This is So Fabulous! Food Storage

So Food Storage....boring huh? Or more like OVERWHELMING!! Where do you start? How do you know how much you have? How much you need? How to Rotate? When does everything go bad? Wheat and Beans for a year??? Wow!! So many questions and so hard to get started!

I've been feeling pretty strongly lately that we need to get this going and how important it is. I've felt that it's also my responsibility as the main food preparer in our home.

Colt's Aunt Jill is an inspiration with food storage - she helps the family get excited about it and do it. She shared with me this recently and I am hooked!

Check out this blog!

http://homeproductionandstorage.blogspot.com/2009/04/part-1.html

Wendy DeWitt has a church calling to get people excited and doing their food storage. She has designed a system that will work for our family and helps me not feel so overwhelmed. It's all here in her blog! How to put it together, how to eat yummy food, how to rotate it, everything!

There are YouTube videos of her seminars on there too with her going through all the written things. The very top left link has her system to be able to print with recipes.

Her system summarized:

Why/When would we need food storage? Worse case senario - some kind of quarantine to homes with no electricity or water. Now hopefully we will have electricity and water, and it would be a huge blessing if we did, but if not.....With the swine/avian flu, people are quarantined to homes. If a nasty strain breaks out, there would be lots of people quarantined, and to keep your family safe, you wouldn't want to go in public. There is a possiblity that some kind of swine/avian flu may be coming and may be horrendous. This is not to feel scared or panicked, just to be prepared if it comes. Her basis was that we may be hungry/starving and watching our children starve - at that point we would do ANYTHING to keep our children alive: Steal, lie, even kill. Get your food storage so you don't go to such desperate measures and put your spiritual life on the line. Even Lehi "Murmured against God" when the bow was broken and there wasn't any food. We will not be able to withstand such pressures when we are starving.

Hopefully we never have to use it - but in case, it is there. Kind of like life insurance.

*How much food do you need?

You will make one week menu - Write down 7 Breakfasts and 7 dinners. For your years food storage you'll have each of these meals 52 times. Times every ingredient in the meal by 52 and you have your years supply for that meal. Now you know how much salt and rice you'll need because it's in the recipes. She also has what you would need to do one loaf of bread a day.

She cans meat! Yes, this was all very new to me, but last night I did my first batch of pressure-canned beef. Today I am trying chicken and hamburger. How to do it is all in her blog.

Now to rotate - I don't want all that money that I spent on the food to be wasted - I don't want everything to go bad just sitting there. You write down everything you need for your year (based off your recipes) then you have a list of what you need and a column of what you have, so how much you'll have to buy. You also write down the expiration date next to everything and then you only need to look at that paper once a year (New Years Day) to see if anything is going to expire in that year. You pull it out of food storage, and work it into your pantry because it is stuff that your family eats anyway (I would always wonder how am I ever going to go through that many pounds of wheat when we don't eat it regularly). Most things have at least a 3 year shelf life and some have many more years of life left.

Back to the meat I'm bottling - They say it is so tender and moist that it will be no problem rotating because it will be so convenient and yummy to use. I bought my meat yesterday on a great deal $1.69 a lb. I usually buy meat at a good deal and then freeze it, but then you have to thaw it before you cook it.....this way you just pop the can open and enjoy cooked meat in your dish. I'm all for it!