that end, I bought three pasta canisters. I only store three types of pasta - penne, spaghetti, and elbow macaroni. I used to buy lots of different types, but I find that these work for most applications and I can buy them in 6 lb bags at Sam's. I was able to fit an entire 6 lb bag of spaghetti in a container, but only about half that for the other two types of pasta.

Contrary to all things OCD in me, I realized it really wasn't feasible to get all matching containers. I had to consider function as well as form.

These are part of the MODS line of Snapware. I thought they were a better fit for brown sugar, sugar and all purpose flour. They hold a TON (that's over 7 lb of sugar there in the middle) and stack easily.

My flour and sugar containers have an added bonus. The lids flip up and the opening will easily fit a measuring cup.

I could've gone crazy and found the perfect storage container for every item in my pantry, but I think this is good for now.

The finished product:

Hopefully I'll be buying a lot less "Sara Lee" and making more "Emily" with my food storage.

I love my pantries with the sliding shelves, especially now that they're organized.

Over the next few months, I'm going to be re-organizing my long-term and short-term food storage areas. Heh heh hehe! (Rubbing hands and cackling with glee) More fun awaits.

Using Your Food Storage: Refried Beans Without the Refry

Got beans?

You should if you know what's good for ya! They are cheap, healthy, filling, tasty and store for a looong time. Go beans! (Said in my best "Hillshire Farms" commercial imitation)

The cheapest, most efficient, and longest lasting way to store beans is dry packed  in either a #10 can or in a mylar bag/bucket combo. If you're anything like me, though, you find it far easier to pop open a can of beans than use your dry ones. Well, fret no longer!

The following recipe has been floating around on one of the forums I frequent and has garnered rave reviews. It is originally from All Recipes and is one of the easiest, yummiest ways to use up those dry beans you should be storing. A big plus in my book is that it uses a crockpot, one of my all-time favorite methods of cooking.

I included some helpful comments from Bethany on the bottom. (Waving hi to Bethany!) Check out Bethany's blog while you're at it. She has lots of great recipes there.

Refried Beans without the Refry

1 onion, peeled and halved
3 c. dried pinto beans
1/2 fresh jalapeno, seeded and chopped
2 T. minced garlic
5 t. salt
1 3/4 t. pepper
1/8 t. cumin
9 c. water

Combine all ingredients in crockpot; stir. Cook on high for 8 hours. Strain, reserving liquid. Remove onion halves. Mash beans, adding reserved liquid to desired consistency.

Bethany's Notes: "Use this recipe as a starting point and tweak to your liking. It freezes well. I always double it, but make sure your crockpot is big enough first. There are several options with this dish. Beans - all pinto, half pinto & half black. Jalapenos - none, one, half diced & half intact, all diced. Water - all water, half water & half chicken or veggie broth (use less salt if you add broth!!). Onion - all diced, half diced & half intact. Cumin - as directed or way more. I don't measure the water either. Instead I just make sure the beans are submerged in liquid, adding more water if/when necessary. I also freeze the extra liquid and use it when making rice. If you choose to use it in rice, then add a little more water to your rice than normal because the bean liquid is partly solid."

Quick Tip: One item that doesn't need O2 Absorbers

I bought a 50 pound bag of sugar at Sam's this weekend. Unfortunately I ended up bringing less than 50 pounds home as the bag sprung a leak in the middle of the Sam's Club parking lot.

I packed the sugar in a mylar bag and food-grade plastic bucket, much like I described in my post on long-term storage. There is one major difference in how I packaged it - no oxygen absorbers. If you put oxygen absorbers in with your sugar, it will turn hard as a rock and you'll need a chisel to get it out later.

By the way, I managed to get about 44 pounds in my 6 gallon bucket. The remainder is in my pantry for my current use. I'm awaiting my order of Snapware to store all my dry goods in my pantry.

So when it comes to sugar, leave out the O2 absorbers and you can keep the hammer and chisel in the garage where it belongs.

Month Five Preps

This is what I've lined up for October:

1. Squirrel away more cash for BOBs and vehicle kits.
2. Buy a couple of cases of toilet paper. I estimate we need about 8 cases or so to have a year's supply, so this will get us a little closer to my goal.
3. Add some more matches to my supply.
4. Buy some air-tight containers for my pantry to hold what I take from my bulk food storage (ie. flour, sugar, dry beans).
5. Continue to build our three month and long-term supplies of food. 
6. Exercise at least three times per week.

I continue to go back and forth on exactly what I should be buying each month. This month I gave in to my urge to focus mainly on food storage. Buying food is more fun for me than many of the other survival categories. What can I say? I like to cook and eat. :) We'll get around to all areas eventually.

Month Four Preps: Long Term Storage

For our food storage this month, I decided to stock up on some of the most important things a prepper can store - staples. No, not the kind you use to attach paper together, but staples of your diet. My part of the country doesn't have places where you can buy bulk wheat or other such items, but I do have Sam's Club available to me. They stock a few items that I can package myself and thereby save some money.

I grabbed a flat-bed cart at the front of the store and awkwardly wheeled it over to the aisle with dry goods. I kid you not when I say that I nearly took out the jewelry counter with that runaway flat-bed. Next time I think I'll stick to a regular shopping cart. I loaded up with 50 lb pinto beans, 100 lb rice and 50 lb all-purpose flour.

You would think that you could avoid scrutiny when you buy items in bulk at Sam's, but I attracted several curious glances as I pushed my load up to the checkout counter. One lady asked me what I was going to make with all of this. Then the checkout girl asked Hubby Dear if all those kids were his. Not ours, his. Some people just don't have any home training! But at least I neatly avoided answering the first lady's question.

Anyway, back to the point. I bought a bunch of real-deal survival food and Hubby Dear and I spent last evening packing it for long-term storage.  

There are two main ways to store basics like these for long-term storage. 

1) #10 cans - Rodent and bug proof! As long as you keep them from rusting, they have awesome longevity. If you have access to an LDS cannery, you can put up beans, rice, wheat, etc. in these cans. The other option is to buy them from a food storage company. It's pretty pricey to get all of your food storage canned like that. 

 

2) Food-grade plastic buckets and/or mylar bags and oxygen absorbers - Some people feel that a plastic bucket is enough to store hardy items like wheat and rice. Others use only the mylar bags for storage since the bag is actually much less permeable to oxygen than the bucket. Oxygen = spoiled food.

The amounts and types of oxygen absorbers to add are also a matter of debate. James Wesley, Rawles, author of  How to Survive The End of the World As We Know It  and survival guru, even goes so far as to advocate using buckets, bags, oxygen absorbers, a dessicant, AND dry ice. I have no doubt that food packaged that way would last for a long time.

We took an approach somewhere in the middle. We obtained a bunch of 6-gallon food-grade plastic buckets and lined them with mylar bags. Then we filled each bucket  to within 1" of the top. There was still plenty of bag leftover, which was a good thing. 

We thought the flour would be the messiest item to transfer to the buckets, but surprisingly it was the rice. Oops!

Before I began sealing the bags, I made sure to label each bucket. I used these labels from Food Storage Made Easy.


It is essential that you move quickly during the next few steps. Once you open the package, your oxygen absorbers start working immediately. If you do not seal your bags stat, the absorbers can lose their mojo. I don't know much, but I do know that it's not good when O2 absorbers lose their mojo.

So, we quickly threw in the O2 absorbers

and sealed the bag up. It is helpful to have two people for this part.

You can use a fancy (and expensive!) sealer made for this purpose or just heat your iron to full blast. We placed Hubby Dear's metal level across the bucket, expressed as much air as possible from the bag, drew the sides of the bag up, and pulled it taut across the level.

I ironed the bag using the level as a stable surface to create a seal. Be careful! The mylar (and level) heats up quickly and stays surprisingly hot for a while afterwards.

I left one side of the seam open, Hubby Dear expressed more air out, and then we sealed the rest of the bag.

Check the bag to make sure it sealed all the way across, push it down in the bucket, place your lid on and seal tight. Over the next 24 hours, the O2 absorbers will get to work and remove the remaining air from your bag.

I bought three Gamma Seal lids to use on the buckets that I will be using immediately. The rest received standard lids. Gamma Lids snap on like a regular bucket lid, but then you can screw the lid on and off. Much easier than having to fiddle with a regular lid! I figure I should make things as easy as possible if I'm going to use my food storage for more than a dusty insurance policy.

So, now that I've gone to all of this trouble, how long will it last? The rice and beans could very well be good for 30 years if I keep them stored in a cool, dark place. The flour has a much shorter short shelf-life, but by packing it in mylar with oxygen absorbers, it should be good for at least two years.

Now these are some preps I can take pride in - we did it ourselves. And the Fed Ex man is pretty happy, too.

Month Four Preps

I keep going back and forth on what I want to buy in the next month. All the economic indicators point to a very long road before we get to real recovery. I'm worried about inflation, which means that I want to buy as much food as I can. It's almost feeling like a Sophie's Choice deciding which items to buy! (Yes, I can be overly dramatic. Why do you ask?)

These are the preps I have lined up for month four of my prepping plan:

1. More $ for BOBs. Add $ to our vehicle kits.
2. The items I postponed buying from Month Three: butane refills for my Zippo lighter, the remainder of the items for my van's vehicle kit.
3. Buckets, mylar bags, oxygen absorbers, etc. so that I can package bulk amounts of flour, beans and rice.

And something a bit different:

   4.   Exercise at least 3 times per week.

This last one may be the toughest one of all. Ack!