The Pantry Panel

Chocolate Raspberry Spread

2009-07-07T10:59:00.001-07:00

Chocolate Raspberry Spread

5 cups prepared fruit (buy about 2 quarts fully ripe red raspberries)
1 box powdered fruit pectin
5 squares unsweetened baking chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/2 tsp butter (optional)
7 cups sugar, measured into separate bowl

Bring boiling water canner, half full with water, to simmer. Wash jars and screw bands in hot soapy water; rinse with warm water. Pour boiling water over flat lids in saucepan off the heat. Let stand in hot water until ready to use. Drain well before filling.

Crush raspberries thoroughly, one layer at a time. (Press half of the pulp through a sieve to remove some of the seeds, if desired.) Measure exactly 5 cups prepared fruit into 6 or 8 quart saucepot.

Stir pectin into prepared fruit in saucepot. Add chocolate; mix well. Add butter to reduce foaming, if desired. Bring mixture to full rolling boil (a boil that doesn't stop bubbling when stirred) on high heat, stirring constantly. Stir in sugar. Return to full rolling boil and boil exactly 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Skim off any foam with metal spoon.

Ladle immediately into prepared jars, filling to within 1/4 inch of tops. Process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath. Adjust time according to your altitude.

Makes: About 10 half pints

Black Forest Cherry Jam

2009-07-07T10:58:00.001-07:00

Black Forest Cherry Jam

6 cups prepared fruit (black or Bing cherries)

3 unsweetened chocolate squares

4 cups granulated sugar

2 Tbsp. Amaretto (or 2 t. almond flavoring)

1 (8 ounce) box Sure-Jell

1/2 teaspoon margarine or butter

Pit the cherries if necessary, then chop them up. Crush the remains

thoroughly, 1 cup at a time. If using frozen berries, use both liquid

and solids; they all were part of the original fresh berry. Measure 6 cups

of crushed fruit into 6- or 8-quart heavy saucepan.

Break the chocolate squares into smaller pieces and add them to

saucepan.

Measure sugar into separate bowl. Mix 1/4 cup sugar from measured amount

with pectin in small bowl.

Stir pectin sugar mixture into fruit in saucepan. Add butter. Bring

quickly to full rolling boil and boil exactly 1 minute, stirring

constantly. Remove from heat.

Skim foam and ladle into pint or half-pint jars, leaving 1/4 inch

headspace and process 10 minutes in boiling water canner.

Busy Summer

2009-07-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

I'd love to know what everyone has been working on this summer.

I've been canning. Lots of strawberry jam, as it's our family's favorite. I've tried a couple of new recipes as well: strawberry pineapple jam and strawberry jalepeno pepper jelly. Neither gelled like it was supposed to but we'll eat'em anyway.

I have plans to make a Raspberry Chocolate Spread to can. I'm happy to post the recipe if you'd like. I got it from one of the yahoogroups I belong to. I'll do Black Forest Cherry Jam again this year. It was quite a hit last year.

I'm learning how to harvest seeds this year as well. I'm hoping that I'll be organized enough to find the seeds next year to plant.

Finally, I'm determined to become much more active in dehydration. Yet another skill I need to master.

Please share with us all what you're up to.

Winner of Giveaway (and ANOTHER giveaway!)

2009-06-16T01:21:00.001-07:00

The winner is Lisette! We will be sending the Shelf Reliance people your email address so they can follow up with you.

But don't despair if you didn't win...there's another giveaway I just caught wind of.

Shelf Reliance is giving away a Harvest 72" food rotation system! Visit the Shelf Reliance blog at http://www.shelfreliance.com/blog/ to enter. The Harvest 72" is valued at $459.99 and can hold up to 600 cans, making it perfect for a healthy food storage supply. The winner will be announced on Friday, June 26th, so hurry to the blog for your chance to win!

A provident living talk

2009-06-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

Given by me in my LDS ward today.

-=-=-=-=-

At long last, frugality is becoming cool! According to last week’s Washington Post, people are no longer trying to keep up with the Joneses. “Instead of feeling conscious about spending less, people are flaunting their frugality.” Of course, in the church, provident living is not some new trend.

What is provident living? Provident means carefully preparing for the future. Elder Robert D. Hales said in last conference, “To provide providently, we must practice the principles of provident living: joyfully living within our means, being content with what we have, avoiding excessive debt, and diligently saving and preparing for rainy-day emergencies. When we live providently, we can provide for ourselves and our families and also follow the Savior’s example to serve and bless others.”

The church puts out “Family Finances” pamphlet that summarizes advice about Provident Living: (1) Pay tithes and offerings, (2) Avoid debt, (3) Use a budget, (4) Gradually build a reserve, and (5) Teach your children.

Pay tithes and offerings. President Hinckley called tithing “the Lord’s law of finance.” When we put the Lord first financially by paying tithing, God is able to keep his promises, and open the windows of heaven to bless us. I know that God blesses us when we keep his commandments, especially when it is difficult.

Avoid debt. Our society has had to relearn this lesson recently, haven’t we? Our country’s recent financial problems have mostly been caused by excessive debt. Every generation or so we forget, and we have to learn this all over again.

Even young children can understand why debt is harmful. Sometimes my kids see the pay-day loan stores, with names like “The Cash Store.” They ask me, “Mom, can you buy cash at the store?” I say, “Yes! They say, ‘We’ll give you $10 today, but you have to pay us $20 next week.’” The kids laughed and laughed, and asked, “Why would anyone ever do that?” I did exaggerate the amount of interest slightly to teach the principle, but this is the truth about debt and interest. You always have to repay more than you borrow, and you can never be sure that you will have the money to repay in the future.

Some in recent years have tried to make debt look sophisticated. But no amount of sophistication can deny those simple truths about debt and interest. Speculative thinking is nothing new. In 1986, Elder James E. Faust said, “There are some investment counselors who urge speculative credit practices described as ‘leverage,’ ‘credit wealth,’ and ‘borrow yourself rich.’ Such practices may work successfully for some, but at best they succeed only for a time. An economic reversal always seems to come, and many who have followed such practices find themselves in financial ruin and their lives in shambles.” History repeated itself yet again.

It’s especially important to avoid consumer debt. Credit cards can be handy. But if you can’t pay off the balance every month, get rid of them. Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin counseled in April 2004, “Those who use credit cards to overspend unwisely should consider eliminating them. It is much better that a plastic credit card should perish than a family dwindle and perish in debt.”

Elder Hales said, “Of course some debt incurred for education, a modest home, or a basic automobile may be necessary to provide for a family.” However, even in these cases, debt should only be incurred carefully and prayerfully, and minimally.

Education: Student loans are often thought of as “good debt.” Interest rates have been low in recent years, and education usually leads to increased income that can be used to pay off the loan. But I know of many people whose student loans have caused them a lot of trouble. The loans have to be repaid even if the degree is not finished, or if job opportunities are not what you thought they would be, or if the degree is in a low-paying field, or if the student wants to become a stay-at-home mom. Student loans are not bankruptable, so even in a worst case scenario those debts are with you forever until they are repaid. So make these decisions prayerfully, and get your education without debt if possible.

Car: a “basic automobile” is not a new one. New cars are much more expensive than used cars. New car loans are often structured so that you owe more on the car than it is worth, making the car impossible to sell without spending thousands of dollars. Reliable used cars can be found with careful research and shopping. Teenagers can save up for old cars and pay for them with cash, which is what my husband and his brother did when they were teenagers. That car was often broken, but they were motivated to keep the car running, and they learned how to repair and maintain a car. These skills have blessed our family and saved our family a lot of money.

House: Debt is usually necessary to buy a home now, but in recent years excessive debt has been promoted. It used to be that banks required a 20% down payment on a house, and monthly payments had to be no more than 28% of your income. Buy a “modest home,” as President Hinckley counseled. If you follow these rules, you will have some measure of safety even in a declining real estate market. Avoid home equity loans, and seek to pay off your mortgage as quickly as you can. President Hinckley told the story of President Faust paying off his 4% mortgage, even though people thought it was foolish to pay off a loan with such a low interest rate. But he understood that being debt free brings freedom.

Use a budget. A budget is a great place to start to get control of your finances. When you write down where your money goes and make a plan, it’s easier to see the waste that you can cut out to reach your goals. The mystery of where the money goes is solved, and you are empowered to improve.

Elder Hales counseled us to “joyfully live within your means.” How can we do this? Often we think of budgeting or cutting back expenses as a matter of deprivation. But it helps for us to have the right attitude. Don’t compare your financial situation to affluent lifestyles portrayed in the media. My husband and I once attended a Parade of Homes home show. We enjoyed looking at the many lovely features in the fancy homes, but when we came home, we found ourselves less satisfied with our own simple home.

Instead, compare yourselves to your grandparents when they were your age. We have a great deal to be grateful for. Of course our grandparents didn't have cell phones or cable TV. But they also did without things that we see as necessities, such as air conditioning and dryers. Families had one car each. My grandparents raised 8 children in a 1200 square foot home. That isn't done anymore, but back in the 1960s it was relatively common.

Getting by on a very small budget can become a game. My grandmother was a divorced mother of 3 young children in the 1960s. Money was extremely tight, and often my grandmother went hungry because there was not enough food for everyone. Yet my mother thought of it as a fun challenge to show how clever they were. Their natural gas was turned off the summer after their dad left, and their stove was gas, leaving them without a way to cook. Granny figured out how to cook meals in the electric coffee pot (they were not Mormon at the time), and the children thought their Mom was so clever to figure that out. In our families, we can seek to have the same attitude, even in desperate circumstances.

Sometimes we think of frugal ways of life as “poor,” and extravagance as “rich.” But wealth is accumulating money. If you spend your money on disposable purchases, you don’t have the money anymore. Many rich people are frugal; that’s how they got the money. My husband’s grandparents are enjoying a comfortable retirement after a lifetime of frugality. Even though they don't have to be frugal anymore, they still only eat oatmeal, cracked wheat, or cornmeal mush for breakfast. All of the money they saved on simple breakfasts and in other countless ways over the years added up. Let your children know that those who spend more money than you are not necessarily richer. Without talking about any specific family’s finances, let them know that debt sometimes makes it appear that others are more prosperous than they really are.

It helps to think about what deprivation means to you. Is it deprivation to eat simple foods, wear yard sale clothes, or drive an old car? Or is it deprivation to not be able to afford to have another child, or have mother in the home, or to be unable to sleep well because of excessive debt?

Gradually build a reserve. Save money for a rainy day. 10% is a good figure to shoot for, and increase that if circumstances allow. The money can be automatically withdrawn from your accounts so it can be done without thinking about it.

Also, remember a reserve is more than just money in the bank. Food storage is part of a “reserve” as well.

Plan for the future, and have goals. Often young couples get used to spending two incomes, not planning what they will do when children come. When we were a young married couple, it was our goal for me to stay at home with the children when they came along. We made our decisions on that basis. It was fun to see how little we could live on! We avoided debt, lived in cheap apartments, and avoided turning on the air conditioning and heat. I worked, and during my time off I learned frugal skills such as bread baking and cooking from scratch. We shopped carefully, stocking up on food when it was on sale, eventually building up a good supply of food storage. We drove a junker car. My husband fixed anything that broke. Because of our choices, we were able to reach our goal.

Teach your children. So many young adults are unprepared for adulthood. We may have provident living skills, but the next generation needs to learn them or else those skills will be lost. How can we teach them to live providently?

Don’t do too much for them. I recently watched a news segment called “Unspoil your kids.” Even if you have means, make them work for what they want. Have them provide for their own car, buy their own clothes, save for their own missions or education. This can start at a young age. When our kids whined in the store for candy, we asked them, “Where is your money?” They didn’t have any, and a fight was avoided. We wanted them to never get the idea that it’s the parent’s job to provide for more than the basics. Children are naturally much more frugal with their own money than with your money.

Teach them how the household budget works. When I was a kid, I saw my dad’s paycheck. I selfishly imagined all the things I could do with that money, because I didn’t understand what family obligations that money paid for. We taught our children how the budget works in a family night, using an idea from this book. We represented our household income with Monopoly money, and asked our children what they wanted to do with it. Then we showed them where the money has to go, and how little discretionary money we actually had. After we did this, our children have desired to do what they can to help us save money.

Do self-reliant things as a family. Teach your children to cook. Even young children can learn to make sandwiches, or prepare oatmeal. My mom taught me, “If you can read, you can cook.” We have created a family cookbook so my children can have the confidence to make our family’s favorite recipes. Do family work projects together. Last month, our family worked together to insulate the attic. We all did our part, and the work got done. More importantly, our children can look back on experiences like that when they are adults and gain the confidence to do needed repairs themselves instead of hiring others. Grow a garden and preserve the surplus together as a family. Include your children when making repairs.

Provide the child with opportunities to work for money. Sometimes families give allowances to help children learn to manage money, but in my opinion, the most important lesson to learn about money is that you exchange work for money. Work together as a family. My husband’s parents ran a newspaper distribution office when he was growing up, and as a family they would assemble the newspapers before they were delivered. Because of experiences like this, my husband and his siblings all grew up to be hard workers.

Talk to your children about money. Help them to understand how interest works, and why debt is bondage. Often people are quiet about their financial problems, so children grow up only seeing the fun side of overspending, and never see the full consequences. My kids sometimes overhear the Dave Ramsey show, a national radio show that helps people get out of debt. The show has given my children a good education about why debt should be avoided, by hearing the consequences of others who have gotten into debt. Explain to your children, in a way that they can understand, why it is smart to be frugal.

I testify that Heavenly Father has blessed us greatly, and he wants us to use our earthly resources to provide for our families, plan for the future, and bless others. I know that when we make wise choices with our money, we are blessed with peace.

GIVEAWAY!

2009-06-03T18:15:00.001-07:00

Well, this blog has been rather quiet for a while. How 'bout we liven things up with a giveaway?

Shelf Reliance has a new program out for those who would like to build up their food storage on a regular basis. They wanted to share this info with us, and they are including a giveaway.

Read on for more info.

Introducing the Shelf Reliance THRIVE Q

(Think Netflix^® – only with Food Storage)

Plus

An Exciting Giveaway

Shelf Reliance just launched a revolutionary food storage program called the THRIVE Q.

The THRIVE Q is a monthly pay-as-you-go program that allows individuals and families to build a customized food storage plan to meet their specific needs. With the THRIVE Q, customers can now set a monthly budget and receive monthly shipments tailored to their specific taste preferences and nutritional requirements.

The THRIVE Q can conveniently be paused or stopped at any time and you can edit your plan as needed. Additionally, your budgeted amount can be easily altered to adjust to changing circumstances. What’s more, the THRIVE Q comes with no contract or obligation.

Shelf Reliance knows that a lot of people feel the need to build a food storage plan, but that buying a full food storage supply at once doesn’t work for everyone. The THRIVE Q helps people to set goals that work with their homes, families, and finances.

Here’s how the THRIVE Q works:

A family or individual creates a customized food storage plan through the Shelf Reliance website (www.shelfreliance.com/Q).
The THRIVE Q “Pay As You Go” payment option is selected.
A monthly budget is determined.
The plan is then divided into monthly shipments (based on the determined budget) that ship automatically to your home.
Monthly shipments and billings are automatically generated until your THRIVE Q plan is complete.
Plans can be paused, altered, or canceled at any time.

The THRIVE Q is great because it promotes the concept of continually preparing while responsibly staying out of debt. It also allows families and individuals to completely customize a plan to their preferences. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all program, which makes Shelf Reliance’s concept incredibly unique.

With the availability of the THRIVE Q, Shelf Reliance believes that every family and individual can now build a customized food storage plan at their own pace. To start your THRIVE Q, visit www.shelfreliance.com/Q.

Also, to celebrate the launch of the Shelf Reliance THRIVE Q, you can receive 10% off your plan! To take advantage of this offer, simply enter Q10 into the reference code box located in step 3 of the THRIVE Q Settings page.

To make the launch even sweeter, Shelf Reliance would like to give away a THRIVE Essentials Sample Pack to one lucky winner! The Essentials sample pack comes with 6 #10 cans of some of the most popular THRIVE food storage items! Contents of the sample pack include: Whole Wheat Flour, Hard White Winter Wheat, Instant Rice, Freeze-Dried Strawberries, Potato Chunks, and Small Red Beans.

If you want to enter the giveaway, share with us (through comments on this post) your favorite food storage trick, item, recipe, etc. OR what your current food storage goal is. Comments will be accepted until June 13. We will randomly pick a winner, and the winner will be announced on (or around) June 15.

Coupon Basics

2009-05-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

I taught a very basic coupon class today for our stake. We had quite a nice turn out. Probably about 40 were in attendance. I thought I'd post the link for my powerpoint presentation so you can take a look at it.

I'm sure additional comments to this post would fill in the gaps of the ppt. Remember, I'm couponing in NJ and we have different store policies with coupons than in other parts of the country.

I welcome your comments.

Couponing 101

Flu Preps

2009-04-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

Flu Preps

I've been meaning to write a little about prepping for a potential pandemic flu. Now, with the current state of affairs it's not too difficult to realize that this can actually happen.

I want to encourage everyone to gather a three month's supply of the food that you eat on a regular basis. Figure out about 5 meals that are common in your home. Take of example: spaghetti. In our family we have 6 children and 2 adults. We have to have 3 pounds of pasta for just one meal. If we eat spaghetti once a week, I'll need to store at least 36 boxes of pasta for a three month's supply. The same type of calculations are done for the ingredients for the sauce. If you buy canned sauce, then calculate how many you will need.

Continue doing this for all of the meals you've chosen. Remember to think of meals for breakfast as well. Also include fun foods that you're going to want to eat. Cookies, cake and brownie mixes, jello, instant pudding...etc.

Along with food, you're going to want to have N95 masks and surgical type gloves in storage. This is to prevent spreading or inhaling anything from the flu "of the day" to MRSA a nasty staph infection.

Learn how and teach your loved ones how to wash their hands correctly. When washing hands, lather the hands up generously and continue to scrub hands for the the amount of time it takes to sing "Happy Birthday". Then rinse hands in warm water. You'll need to wash hands after using alcohol-based hand sanitizer five times. The hand sanitizer just doesn't get into all the crevices of the hands and fingers.

BUT, please do include hand sanitizer in your storage. Get hold of small bottles of sanitizer so that EVERY member of the family carries it with them. Teach them how to use it and make it a normal part of their day.

Washing hands will be the greatest source of protection we have to fight against any funky things coming down the pike.

Bleach is also necessary to clean the surfaces of your home and other areas. Mix 1 tsp of bleach to one gallon of water. This mixture will only have potency for ONE day. You'll have to mix this up every day. My husband will be taking this in a spray bottle to the gym every day to spray down the equipment before he works out.

Keep your "outside of the house" footprint small. Combine all of your errands so you only have to be outside for a minimal amount of time. This is where the three month's supply comes in handy.

Add over the counter drugs and vitamins to your storage. Things like children's Tylenol and cough medicine may help with symptoms from the flu. The healthier you can make your body the better chance you will have of getting through this will as little stress as possible.

If you have more questions, please ask.

Container Gardening Class

2009-03-31T07:56:00.000-07:00

I taught a container gardening class for my stake last week. I created a power point presentation instead of having a gazaillion handouts. Technology can be glorious. I wanted to share the link to the presentation for all to enjoy. :)

Container Gardening Presentation

Online Canning Class

2009-03-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

I just took an online self-study course on Home Canning and Preservation offered by the the National Center for Home Food Preservation through the University of Georgia.

I have to say that I knew a lot but learned quite a bit as well. It also helped to solidify some things I was a bit shaky on. They have you take a pre-quiz before each section. I didn't pass the pre-quizzes but scored between 70-90%. After the section, you'll have the opportunity to take the same quiz up to two more times. If you pass the course with greater than 70%, you will be sent a certificate saying that you completed the course.

The course is free of charge. Click on this link http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/index.html and scroll to the bottom. You'll see a little sign that says "Preserving Food at Home--Self Study". Under that banner there will be a teeny tiny link to sign up for the course. It took about a week before I was sent the link and password for the actual course.

You have up to 6 months to complete it. Having done a bunch of canning, I didn't feel it necessary to actually go through the exercises they give you. They teach you to can apples, tomatoes and something else that slips my mind. If you mess up, they give you reasons for the problems. I did find it to be very helpful.

I completed the course in one day. If you're familiar with canning, it takes about 2 hours or so. I was also doing laundry, homeschooling and general mom stuff.

New Fun with Food Storage forum!

2009-03-01T21:16:00.001-08:00

Okay, so this isn't exactly new anymore. That's what I get for taking a long break.

The gals at Food Storage Made Easy created the Fun with Food Storage Forum. Come over, ask questions, and share your ideas!

How (and why) to can beans

2009-03-01T20:49:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the extended break I've taken from writing for this blog! I hope to get going with more regular posts.

I've been meaning to write a post about canning beans. Dry beans store well, but they can be difficult to use. Most recipes require you to soak the beans the night before, which requires some planning ahead. But you can convert your dry beans into canned beans through use of the pressure cooker!

About a month ago, Kim at All about Food Storage posted about how to can beans. The way she does it is the way I (and many of my friends) can beans: place about 1 1/4 cups of dry beans into the quart jar, add 1 teaspoon salt, fill to the top (leaving 1 inch head space) with water, and process for 90 minutes in a pressure cooker according to the manufacturer's instructions. It's a very easy way to prepare dry beans, and the beans come out soft and delicious. The processing cooks the beans.

However, that isn't the official recommendation. The official recipe for canning beans, which you will find in the Ball Blue Book and from the extension service, is that you first soak the beans overnight and then boil them for 30 minutes, and then fill the jars.

I want to note the official recipe so you can make an informed decision. I have never boiled the beans first. 90 minutes in a pressure cooker is a very long time. I would think that would be enough time for the heat to kill off any bad bacteria, but that is only my unscientific opinion. If you wanted to be extra careful but still use this method of canning beans, you could increase the processing time to 120 minutes. Beans cook in about 30 minutes in a pressure cooker, so by adding the bean cooking time (30 minutes) onto the processing time (90 minutes), the beans would have had the same amount of cooking recommended by the official source.

With canned beans available, it is quick and easy to throw together a dinner of chili, taco soup, or burritos.

Food Storage Recipe Contest!

2009-02-22T01:52:00.000-08:00

I received this via email from a woman at Shelf Reliance, and told her I would pass it along. Let's see what we can create, folks!

--

Because we know how fun and rewarding using food storage can be, we want to get you involved! Despite what some people may think, food storage does not have to be stowed away in dark corners. Really!

For all of you food storage lovers out there who understand the value of rotating your food storage and using it in daily menu planning, we have a recipe contest just for you! We are looking for great tasting, nutritional recipes that incorporate food storage.

In exchange for your recipe, you will be entered to win one of following three prizes!

Prizes:

1st Place = One (1) Harvest Food Rotation System ($459 value)

2nd Place = THRIVE Fruits and Veggies Essential Package ($283 value) [I have tried some of their stuff, and it was good!]

3rd Place = Three (3) Cansolidator Pantry systems ($135 value)

To Enter:

1. You may submit your recipe through email to contest@shelfreliance.com
2. You can mail in your entry to: Shelf Reliance Contests, 810 N. 2800 W., Lindon, UT, 84042

Rules:

1. All recipes must be submitted by Feb. 28, 2009 by 6:00 PM MST
2. Multiple entries are allowed, but each entry must be submitted separately
3. All entries must include the recipe name, number of servings the recipe yields, clearly understandable ingredients and ingredient measurements, step-by-step preparation instructions, and cooking directions.
4. You must include your name, phone number, complete address, and e-mail address with each entry.

Judging:

All entries will be judged by a qualified panel of judges to select (1) grand prize winner, (1) second place winner, and (1) third place winner. Recipes will be judged on taste, creativity, and practicality.

For all official rules and details, visit http://www.shelfreliance.com/pages/contests

Power Outages

2009-01-11T09:03:00.000-08:00

Are you prepared? During winter in our area, power can go out & stay out for 3-5 days. Fortunately, this hasn’t happened in several years, BUT it can. (how about those summer “rolling blackouts" in California? We’ve never been part of one, but it’s a possibility here.)

What does it take to “be prepared” for a power outage? If you use a generator, do you have enough fuel stored for longer outages? If you are one of the many families without a generator (we don’t have one, yet), what do you do when there’s an outage?

For starters, you need a heat source, a light source, and methods of preparing healthy meals/heating water. Right up on my list of “must haves” is a plan to keep everyone occupied & sane while the power is out.

Heat: At this point, we’d be miserable if power went out for any duration! We need to get propane again, but have to wait for the $$...we should have this situation remedied by end of January! We have extra blankets, warm clothing, and those hand/foot warmers. We would close off all rooms except the living room & contain our body heat in there. BUT, are there alternate heat sources that would be SAFE to use indoors?

Light: We’re set here. Kerosene & battery operated lanterns, with extra fuel & batteries on hand. We have flashlights in every room. We got a wind-up flashlight for each car for Christmas - these are pretty cool! We also have a stash of light sticks, if needed. We also have plenty candles, but don’t often use them – too dangerous with a curious cat!

Cooking: I’m fine here, too. Cooking during a power outage is easy if you enjoy camp cooking! We have our camp stoves with extra fuel, 3 Dutch ovens, bbq with plenty charcoal, and “camp fire.” I used to have a supply of the tuna-can stoves (buddy burners?), but we're out...note to self: make more! We LOVE outdoor cooking, so this is not a hardship for us :) Since this is a FOOD storage blog, I should mention WHAT to cook, not only HOW to cook it...if you have the equipment mentioned, you can cook any meal outside that you can cook inside, with a bit of extra thought. Be sure to start thawing meats earlier, or plan to use canned meat. Cooking in a Dutch oven can take a while, so if needed, be sure to start your food to cooking early. This is a good time to use up some of that "almost ready to expire" canned food in a big pot of soup.

If you don't have the cooking equipment, you can still eat well. Tuna or p.b. sandwiches are always yummy. Heat a can of chili, stew, or soup on a tuna-can stove or over an open fire. If you can boil water, you can eat cup o' soup or any number of the freeze-dried/dehydrated foods in your stash. Be sure to check your food storage for foods that can be prepared with little or no preparation! Now that I'm writing this, I don't have enough in this category...

I also like to keep a big pot of water simmering. We use it for hot cocoa or scoop (with a ladle) a bit out for hand washing.

Sanity/entertainment: Our family loves to play games, so a power outage always means lots of games – board games, card games, it doesn’t matter. Our youngest is learning to play guitar, so I’m sure we could talk him into some live entertainment! We also have the keyboard that has battery-backup, so we can always have piano music, as well.

For longer outages, you should be prepared to save the foods in your freezer…can you cook up big batches of whatever is thawing and can it? I’m thinking mostly about meat because it would be such a shame to lose! I know, home-owner’s insurance should cover lost contents, BUT it’s still such a waste. I wish that I could say I’m fully prepared, but I can’t – yet. I have so much meat in my freezer that I don’t have a way YET to process it all without the electricity. I have a pressure cooker/canner, but I’ve only used it in the kitchen. (if we had the generator up & running, I shouldn’t need to worry about the freezer…)

OH, one last thought…every home should have a regular (non-cordless) phone to use in case of power outage…

Does anyone have other suggestions for surviving power outages?

Managing Your Storage Inventory

2009-01-04T17:44:00.000-08:00

The most important suggestion I can make: DO keep an inventory!

I have an Excel spreadsheet for tracking my storage. I keep it saved on the computer, but after losing a couple computers, I also keep it saved on a thumb drive. I also print out a master copy in January. I make notes throughout the year: whenever I remove something from the storage room; when I think of something to change; when someone gives me an idea I don’t want to forget. I usually won’t print out a new copy unless the current one gets too cluttered with my notes.

When I update my inventory each January, I reconsider my needs for the upcoming year: is there anything I need/want to add or eliminate from my storage plan, or change quantities? For instance: 1) this year, I have a son who is not here full-time any more – do I still count him when calculating quantity requirements? 2) It is also important to consider changes in dietary needs – is there someone with a “special needs” diet due to health issues? Or in this case, I have a new nephew, so I now include baby & toddler items in my storage, because he will spend a lot of time here. I plan to rotate through the perishable things on a quarterly basis, and send things to my sister for use – she’ll love the quarterly care packages, and they can certainly use the help! 3) Another thing to consider is the changes in eating habits, especially if you have a teenager going through growth spurts! (Sometimes I wonder if I really only have 5 people here!) 4) Does your plan include the possibility of additional mouths to feed in case of emergency? My brother is with us “for a while.” He may only be here a few months, maybe longer. When calculating our needs, I tend to lean towards generous, rather than conservative. My home is the place where family & friends tend to land in times of need, so I feel so much better knowing I’ve allowed for that possibility!

If you’re like me, you’ve always got storage on your mind – am I obsessed? Probably. I’ve been at this for a while now & it’s actually FUN for me to find a new way to fine tune my methods! I hope this helps you on your quest to be self-reliant!

I want everyone reading this to know that I have a strong testimony of the concept of acquiring & maintaining an ample supply of food (and non-food) items. I will share more in another post, but for here I will tell you that my family has just survived a 3-month financial scare because my husband lost his job. We were fortunate to have some money in savings, but had it not been for our food storage, that money would not have gone nearly as far! We were offered help from the Bishop’s Storehouse & I was able to say we didn’t need that assistance at this point…what a great feeling! We have followed the counsel to do this & we’ve been blessed for it…

News Story about Mormons' Self-reliance

2008-12-26T23:45:00.000-08:00

This is a very positive story about how members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are "well served by self-reliance in hard times." This article gives an interesting look into the purposes of the Church's welfare program -- to help members become self-reliant and to help the poor and the needy.

For example, dDid you know that

The church...makes its programs available to nonmembers and in particular reaches out to the homeless. The church also works in partnership with other faiths and local social service agencies to share surplus commodities and support services.

In my opinion, a great element of many of the welfare services that the Church provides (such as the Bishop's Storehouse, which is explained in the article) is that

...Mormon church welfare is not a free ride.
Assistance comes with the expectation of reciprocal service, whether it's a few hours of volunteer work on the Square stocking shelves or some other form of service.

The Church also has employment services to help people find jobs, improve their interviewing skills, find scholarships for college, grow their small business, and a range of other things.

One of the things I love about the Church organization is that it is there to help people -- whether Church member or not -- grow and progress and succeed in every aspect of their lives.

You Can Do It!

2008-12-18T11:34:00.000-08:00

Just a short little story about what really can be done.

I found a recipe for Jalapeno Jelly Chicken. I've really been wanting to try it but I ran out of pepper jelly a while back. So, I started to hunt for some more. I went to FOUR grocery stores and none of them had it. Yesterday, I was mad and decided that I would just make it myself. I stopped by the produce section and grabbed quite a few jalapenos and some red peppers.

Today, in a matter of minutes, I made four half pints of pepper jelly. I had the water bath canner, jars, lids, rings and sure jell in my food storage.

It's silly to think that I wasted a lot of aggravation hauling around four kids with me and a lot of gas trying to find something store bought that was just too easy to make. I won't do that again.

The internet is a wonderful place to find just about anything we need to know. I'm grateful for the videos, step by step instructions and recipes that are so easy to find.

You can do it!

Fast fast fudge

2008-12-16T21:17:00.000-08:00

I'm always looking for recipes that use basic ingredients. Recipes that call for basic foods will usually be cheaper, and they will help you rotate your food storage. Sometimes they take extra time to prepare, but not always. Here is an example of a recipe that uses basic ingredients that is quick to prepare:

Fast fast fudge

1 pound powdered sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
1/2 cup butter (one stick, unmelted)
1/4 cup milk (reconstituted powdered milk is fine)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Sift powdered sugar and cocoa into a bowl. Add butter and milk. Do not stir. Microwave 2 minutes on high. Stir. Add vanilla, stir. Pour into 8" square baking dish. Refrigerate 1 hour before cutting and serving. Serves 16.

Tonight I was asked to bring treats to choir practice just a few hours before it was time to go. I scoured my cookbook for something that I could cook quickly with ingredients I had on hand, and I found this. I whipped them up quickly. They were a hit at choir practice tonight. This is a great recipe to have on hand during the holidays: quick, fancy, and inexpensive.

Skills To Go With Food Storage

2008-12-16T09:48:00.000-08:00

This is something that has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Do you, me, we have the skills necessary to survive an economic downturn? Whether that be on a personal, national or global level.

Here's what I mean. I'm a mom of six kids. Laundry is a beast for me. Socks seem to get lost or damaged or otherwise. When I had four kids under the age of six, I just chose to throw out the unmatched socks and buy new packages for everyone. But, that was when the economy was booming and it was just easier. Quite frankly, it's still the easiest way to do it. BUT.....I'm wondering is it time to learn some of the skills our Great Depression ancestors mastered? Or do you adjust your budget for things like buying new socks? The easy way out. I think that there has to be some compensation.

I'm going to suggest a few skills I think we all need and that we need to teach our children or those over which we have stewardship.

Darning Socks (Needs a darning egg or darning mushroom)
Simple Sewing - buttons, hems, etc (add to that list)
Making bread and bread products using food storage(pizza dough)
Making buttermilk, yogurt and cheese with powdered milk
Keeping a small garden - container gardening
Cleaning supplies with vinegar and ammonia (other suggestions)
Using coupons effectively to reduce grocery costs
Cooking from scratch - gravy, frosting, roasting a chicken, etc

These are just a few. What are some more suggestions of skills needed. If you know websites that are particular to certain skills, that would be nice to know also.

These skills may be difficult initially to introduce to our very busy lives, but I have no doubt that as we do them they will become easier and we'll be excited at our own self-reliance. I personally feel that it's better to learn now while the easy option is still available.

I would also encourage each of us to set goals for learning the skills we feel are most important to our families. Perhaps identify 3-4 skills and assign months that you'll devote to learning the skills. I have found that YouTube has myriads of videos showing all kinds of domestic skills. Anything from darning a sock to making your own fresh mozzarella cheese.

And yes, all the kids are getting brand new packages of socks for Christmas.

Surviving a Minor Illness

2008-12-05T16:12:00.000-08:00

I've been a bit under the weather this week so I'm not as perky as I usually am when it comes to food storage. But, that's kinda what I'd like to address.

One of the things I love about having home storage is the fact that I've put forth energy to think of and prepare things so that when I go down or if there is a disruption in the daily schedule, no one is really put out. Other than the fact that all I've really done this week is play games with the kids and sit on the couch, everyone has eaten and I had medicine in the storage so I didn't have to go out to the store or wait it out until my husband got home. We did have one little emergency that required my husband to run to the drugstore to buy an eye patch for my son. But, now we've got an eye patch to add to our other first aid efforts. (Don't worry about the son, he was hit in the eye with a tennis ball while playing "suicide" at scouts.)

So, may I suggest taking an inventory of your medicines and vitamins and if you're running low or are out, put that on your grocery list for this week. There are quite a few coupons out right now that you should be able to match to sales for the different products.

A few ideas include:

Tylenol/Ibuprofen - adult and kids

Cough Medicine

Antihistamines

Eye Patch (that's just to see if you're paying attention)

Vitamin C

Airborne (love this stuff)

Zicam (another favorite)

Nyquil or other such all-in-one, knock-me-out type med

Also, I'd suggest working with your children to teach them how to make some super quickie meals so that you don't have to get off the couch. I'll address that one in another post. :)

Levels

2008-12-02T17:48:00.000-08:00

Here at the Pantry Panel, we are writing for an audience with a wide variety of food storage experience. Because of uncertainties in the economy, there are a lot of people who are new to food storage, who are searching for basic information and overwhelmed about where to start. And then there are food storage gurus who have been cooking with basic foods for years.

We'd like to write for both audiences, without overwhelming the newbie or boring the expert. To that end, we will label our posts Newbie, Skilled, and Black belt. I'm calling the highest level "black belt" in reference to The Tightwad Gazette's references to "black belt tightwads."

Newbie posts are for those just starting out. These will focus on the the basics of the Church's counsel: storing a three-month supply, drinking water, a financial reserve, and foods that will store long-term.

Skilled posts are for those who understand the basics and want to go to the next step of learning how to prepare these basic foods. These will cover topics such as making homemade bread, tortillas, and yogurt, using dried beans, and gardening.

Black belt posts are for those who have been at this for a long time, for those who are especially motivated to be prepared, or for those of us weirdos who think this is fun. These posts are also good for those who are in tight financial circumstances, who are willing to spend more time on preparedness so they can conserve their cash for other needs. Black belt posts are about things like pressure canning, storing blocks of cheese in the basement, or gleaning fruit. These skills may not necessarily be difficult, but they are not the basics.

The label will be beneath the post, in the "labels" section.

Food storage Q&A: storing leftover turkey

2008-11-29T11:39:00.000-08:00

Audrey asks, "I have SO MUCH extra turkey. Any way I can store it? Thanks!"

You can either freeze or can leftover meat. To freeze leftover meat, I separate the meat into meal-sized portions. I wrap it with two layers of plastic wrap, and then label the package with the contents and the date. I store packages of the same type in the same part of the freezer, so I can find it when I need it.

If I want to freeze in portions smaller than a meal, I will "flash freeze" it. That means I will place the food individually on a jelly roll pan, and place that pan in the freezer. After the food is frozen, I place the individual frozen pieces into a zipper-lock freezer bag. I do this with chicken breasts, homemade chicken nuggets, grated cheese, fruit, and occasionally cooked hamburger or sliced turkey. This way you can open the bag and take out a couple of pieces of meat for a sandwich, without defrosting the whole bag.

Or, you can can it. Wendi, our new blogger, wrote up a detailed description of how to can chicken breasts on her blog (scroll down to November 9). She took photos of every step of the way, so it's easy to follow. She canned raw chicken breasts, but you can replace that with cooked turkey without any major changes.

Enjoy your leftover turkey!

New authors here!

2008-11-26T17:58:00.000-08:00

Since Michelle and I began this blog a few months ago, we have meant to find other people to help us write so this could be a group blog. Many people have a slightly different take on food storage, and we can learn more when we see how different people approach the same topic. Finally we were successful in finding more people to contribute We are pleased to welcome two new authors! Wendi Bergin, who writes Wendi's Home Storage Skills blog, is a mother of 6 from New Jersey. Carole is a mother of two teenage boys who lives on three acres outside of Sacramento, California. They have a lot of food storage experience between the two of them, and we are so excited to read their ideas.

Day-after-Thanksgiving soup

2008-11-24T20:22:00.000-08:00

Making turkey broth is easy!

Step 1: Collect the turkey carcass while Thanksgiving dinner is being cleaned up.

Step 2: Place turkey carcass in a large crock pot, roaster oven (which can function like a giant crock pot), or stock pot. Cover the carcass with water. Add a splash of vinegar, if desired, to extract calcium from the bones. The vinegar cannot be tasted in the finished product. If you have a crock pot that will fit the turkey carcass, you can get the broth started before the Thanksgiving dishes are done.

Step 3: Simmer on low for at least 2-3 hours, or overnight, or slightly longer, until you feel like dealing with it.

Step 4: Place a colander inside a different large stock pot. Carefully pour the broth into the colander. The colander will catch the bones and meat. Using gloves or hot pads, carefully remove the colander and its contents from the stock pot full of strained broth.

Step 5: Place the stock pot in the fridge. Let it cool until the fat is solid. Skim off the fat and discard. Enjoy the broth in soup or other recipes. Use it within a week, or freeze or can it.

Step 6: You can get a couple of meals' worth of meat by separating the meat from the bones. A "chicken pickin' party" (or turkey, as the case may be) takes a strong stomach, and I don't recommend it for those in the first trimester of pregnancy! But my kids seem to think it's fun to help, especially if I let them eat a little of the meat. After letting the meat and bones cool, I put on disposable gloves. I pick off the parts of meat that look like meat, package it in meal-sized portions with plastic wrap, and freeze it to use in casseroles or soups later. Bones and anything questionable (connective tissue) gets trashed.

You can take that broth and turn it into soup. Lion House Chicken Noodle Soup, posted by Crystal at Everyday Food Storage a few weeks ago, is a delicious recipe to try. We are adding it to our family cookbook.

Making your own broth is a little extra work, but it is rewarding to get some extra "free" meals out of something that would have otherwise been wasted.

Don't forget the non-food stuff!

2008-11-21T16:12:00.000-08:00

I just have to say hats off to Sara for all she has done here! I apologize that I haven't contributed more...have had a crazy couple of months.

In all our talk of food storage, I'm going to diverge a little and remind everyone to not forget non-food items as they build their supply.

For example, in our house, we have a specific brand of toilet paper that I like. It's not cheap, and so I hate to pay full price. And I rarely have. When it's on sale, I make a fool of myself and fill the cart as full as possible. Sometimes I will go back twice.

It's been a while since I have done this, but at one point, with my estimates, I had a ten months' supply of TP in my basement! (I wish I had taken a picture -- I had several stacks that went to the ceiling.) This not only saves money in the long run, but also leaves me with something I wouldn't want to be left without if for some reason I was limited in what/how much I could buy. :)

Job loss, economic struggles (personal or more general), distribution problems (imagine if there was a trucker's strike sometime because of gas prices or something else), panic times (think of when rice was nigh unto impossible to find), or even some kind of quarantine (less common to consider, but still a possibility) could mean that shopping for what we need real-time may not always be possible, or at least not economically wise. While of course, a supply of food and water is critical, I invite us all to think about other supplies that become important. Here are some of the things I always like to have on hand:

Toilet paper
Soap (hand soap (I like the liquid kind) and bar soap for bathing)
Shampoo
Paper towels
Paper plates, cups, etc.
Plastic utensils
Dish soap (liquid) and dishwasher soap (if applicable)
First aid supplies (bandaids, rubbing alcohol, etc.)
Over-the-counter and prescription medications (there's nothing worse than having someone get sick late at night and have to run to the store -- think ahead about the common ailments and have a supply of medicines for these things -- just be sure to rotate)
Hand sanitizer
Toothpaste, toothbrushes, floss
Deodorant
Aluminum foil, plastic wrap, waxed paper, etc.
Cleaning supplies (bleach, Lysol, bathroom cleaners, floor cleaners, etc. - bleach, if the non-scented kind, can also double as a water purification option -- be sure to rotate this as well, as it loses potency over time and should not be used for water purification after a year or so)

You get the idea.

For prescription meds, try to fill regularly. Some will allow you to fill several days before the cycle. You can also see if your meds can be purchased on a 90-day supply plan.

Make a list of the non-food items you use on a regular basis. Estimate how much you use in a month, and look for sales to build up a buffer supply. Start with a one-month supply and work upward from there. Don't only focus on those things you would use in a true emergency, when water is not available, for example. Consider the big picture and try, little by little, to create your own little store -- so you are not dependent on the stores and their supplies and prices. It not only helps you prepare for emergencies, but also just ends up making life easier and saves time and money. I go to the store a lot less because I have my own store in my basement!

Stuffing bread, with the bread machine

2008-11-21T11:58:00.000-08:00

Stuffing is my favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner. When I was a kid, my mom would set out stale pieces of bread in a big Tupperware bowl on the day before Thanksgiving. She broke the bread into small pieces and let it sit to dry out. Sometimes she would dry it a little while in a low oven. She fried onion and celery in a little butter, and tossed the bread in, adding spices and enough broth to make it moist. Then she stuffed it into the turkey. Delicious!

For some reason, I have never made stuffing this way as a grown-up. I've always bought boxes of Mrs. Cubbison's instead, even though I'm normally a make-it-from-scratch snob. So, this year I am making the stuffing bread from scratch for the first time. This will save us money on our Thanksgiving groceries, help us rotate our food storage, and start a new family tradition. Since I'm using the bread machine, it won't take a lot of extra time if I plan ahead.

My mom says it really doesn't matter what kind of bread you use. She would just take stale bread from the bread drawer, which was usually store-bought wheat bread. We don't have much stale bread around here; it all gets eaten pretty quickly. What little we have gets turned into bread crumbs. So I figured I'd be making bread for stuffing anyway, and I might as well pick out a good recipe.

So I looked for a good recipe the way I usually do nowadays, by searching the internet. Sure enough, a few recipes did come up under "stuffing bread machine." I tried this one in the bread machine today. It's a basic bread recipe with added herbs, diced onion, and an egg. I don't like the texture of onion, so I blended the onion and water together in the blender before adding it to the bread machine. The bread smelled delicious while baking, and I couldn't resist trying a piece when it was done. Delicious! If I were eating it straight, I'd add a little extra salt to the bread, increasing it to 1 teaspoon. The stuffing will have more salt added through the broth, so adding extra salt isn't necessary if using it for stuffing.

Cooking the stuffing

Traditionally, stuffing is stuffed into the turkey. Our family has usually done this, despite modern worries about salmonella, and we are still alive. However, some foodies like Alton Brown say that you should never bake stuffing in the turkey because it increases the cooking time and makes the bird drier. The problem is that baked stuffing usually tastes dry. Also, sometimes you need to make extra stuffing for more guests. How can you make good stuffing without putting it into the turkey?

Last year, I tried this recipe for Slow Cooker Stuffing. I adapted it to our family's stuffing style by adding sausage and eliminating the mushroom and egg. I was careful about the amount of broth I added, only adding enough to make the bread moist, not soggy. I also added extra turkey gravy, at my mom's suggestion. She said that the gravy helps the stuffing remain moist, the way that "real stuffing" (from the turkey) is. I put it all into the crockpot early in the day and let it cook on low. This was very convenient, because I didn't have to deal with the stuffing at the last minute, and it stayed warm until it was ready to serve. And it was delicious. I'm making it this way again this year.

Food storage for the allergic

2008-11-06T08:50:00.000-08:00

Safely Gathered In has started a guest post series about storing food for those with food allergies. Unfortunately, I also have a little experience with this. Fortunately, the experience was short-lived. When my youngest daughter was a baby, we discovered that she was allergic to milk, wheat, eggs, and nuts. Oy! She was exclusively breastfed, which meant that I needed to avoid those foods.

I valued breastfeeding, so I started the horrible diet. I lasted for a couple of months until my health got a little iffy. I switched her to soy formula for a couple of months, and we were successful in switching her back to breastfeeding after that. Within that time, she had gained the ability to process the proteins in my milk, and she kept nursing until she was 13 months old.

She outgrew the wheat allergy by the time she was about 1 1/2, thank goodness. She outgrew the allergy to milk and egg by the time she was 3. She still avoids nuts, but her allergist thinks she will outgrow that in the next couple of years as well.

The wheat allergy was the killer. Some people thought that a wheat allergy just meant that I would just have to avoid whole wheat products. Nope. White flour is made of wheat, of course, and it is in just about everything.

How can you adapt food storage to your or your family's special dietary needs?

Figure out what you can eat. If you are new to the diet, it takes a while to figure out what you are able to eat, and what you want to eat regularly.
Figure out how to cook what you eat from basic ingredients. Instead of depending on items from the store, try to figure out what your diet would look like if you were to make the items yourself. Some examples of basic cooking for allergies from food storage ingredients are below. This can be challenging. Look for food allergy cookbooks from the library, or websites and internet message boards devoted to people with the same dietary restrictions.
Store those basic ingredients. In our case, we added more barley and soy beans to our food storage. I added nutritional yeast (an ingredient in dairy-free cheese sauce) to our three-month supply.
Tools. With food allergies, extra tools become even more helpful. Usually the special ingredients that food allergic people require are very expensive. A grain mill is helpful for milling various non-wheat grains. A soy milk maker saves a ton of money compared to buying store-bought soy milk. Canning, dehydrating, and freezing your own allergen-free foods may also be necessary.

Here are a few things I learned when I was in that world:

Barley is a decent substitution for wheat. If you are allergic to wheat and not gluten, I had decent success with substituting barley flour for wheat flour in recipes. I believe they sold "white" barley flour at the health food store. Barley has gluten, so this wouldn't work for gluten intolerant people.

Waffle bread. My neighbor with Celiac told me his cool trick. He makes his "bread" for sandwiches in a Belgian waffle maker. Because gluten-free flours do not rise, they have the consistency of play-dough. There are no air bubbles baked in the bread to make it lighter. But the waffle iron bakes the air holes in. I think he used a wheat-free cornbread recipe. He bakes up big batches at a time and stores it in his freezer. With this "bread" he can make sandwiches.

Soy milk maker. After my daughter weaned, she was still allergic to milk. I started making our own soy milk. I used the SoyaJoy soy milk maker, which was a good machine. I dumped in soy beans that had been soaked overnight, and filled up the jug with water. I turned on the machine, which ground up the soy beans and heated the water. Fifteen minutes later, I had soy milk. I added some sugar, salt, and a vitamin tablet for calcium, then placed it in the fridge to cool. Cheap soy milk! In 2003, when I was doing this, a half gallon of soy milk at the store cost around $3. The soy beans for a half gallon of soy milk cost between 25 and 50 cents at that time. I already had some soy beans in storage that needed to be used up, so the cost was even less for us. Vickilynn Haycraft estimated that making her own soy milk saved her $500 per year.

I once experimented with making soy milk without a maker. It was a difficult process. I boiled the soy beans, and then ground them up, and then squeezed the hot soy pulp through a piece of cheese cloth (burning my hands). I liked the soy milk maker much better.

Instead of storing powdered milk for my daughter, I stored soy beans. If you drink soy milk and do not want a soy milk maker, or want to store soy milk in another way in case of a power outage, there are shelf-stable soy milks that can also be stored. I've also seen powdered soy milk.

Soy flour egg substitute. I've posted about substituting soy flour for eggs before. I used it often when I was on this diet.

Fats. Milk allergies make it difficult to figure out what fats are safe. Butter is out, as are many margarines. My daughter could tolerate Blue Bonnet Lite Margarine. Nucoa was also milk-free. Coconut oil, olive oil, lard, and shortening are safe for most people with allergies. Coconut oil and unopened olive oil store for 1 to 2 years.

Thickeners. My beef stew recipe had flour in it, in order to thicken the sauce. What could I substitute? I found The Cook's Thesaurus, an excellent website for figuring out substitutions. I learned about instant tapioca. I added that to the stew instead of flour, and I could eat beef stew!

Available "normal" meals for the milk- and wheat-allergic. I ate a lot of tacos with corn tortillas, and a lot of rice pilaf. Sauces were difficult, because most had milk or egg in them. Tomato sauce was still available, thankfully. For dessert, rice krispie treats were legal. I also made this hot fudge cake, substituting barley flour for all-purpose flour, and soy milk for milk. Get good at reading labels. Some breakfast cereals don't have wheat.

Cream of chicken soup substitute. The book Country Beans by Rita Bingham teaches how to make quick meals using bean flour (i.e. beans run through the wheat grinder. This is a good use of old beans.) Her book has a recipe for Three-Minute Cream of Chicken Soup, using water, bean flour, chicken soup base or bouillon, and optional diced chicken pieces. This is a great option for the food allergic. I tried it once and it tasted good.

Links on the economy and peak oil

2008-11-02T13:57:00.000-08:00

This isn't a blog about the economy. I like keeping this a happy blog about food storage and frugality. But the problems our country is facing are complex and difficult to understand. I thought I'd share a couple of links that I have found helpful.

Chris Martenson's Crash Course. This series of online videos clearly and logically explains the mess we are facing in the economy, peak oil, and the environment. He presents the data in a way that is easy to understand, and shows you how he reached the conclusions he has come to. The videos are less than 15 minutes each, for a total of about 3 hours.

And Sharon Astyk wrote a blog post yesterday about oil depletion and its consequences. According to a recent news article, the production of 400 largest oil fields in the world are declining 9.1% per year. Don't get tricked into thinking that the recent drop in oil prices will be permanent. It's smart to make common-sense preparations in case oil prices shoot up in the next few years.

I hope I'm wrong. I was all geared up for Y2K, and that turned out to be a non-event. But it's best to be prepared.

Create a breakfast muffin

2008-11-02T07:31:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite cheap breakfasts is the Create a Breakfast Muffin recipe from Tightwad Gazette. It's a mix-and-match recipe that you can customize to the ingredients you have on hand. It's been posted on the web, here. For the grain, I use 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup old fashioned oats. Because I use whole grains, I increase the baking powder to 1 tablespoon.

I don't usually make mixes, but I make an exception for these muffins. Since it's a breakfast food, preparation time is of the essence. I store it in the freezer because the whole grains and fat would go rancid over the long term. Here's my mix:

12 cups freshly ground whole wheat flour (preferably soft white wheat)
4 cups old-fashioned oats
4 cups sugar
1/2 cup baking powder
4 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 cups regular non-fat powdered milk
2 cups fat of your choice

In a huge bowl, add all ingredients but the fat. Add the fat. Mix until thoroughly combined. I store it in two gallon Ziplock bags in the freezer, with preparation instructions on the bag.

To make muffins, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Grease muffin tins. Measure out 3 scant cups of muffin mix (2 5/6 cups is what the math works out to), 1 egg, 3/4 cups of water, and 1 to 1 1/2 cups of an "addition." For us, usually that is overripe bananas, pumpkin, or zucchini. Look at the Tightwad Gazette article or the link above for more ideas. With pumpkin, I also add a little pumpkin pie spice (which is cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger). If the mixture is too thick, add a little extra water. Stir until just combined; it's okay for it to be a little lumpy. Fill muffin cups 2/3s full. Bake mini muffins for 7-9 minutes, regular sized muffins for 15-20 minutes, and large muffins for 20-25 minutes. Turn pans around once during baking. Check muffin with a toothpick; they are done when it comes out clean.

These are yummy and cheap. Enjoy!

Advantages of a three-month supply

2008-10-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

Wendy at iPrepared wrote up a great post about the advantages of a three-month supply. She's absolutely right. Keeping a three-month stockpile saves time, because it eliminates last-minute grocery store trips for missing ingredients and enables you to shop less often. It saves money, because you can wait to stock up on items until they are on sale, and fewer grocery store trips means less money spent on impulse buys and gas. It leads to a better diet, because meals prepared at home with wholesome ingredients are better than quickie convenience foods from the store. And keeping a three-month supply inspires confidence, in both you and in your family. With a little extra food, there is less to worry about. My husband and I talk about problems in the economy with our elementary school-aged kids. They don't seem to be afraid. I think part of the reason they aren't afraid is that we have food in the basement and a garden in the backyard.

Another advantage is that little kids think it's cool to have a store in the basement.

Another advantage is inflation protection. I'm glad that we are still eating cheese at last year's cheaper prices.

While I'm here, what are the disadvantages?

Basement flood. We did that last year, and it wasn't fun. A pipe burst over our food storage, getting everything wet and leaving a couple of inches of water on the floor. We had to move everything and suck up the water with the wet/dry vacuum and with the carpet cleaner. Our kind neighbor helped us. But most of our food was okay. The boxes of baking soda got a little wet, but everything else was wrapped in such a way that the food was okay. By the way, now is the time to disconnect hoses from the outside of the house, so your interior pipes don't freeze this winter, causing a flood in your basement!

Moving. Moving food storage is tough. But with a three-month supply, it isn't too difficult to use up your food storage before moving. Towards the end you tend to get creative with meals to use up spare ingredients. I think we made chicken spaghetti before our last move. It wasn't too bad.

Weirdness. A few people still think it's weird. But more and more people are thinking that keeping a three-month supply is a smart thing. Funny how quickly opinions are changing.

Caramel apple recipes to try

2008-10-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

Last week in the store, next to the apples in the produce section, I saw a big barrel full of individually wrapped caramel candies. I also saw packaged caramel apple making kits.

I know from a carmel corn recipe that making caramel isn't especially difficult. It involves butter and brown sugar and cooking it on the stovetop in a certain way that isn't that complicated, right? So why do all of the caramel apple recipes on allrecipes.com call for individually wrapped caramels?

Caramels probably store just fine. But who remembers to store caramels? I don't. If you know that you can make your own caramel from a few basic ingredients, you have more options.

Anyway, if you want to make caramel apples without making a special trip to the store or spending a lot of time peeling off the little plastic wrappers, here are links to a couple of recipes:

The best and easiest caramel apples, from Recipezaar. This recipe calls for butter, brown sugar, corn syrup, a can of sweetened condensed milk, and vanilla (as well as apples and sticks). Based on the recipe, it seems like this one does take a long time to cook (30 to 40 minutes on low), but the reviews say they are very good.

Caramel apples from Family Fun Magazine. This one just calls for butter and brown sugar, in case you are someone who avoids corn syrup. The submitter of the recipe says that this "makes a glossy caramel coating that sticks to the apples without pulling out your fillings." This recipe looks like it cooks up a lot more quickly.

The lesson: look for basic, old-fashioned recipes that your family likes. Those kinds of recipes make it easier to use your food storage regularly. Some recipes that use basic ingredients take more time to cook, but not always. Sometimes we forget how people used to cook before Kraft and Pillsbury started publishing cookbooks.

[Okay, okay, caramel apples are not the best example of this principle. Caramel requires butter, which doesn't store well unrefrigerated. I do have a case of butter in my freezer, though, and no caramels in the basement. If you really want to store individually wrapped caramels, go for it!]

Roast pumpkin: Turning your jack-o-lantern into something edible

2008-10-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

Why do I buy pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns, and then open up a can of pumpkin to use for pie or cookies? Because I don't have experience in turning pumpkins into real food, that's why. So this year I want to see if I can figure this out. Maybe you can too.

A couple of years ago, I was listening to an NPR cooking show on this topic. The lady on the radio said to think of a pumpkin as a giant baked potato. You can bake it by poking holes in the skin and baking it for a couple of hours.

Since I don't have experience in this matter, I'll forward you to people who do. Tawra Kellam, author of Living on a Dime, wrote up this article about roast pumpkin. She cuts hers up into pieces and bakes them. After baking, she scrapes the pulp off the pumpkin shell and purees it in the blender with a little salt. She warns that you have to drain the extra water off before using it by placing the pumpkin in a colander lined with cheesecloth. She freezes the extra puree to use in recipes later.

Tawra also warns that the pumpkin you use has to be fresh. This is where I messed up last year. I thought I could bake the jack-o-lantern a few days later, and no, that didn't work. It made the whole kitchen smell gross.

And here is a page from Tammy's Recipes about using fresh pumpkin. She gives canning instructions here as well.

With the pumpkin, you can bake pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, or pumpkin muffins. I like to use the create-a-breakfast-muffin recipe from the Tightwad Gazette, which is very healthy and can be used with whatever ingredients you may have on hand.

Whatever pumpkins that you don't turn into jack-o-lanterns can be stored whole in a root cellar or other cool place until you are ready to turn them into pumpkin puree.

Update: I have cooked two pumpkins according to Tawra Kellam's instructions. It worked great. Two jack-o-lanterns created about 20 cups of pumpkin, so I guess we are going to have to eat more pumpkin. Amy Dacyczyn, in The Tightwad Gazette, wrote that her family eats "pumpkin pudding," which is pumpkin pie without the crust. I think we'll have to try it.

Getting started with food storage

2008-10-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

Getting started with food storage is an overwhelming project for the beginner. I learned these skills gradually, over a period of years. Now, because of the insecurity of the economy, many people are eager to put in a supply of food right now! Buying three months to a year's supply of nutritious, long-lasting food is an overwhelming project. Thinking of cooking with it is even more overwhelming. Where should you begin?

Well, if you're Mormon, you'd want to start out by looking at the counsel of the Church. The current recommendation is to build up a three-month supply of the foods you already use, a supply of drinking water, a financial reserve, and a supply of foods that will last a long time.

Note what is not stated. A 72-hour evacuation kit is a good idea, but it is not part of official church counsel. "Store what you eat, and eat what you store" is also not stated anywhere. This is good advice for the three-month supply, and our family does try to follow it for our year's supply, but don't let that advice dissuade you from buying wheat that you don't know how to use yet.

Three-month supply. The gals at Food Storage Made Easy have made a great tutorial video and spreadsheet to walk you step-by-step through making a plan for three month's worth of normal food. The basic idea is to come up with meal ideas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that can be made out of storable foods. Figure out how many of which kinds of meals you would eat per week or month, and then do the math so it works out to three month's worth. Her spreadsheet helps you input the ingredients of those meals and turn them into a shopping list.

Drinking water. Perhaps the simplest method is to make friends with someone with a soda drinking habit. Collect two-liter bottles, rinse them, and fill them with chlorinated water. We had a post about water storage last month with details about other options.

Financial reserve. The details of where to put your money is outside of the scope of this blog, but safety is what you are looking for here. Frugal living will leave you with a little reserve to save, we hope.

Longer-term supply. For the most basic version of a longer-term supply, look at the Food Storage Calculator on the Church's Provident Living website. Simply Living Smart has a more detailed Food Storage Calculator on their site. (I don't recommend blindly using their Beginner's Shopping List though; it lists a lot of expensive products that you might not want to use, such as powdered sour cream.) Store these in a way that will protect the food from spoilage, insects, and other pests. #10 cans are terrific for items that you don't plan to use right away. We use 5 gallon buckets with gamma seal lids for items that we rotate.

Next steps. Congratulations on getting this far! What needs to be done next?

Organize. Where will you store the food? Do you need shelves, or do you need to use more creative options? Label everything, and keep a record of where everything is if it is not obvious. If you can't find it when you need it, it's as though you don't have it.
Figure out how to use it. Start to collect recipes that use food storage ingredients. Try them out. Learn new skills, such as how to make bread. This is the fun part, in my opinion.
Start to budget for tools to help you use your food storage better, such as a wheat grinder, canner, dehydrator, or a bread maker. Wheat grinders are not often found on the used market, but put out the word to any older Mormon women you may know, in case they have one they are no longer using. Consider cooperating with neighbors.
Think about how your storage can better meet your family's needs. Make lists of the little things that you use that may not be on the lists above, such as spices and baking items. Consider family needs, especially if you care for babies or the elderly or others with special health needs. If your budget allows it, consider storing treats or expensive special storage products, such as freeze-dried vegetables or powdered sour cream.
Start to learn home production skills. Start a garden. (Now is the time to prepare soil so you will be ready to start next spring.) Learn to preserve food.
Keep track of inventory, and restock as needed.

There's an crisis and I don't have time to think this through. I just need to go shopping now. If that's the case, here are a couple of posts that discuss getting a basic frugal food supply from regular stores, that spell out exactly what kinds of things to get. Here is the ANYWAY, very cheap system of food storage for emergencies and/or inflation, written by someone who wants to remain anonymous. She advises buying oats, canned beans, canned tomatoes, and canned applesauce as the basis of an emergency food supply because they are cheap, nutritious, available at grocery stores, and they will be used anyway. And here is Sharon Astyk's post Crisis shopping: Food storage when you haven't been storing food. She suggests what kind of stores to shop at and what kinds of things to buy if there is a crisis that you are unprepared for. Of course it's best to be prepared and avoid this kind of situation in the first place.

A cheesy experiment

2008-10-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

Our family likes cheese. We eat cheese on sandwiches and burritos for lunch, and on about half of our dinners. We also try to store what we eat and eat what you store, but that's hard to do with cheese. There's cheese powder (which is what is in boxes of macaroni and cheese), and there's Velveeta and Cheez Whiz, and Red Feather Processed Cheese, but those are just not the real thing. If we ever really had to live on our food storage, we would miss having cheese.

So when I read an idea on a message board a few years back about storing cheese in a root cellar, it piqued my interest. The details weren't entirely clear, but it involved placing the cheese in an air-tight plastic bag and placing the bag inside vinegar, which didn't make sense to me. I was reluctant to experiment here, because I didn't want to kill off our family just yet.

Then I read a Backwoods Home Magazine article by Jackie Clay, their food storage/self reliant living/homesteading expert. She talked about her experiments with canning cheese. She said that cheese is a high acid food, so it's pretty safe to play around with. If it goes bad, you can tell because of the mold or because it dries out. That fact gave me courage to proceed in further cheese storage experimentation.

In January of this year I bought two 5 lb. blocks of Tillamook cheese, in the air-tight plastic packaging. I decided to try just placing them on my basement shelves without any special preparation. I let them sit there.

In May, we opened one of them. It looked the same as it had when we had stored it. It tasted even better. It had gotten sharper in storage. Yum! We love sharp cheese.

We opened the other block of cheese in August. That experiment didn't work out quite as well. Because of the heat, some of the oil had separated out of the cheese, and that oil was starting to get rancid and make the edge of the cheese slightly moldy. I poured off that oil and cut off the mold, and patted the cheese dry with paper towels. Then we tried it. It was sharper than the first experimental block of cheese. The texture was more crumbly, kind of like previously frozen cheese. But it still was delicious, and it hasn't killed any of us yet.

Historically, it makes sense that cheese can be stored without refrigeration. Cheese has been around for thousands of years, and refrigeration has been around for only about 100 years. Cheese is basically the old-fashioned method of storing milk.

Based on the results of this experiment, it seems that cheese will store in a cool basement, root cellar, or cold storage room for around 6 months. The cheese will grow sharper with age. If it gets too warm, the oil will separate out of the cheese, and if the oil is left alone long enough, it will go rancid and cause the cheese to get moldy. Cheese goes bad if it gets too moldy or if it dries out.

We have decided to buy about a 6-8 month supply of block cheese in the fall, and use it up by spring before the weather gets warm.

Cautions:

Try this idea at your own risk. This idea has not been endorsed by any food safety expert.
Cheese is expensive. If money is tight, I would recommend getting the rest of your food storage in before buying cheese.

In case you are freaking out about the economy: How to be frugal

2008-10-22T09:36:00.001-07:00

Lately I've talked to more people who are freaking out about the economy. I became concerned last winter and spring, and I'm still following economic news closely. I'm assuming some amount of freaking out accounts for the newfound popularity of food storage information. The values of assets are disappearing, but the debt remains (unless it gets bailed out, but if I understand this right, a bailout of that size would eventually lead to huge inflation). This, plus the uncertainty of some jobs and the decreased access to credit, means we are feeling less prosperous than we used to.

I think the best first step to take after freaking out, and taking a deep breath to calm down, is to practice frugality. A lot of this preparedness stuff requires money, and getting the money requires cutting back on non-essentials. So, how can you make the transition to living frugally?

Write down where you spend your money. Look at the non-essentials, and start to make cuts.
Get ideas for where you can creatively cut costs. The best place to start getting ideas is from Amy Dacyczyn's Complete Tightwad Gazette. You could also see about checking it out at the library, but in my opinion this is a book worth owning. Some of it is out of date, and some of the ideas are, um, extreme, but the bulk of the information is very helpful. I especially like her philosophy articles, which help you see things from a frugal perspective so you can start to solve your own frugal problems. The book is entertaining to read in little snippets of time. Trent at the Simple Dollar arranged an interview with her last May. If you're a fan, check it out!
Start going to yard sales. Craigslist or the local newspaper website usually have lists of yard sales near you. Think ahead about things you will need in the future, and start looking for them now. Especially good items to look for are clothes in sizes your kids will wear in the next 5 or so years, according to your available storage space and moving plans. Kids yard sale clothes are a bargain at 25 cents to $1 each. Look for canning jars and other preparedness items. Granted, these were more easily found a few years after Y2K, but I was able to find a hand wheat grinder for $3 this spring, so apparently not everyone is freaking out. Breadmakers are still relatively easy to find cheaply. You might also look for gifts. Depending on your family and changing economic circumstances, you might be able to get away with buying extraordinarily thoughtful used gifts in good condition. I also like to look for books that would be good for self education, such as classics, children's books and old textbooks. These are usually 25 cents to $1 each.
Speaking of yard sales, if you have a lot of extra junk, sell it! Usually most items fetch better prices on Craigslist or eBay. Yard sales depend on a cheap buyer happening across the thing you want to sell on that particular morning, but on Craigslist you can find a buyer who specifically wants the thing you are selling.
Cook more; go to restaurants less. If you are used to restaurant food and don't like your cooking, keep practicing. Get a good cookbook or get acquainted with online recipe sites, and keep trying!
Start thinking about how changing economic circumstances will affect your kids. Your family may need to cut back on activities, cutting back to only the most important to your family or your child. Look into inexpensive activities, such as scouts. Substitute with more involvement at home, like playing catch in the yard or reading chapter books in the evenings. Also, children and adults may need to adjust their eating habits to avoid wasting food. Amy D. has an article about this, called "War and Peas," in her book. After you are calm, talk to your kids about what changes are going to happen at home, and why those changes are smart and will prepare you for the future.
Use time to save money. Many money-saving things require more time. If your hours have been cut back at work, perhaps you already have more time. Or perhaps you can carve out more time by working together as a family, and limiting unproductive time (like surfing the internet, she said sheepishly). Wealth is increased by cutting expenses and increasing productivity.
Learn new skills. You can count on making mistakes at first, but don't let that discourage you. Eventually, after you make the required number of mistakes, you figure it out.
Think about how people used to do things. Last week, a caller to the Dave Ramsey show really wanted to go on a cruise to celebrate her 10th wedding anniversary, but she didn't have sufficient money saved. She became upset when Dave said that she shouldn't go. That call got me to thinking: how did people celebrate anniversaries 40 years ago, before cruises became popular for everyone? Were people's marriages less worthy of celebration back then? No, most people had happy marriages, but they celebrated more simply. This idea extends to other topics, such as houses. My grandparents raised 8 kids in a 1200 square foot house. My parents raised 4 kids in a 2000 square foot house. Now the average new home size is 2500 square feet, and most families have 1 or 2 kids.
That leads to a sad topic. Can you afford your house? Based on the stats, a lot of people who bought during the boom years in boom markets cannot afford their homes over the long term. Carefully look at your own numbers. If you don't have a fixed rate mortgage and you want to keep the house, now is the time to look into refinancing, because short of more bailouts, financing isn't getting any easier to get. Compare the fixed rate payment to the cost of renting acceptable housing. Consider selling your home and renting if it would be much easier on your budget. If you need to sell, in my controversial opinion now is better than later. House prices need to go down until prices are affordable to buyers without "creative" loans, and there's no sense in throwing good money after bad in order to try to keep an unaffordable house.
If you can see a necessary change looming in the future, start the process of changing now. Our family believe that oil will be more difficult to come by in the coming years, so we have gotten bikes for all family members and are using those for local transportation in good weather. It's easier to make a change before you are forced to, and it will help you save money in the long run.
Cooperate with your neighbors. Not every family needs every kind of tool and piece of equipment, if you can share with those around you. My neighbor and I are trading carpool trips in exchange for use of my wheat grinder.
Look on the bright side. Going down to a lower standard of living doesn't mean unhappiness. We're usually about as happy as we are in the habit of being. People weren't any less happy 30, 50, 80 years ago. The transition may be painful, but once you are used to the changes it won't be painful. Some changes can even be good. Decreased spending in restaurants can lead to better health. Smaller homes and fewer children's activities can lead to more family togetherness.

At this blog, we are committed to helping you find frugal ways to prepare. Smart frugal decisions will help your family make the most of your money as we prepare for whatever may be to come.

Request for info on LDS canneries

2008-10-21T21:21:00.001-07:00

I'm preparing a post about using LDS canneries. If you've used the cannery recently, could you email me, or post in the comments? I am especially wondering if they are selling to only LDS members at this point or if they are still open to the general public.

Green tomato salsa verde

2008-10-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

About this time two years ago, the frost had killed off the last of the tomatoes. I had a bunch of green tomatoes on the counter, and I tried to figure out something to do with them. I found a recipe for fried green tomatoes in Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living (highly recommended, by the way). I didn't like them.

So I searched the internet for another idea. Someone had posted a recipe for salsa verde that called for green tomatoes. Usually this recipe calls for tomatillos. We love salsa verde at our house! But it cost between $2 and $3 per jar at the time, and it was an extravagance.

I decided to experiment. I bought the ingredients one evening and got to measuring and chopping and blending. I presented the finished product to my husband along with some tortilla chips. My husband gushed, "This tastes as good as something from a restaurant!" I used the rest of my green tomatoes to make a lot of green tomato salsa verde for the freezer. I was thrilled at the frugal victory, and loved eating the finished product for the rest of the year.

Last year, we didn't grow a garden because we thought we would be moving. But I still wanted to make up a lot of salsa verde. So I posted a wanted ad for green tomatoes on Freecycle, and I found a few people who let me pick their green tomatoes in October after the freeze. I canned a bunch of both red and green salsa, and gave it away for Christmas.

I plan to make more green salsa this year after the freeze. Here's the recipe:

3 green tomatoes
4 ounces diced green chiles, canned
1 medium sweet onion, chopped
1/4 cup lime juice
salt and pepper, to taste
1/2 cup chopped cilantro

Peel and seed green tomatoes. Place green tomatoes in a pot, and cover with water. Bring to a boil, and cook about 15 minutes until the tomatoes turn light green. Drain well. Place in a blender with the onion, lime juice, salt, pepper, and cilantro. Puree to desired consistency and chill.

Notes: If you are lazy and the salsa is for family consumption, you can try making it without peeling the tomatoes first. The peels were bothersome in the frozen salsa, but I don't notice it in the canned.

Easy on the blender pulse button. This recipe is easy to overblend.

You don't have to be super scientific with the ingredient amounts. It still tastes good.

You can use fresh green chiles instead of canned. I just haven't figured out how to peel green chiles quickly (when I tried the heat-them-in-the-oven-in-a-paper-bag idea, I couldn't get it to work), and I haven't grown a lot of them before, and the cans are cheap at case lot sales.

Canning note: I researched this heavily last fall to try to figure out some canning guidelines. Everything I read said that green tomatoes are more acidic than ripe tomatoes. That fact, plus the lime juice in this recipe, makes me confident to follow the canning instructions for regular red tomato salsa when canning this recipe of salsa verde.

Speaking of fruit, fruit fly traps

2008-10-09T22:24:00.001-07:00

'Tis the season for fruit flies in the kitchen, if your kitchen is like mine. Here's an idea for a fruit fly trap that sometimes works around here:

Take a small bowl. Pour a little apple cider vinegar in. Place a very small amount of soap on your finger, and stir it into the vinegar. Let sit near the fruit flies.

The idea is that the scent of the apple cider vinegar draws the fruit flies in, and the soap reduces the surface tension on the vinegar, so the flies sink into the vinegar, unable to rescue themselves.

Sometimes this trap works great; sometimes it catches one or two and then stops working, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. I can't figure out what the difference is. Maybe the fruit flies don't like scented soap, or too much soap.

Any other ideas for dealing with fruit flies?

Finding fruit with April

2008-10-09T10:26:00.001-07:00

In my post about how to get food storage when you can't afford it, I mentioned preserving fruit that would otherwise go to waste. Many yards, especially in older neighborhoods, have fruit trees with fruit that go to waste because it is never picked. Many of us would like to preserve fruit, but either don't have fruit trees, or our fruit trees are too young to bear fruit. Is there a way to make a connection between unwanted fruit and people who want to preserve it?

My friend April has been successful with this. She preserves a lot of fruit, but her trees are young. She gets the fruit in a couple of ways:

Barter. April knows how to prune fruit trees. April prunes fruit trees of people in our ward in the spring for a share of the fruit in the fall.

Generosity. April is a naturally giving person who is always looking for ways to help others. Others are happy to help her in return when they can.

Boldness. April also keeps her eyes open when she is going through neighborhoods with fruit trees. If it looks like no one is picking the fruit and it is starting to go to waste, she will go up to the door, ask if they are not using the fruit this year, and if she might be able to pick it.

When she first told me this, I was surprised at how bold it was. I am shy. I am also worried about what other people would think. Still, I do like to save money, as long as it's not at the expense of others. Fruit is increasingly expensive, and it is a shame for good fruit to go to waste.

So I decided to try it this summer. While visiting California family, I noticed ripe apricots falling into my parents' yard from the tree next door. I gathered up my courage to ask my parents' neighbor if we could pick the fruit. She was happy for me to do so. She confessed that she disliked apricots, and that they went to waste every year. She was happy for me to pick them and save her the mess of cleaning the fallen fruit later. And I got a year's worth of apricot fruit roll-ups out of the deal.

When I got back home to Utah, I decided to see if I could find more fruit. I decided to call April so we could do this together. That way I could see exactly how she does it.

We all loaded into April's van. She had prepared by bringing boxes, buckets, ladders, gloves, and drinks. My daughter loaded in the van with April's four young children.

I told her about where I saw some pear trees. We found that house. April asked, "Do you want to go the door here?" I agreed to do so.

April coached me about how she usually asks: "I go to them with a big smile, and just say, 'I noticed your pear tree, and I was wondering if there might be any chance that you aren't going to use your pears this year? And if not, if you might let us take some?'"

I went up to the door, and followed April's instructions as best as I could. A woman came to the door, and told me that the pears weren't sprayed or anything. I said we would still be happy to have them.

April said, "They always say that! They don't think the fruit is any good!" She appreciates the fruit that hasn't been sprayed, so she doesn't have to worry about the chemicals. Sometimes there is a spot that has to be cut away because of the worms, which adds to the work of preparation, but the rest of the fruit is good.

The woman let us into the backyard. We put on our gloves and set up the ladders and got to work.

At first the children helped us pick up low-hanging and dropped fruit, but as time went on they started playing in the yard instead. Our children entertained each other. We picked fruit for about an hour, collecting about 7 boxes, plenty for both of our families.

This yard had three pear trees, which we thought was odd. Would one family really use all of these pears? We later found out that these pear trees were 100 years old, and had belonged to an orchard owned by the woman's grandfather. Later he sold the property to developers, but they kept three lots themselves and kept the old pear trees on the lots.

The woman told us that her 6-year-old would be happy not to have to pick up the old pears after the thaw. So she got something out of the deal too.

We did this about a week and a half ago. Now it's probably getting too late for pears. But as soon as it freezes, the apples will be ready. So if you want to gather apples like April, here are the steps:

Keep your eyes open. Look for fruit trees around town, especially trees that have started to drop ripe fruit. This is a sign that the tree's owner may not be using the fruit.
Be prepared. Look trustworthy and well groomed; these people may be trusting you to be in their yard. Bring ladders, gloves, and boxes or buckets.
Knock and ask in such a way that they do not feel pressured to say yes. Never steal!
Leave the yard cleaner than you found it. It's nice to put overripe fruit into a pile so it's easier for them to clean up after the overripe fruit.

Happy fruit hunting!

Food storage versus hoarding

2008-10-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

Sometimes people who store food are accused of hoarding. There was a great post about this on Casaubon's Book (Sharon Astyk's blog) last July:

First, a quiz!

Question 1: If James has a large group of Hummel figurines (those weird looking kids with big eyes in cutesy poses), including some that are very rare and scarce, and he has more Hummel figurines than anyone could possible use or appreciate (for me, that number would be 1 figurine ;-)), will people say James is hoarding Hummel figurines?

Question 2: If Laurie has more money than she needs to pay her expenses, and she takes this extra money, and puts it away where it earns interest and is available to her for future use, even though there are people in the world who could really use that money, will people say she is hoarding money?

Question 3: If Li goes to the grocery store only once every few months, purchases in bulk and in quantities he needs for a year, will people say he is hoarding food?

Question 4: If Gloria knows she is likely to lose her job soon, and takes her kids to the doctor, gets their teeth checked, and gets a 3 months supply of her allergy medication while insurance will still pay for it, is she hoarding medical care?

Question 5: If Gloria knows she will lose her job soon and isn’t confident about finding a new one, and goes to the thrift shop and buys clothes that are available in larger sizes for her oldest son and stores them, so that he’ll have nice clothes for school even if they are quite poor, will people say she is hoarding?

Queston 6: Laurie is also worried about affording clothes for her children. So she puts as much of her salary aside in a specific account marked for her daughter’s clothing as possible. Will people say she is hoarding?

It's a great post that continues at this link.

A historical note: Hoarding, defined as storing more than a 30 day supply of food, was against the law during World War I. Herbert Hoover was the food administrator in charge of enforcing this law. Here is a link to a 1918 New York Times newspaper article about people who were punished for hoarding, because they used inherited money to put in a food supply before there was an anti-hoarding law. After the law was put into effect, he tried to distribute his food among the poor, and he was caught and punished.

Food storage for college students

2008-10-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

With the recent problems and fears in the economy, some college students have felt like they should set aside a little food. How can college students prudently store within their limitations of budget and space?

First of all, do they even need to? When I was a BYU student, I remember hearing that the school had a stash of enough food to feed all of the students in case of emergency. Is that really true? Well, it's partly true. There is enough food on campus, through the regular campus food service and the vending machines, to feed 33,000 students and faculty survival rations for three days. So they are covered in case of a three-day emergency. If you want food for a longer-term situation, you should store some.

But how? Let me share what I did during my last semester at BYU, when I was engaged and eager to learn money-saving habits for my upcoming marriage.

First of all, define your goal. I think buying a year's supply of long term storage items is not practical for most college students. That requires a lot of space, takes a lot of extra work to move, and those staples can be difficult to use. But having a three-month supply of groceries that you usually eat is very much doable. It might even possible to extend your supply of some ingredients to last you for the semester, for the school year, or until you plan to move.

With that goal in mind, buy groceries in bulk, according to your space and budget. If you like to eat oatmeal every morning, buy a bag big enough to last you through the school year, or until you move. If you enjoy eating rice for dinner, buy a big bag. Other common ingredients for college meals can be bought in bulk: canned soup, tuna, canned meats, spaghetti sauce and noodles, ramen, peanut butter and jelly, cold cereal, potato pearls.

If you want to avoid moving the extra food, do a rough calculation to figure out how much you will use while you live in that apartment. If you plan to live there two semesters, and you usually eat a can of tuna per week, buy 32 cans of tuna, assuming you have a place to store it.

Consider powdered milk. Powdered milk is expensive, but the price has fallen a bit recently. Try the Country Cream brand if your primary concern is taste; my mom says that she can't tell the difference between reconstituted Country Cream and store-bought fresh skim milk. Most college students don't drink an entire gallon of milk before it goes bad, so they buy smaller quantities, which are more expensive. Powdered milk might be a money saver in this case, and you wouldn't have to worry about running out of milk. You would have to have a pitcher to mix it in, and you would have to be willing to plan ahead to mix the milk so the milk is chilled when you are ready to use it.

Also consider a bread machine. I brought a bread machine with me during my last semester at college. I kept it in my room. I also stored a bucket of whole wheat flour in my room. I liked whole wheat bread, and I could make my own for about a quarter per loaf, versus spending $2.50 for good quality whole wheat bread at the store. Bread machines can be found cheaply at thrift stores and yard sales nowadays. Making bread machine bread is doable even for a college student, since you can put the ingredients in, set the timer, and walk away. For me, using a bread machine was a good introduction to bread making. I got familiar with the ingredients and gained confidence. And it did save money.

Where to store it. First of all, stuff your assigned shelf in the kitchen. Sometimes it's surprising how much can fit in a small space. After that, you can store some in your room. Quite a lot can fit under a bed. I had roommates who lifted their bed with risers so they could fit more under the bed. Use your closet as well.

How to afford it. It helps to follow the sales. If you get the grocery store sale flyer, read it so you can start to get a sense of where prices are. If you are in Utah county, subscribe to Savvyshopperdeals.com for free to get a list of the good deals sent to your inbox. Those living in other areas can scour the web to see if there is a similar service in your area. Usually the best grocery store sales are half of the regular price. If you live in a place where there are case lot sales, use them. The cases usually sell at close to the lowest available price.

Also, recognize that buying in bulk usually saves money in the long run. Buying a 10-pound bag of rice may cost a little more during that week, but during the following weeks, you don't have to buy rice.

Historical perspective. A few years ago I read Juanita Brooks' memoir Quicksand and Cactus. As a young widow and mother in the 1920s, she and her son traveled from her family's home in Bunkerville, Nevada (just outside of Mesquite) to Provo so she could finish her education at BYU. The budget was very tight, and she couldn't afford to eat store-bought groceries from town. So she filled the car with jars of homegrown and home-canned produce from her family's farm. This is another idea to file away for truly tough times, if your family gardens and preserves food.

Pantry panel weekly round-up

2008-10-06T08:23:00.001-07:00

Crystal at Everyday Food Storage has a recipe for whole wheat pumpkin bread that I want to try.

Sharon Astyk, who posts at the blog Casaubon's Book, is a Jewish mother of four sons homesteading in upstate New York. Her site contains information about preparedness and subsistence agriculture in the context of preparing for the credit crises and Peak Oil. She posted about storing fats last week. Fat is often overlooked in food storage, so this is important information. Like me, she is storing mostly olive oil and coconut oil. She also wrote about how the credit crisis could affect the food distribution system. In the Great Depression, food rotted in the fields unharvested because the cost of harvesting it and transporting it to market was higher than the price the food could get. As a result, people starved. Now is the time for farmers to be planting next year's wheat crop, and like other small business owners, farmers are struggling to get credit. Sharon also wrote up her thoughts on the bailout.

At It's Not Your Mama's Food Storage, the blogger's sister wrote up her experiences with Hurricane Ike. It's important to see how others deal with disasters and learn in what ways our own preparation may be lacking.

Safely Gathered In has regular posts about many different topics, usually illustrated with lots of photos so you can see exactly what she means. My favorite recent posts have explained how to bake whole wheat bread, make a cardboard box oven for baking with charcoal briquettes, and pressure can green beans. This post about how to grind wheat with an electric wheat grinder is a great one too.

What to do with dehydrated carrots from the cannery

2008-10-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

In 1998, our family made our first big push towards a true year's supply. I made a master list of what we needed based on the guidelines in the Church's pamphlet Essentials of Home Production and Storage. The list gave guidelines on how much fruits and vegetables to store. To meet the fruit requirements, we stored dried apple slices from the cannery, as well as commercially canned applesauce, peaches, and mandarin oranges. For vegetables, we stored dehydrated carrots from the cannery, as well as commercially canned corn and green beans.

Ten years later, we still have the dehydrated carrots. They are still good. But obviously we need to rotate them. I haven't figured out how to make these taste good as a side dish. So we throw them into soups and rice pilafs. This works better if they have a long time to cook in the soup to rehydrate. The kids don't like it when the carrots are hard.

I decided to pulverize some in the blender. This made carrot powder. This is easier to use, because the smaller pieces rehydrate faster. The powder is easy to sneak into other items, increasing the nutrition and helping me to use this up. Here are some of the ways I've thought of so far about how to use this. Hopefully others of you have other ideas.

Marinara sauce! Add carrot powder to spaghetti sauce, especially sauce that is a little too watery. The dried carrot powder soaks up the extra water in the sauce, making the sauce thicker and yummier. Finely chopped carrots are an ingredient of marinara sauce. I tried this with this week's spaghetti, and the family ate a lot, not noticing any carrots.
Add a little to bread dough. This leads to little orange flakes in the bread. Trying to get the kids to think this was cool, I named it "Halloween bread." They think it's special.
I found some other dehydrated carrot ideas at this Australian dehydrator recipe site. Because they are Australian recipes, measurements are given in grams and kilograms. They have a recipe for carrot cake made out of rehydrated shredded carrots. I never thought of that, but that would work.

I just read a Mary Bell's Complete Dehydrator Cookbook from the library. She gave instructions for making "powder" out of dehydrated fruits or vegetables, so I wasn't the first to invent this idea. She said that you can use dehydrated fruit or vegetable powder to make baby food by soaking the powder with a small amount of liquid, and gradually adding more until it is the desired consistency. Store the rehydrated baby food in the refrigerator, and discard any baby food that has been at room temperature for more than an hour.

Edited: Before, I had used another dehydrator cookbook, but a commenter found that the ratio of powder to water was incorrect. I replaced the baby food information with info from Mary Bell's cookbook.

Sun dried tomato raisins, or My problem and how I solved it

2008-10-02T07:36:00.000-07:00

My problem: Our grape tomato plant is producing more grape tomatoes than we can eat fresh. It's hard to preserve them in salsa or tomato sauce because there is so much skin for the amount of tomato flesh that you get. How should I preserve them?

How I solved it: The dehydrator!

I had never eaten sun dried tomatoes before this summer. A couple of months ago, I was making tons of fruit leather while visiting family, and there were very ripe garden tomatoes in the kitchen. I sliced one and put it on the dehydrator. It was delicious. It tasted like summertime. I decided to dehydrate some of my tomatoes after I got home.

I've sliced them and placed them on the dehydrator. They dry quickly this way, but the skins stay on.

Or you can make tomato raisins. (Dried grape tomatoes; get it?) Here's how I did it:

I put a bunch on the dehydrator tray whole. When I checked on them a few hours later, they looked the same. The skins were getting puffier though, like they were going to explode. I pierced the skins with a little "pop" and then peeled them. The papery skin had detached from the grape tomato and the inner tomato slid out easily. I placed them back on the dehydrator tray and they had dried to the consistency of raisins within 6-8 hours in my Excalibur dehydrator.

These tomato raisins are a sweet and delicious low-calorie snack with intense tomato flavor. We plan to eat them in the winter and think of summer.

A Pantry Paragon; or, How to make your own can storage bins

2008-09-30T08:54:00.001-07:00

We visited my husband's grandparents for the weekend. I've mentioned them in the blog before. Grandpa is an engineer, and this is evident by the way their house is planned and organized. Visitors love to look through their house at all of the good ideas in each room. The pantry is no exception.

Here is a picture of their pantry. As you can see, Grandpa has made his own can rotating storage bins out of painted cardboard. He likes this version because they are small and versatile, and can fit into a variety of pantry situations. Of course his version is also much cheaper than the commercial systems.

I asked if he could explain how these are made. To my surprise, he pulled out an engineering drawing with exact instructions. He gave permission for me to share the plans with the readers of this blog. These plans are for non-commercial home use only.

Added 1/6/09: Because I couldn't put a pdf file on Blogger, and because I got sick of emailing these out, the nice gals at Food Storage Made Easy have posted the plans on their site here.

Added 2/16/09: Jodi at Food Storage Made Easy made a cardboard can storage bin from Grandpa's instructions. They took pictures of how they did it! Check out their advice here.

He saved good quality cardboard and cut it to the dimensions indicated on the paper. It's important to cut the cardboard with a razor blade, he says, so the edge of the cardboard is square, so it will glue together correctly. He says that you need to stick close to those measurements in order for it to work. He glued it together with white glue. After it was assembled, he painted it. Any paint will do, he says. The paint significantly increases the strength of the cardboard. He has been using the bins pictured here for about 13 years, and they are still in good condition. Each bin is labeled, which makes it easy to find exactly what they want when they need it.

I also took a picture of his containers of staples. He got these jars from a manager of Chuck-a-rama. They use the bungee cords to keep the jars on the shelf in case of an earthquake.

All of the food stored in their pantry is what they use routinely. There are four cans of things like powdered eggs that they have had for years and have not used, but otherwise they store what they eat and eat what they store.

Organizing all of this stuff

2008-09-24T07:26:00.001-07:00

Organizing your food storage--in other words, knowing where everything is and being able to put your hands on a particular item quickly--is important. If it's not organized, it's not useful. You can't use the food to rotate it if you don't know where it is.

I learned this again last week. I still don't know where the kidney beans are in my basement. It's making me mad.

It also takes organization to know when to restock.

Organizing home storage: Knowing where everything is

Label, label, label. Label the top and sides of the box or bucket. I had to move around a bunch of heavy buckets last week because a label wasn't on the side of the bucket. When you stack the buckets, make sure the label is facing outward when the buckets are stacked. Put a date on the label. We buy 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of printer labels and use those to label our food. Sometimes I use a date stamp from an office supply store to more quickly date the labels.

Keep like items together. It's easier to find items if the baking items are together, the canned vegetables are together, the pastas are together, and so on.

Make sure you can see the item from the front of the shelf. We don't have any fancy Shelf Reliance-type can dispensers, so we just put things on the shelf, newest in back. We like to stack the cans so they are one can wide, two or three cans high, and 10 (or so) cans deep, to the back of the shelf. This way we can fit a whole case of food on the shelf with just the width of one can. That way we can see at a glance what items we have, without having to dig to the back of the shelf. I like to turn the cans so the labels are facing forward (a little trick I picked up from a home staging book). That does make it easier to see what you have, but it's a little neurotic.

Keep records. This is especially important if you have to use creative storage ideas that are not easily accessible. Keep a page in a household notebook that records where the different items are.

Keeping inventory: Knowing when you need to buy more

Keep a master list of staples you like to have on hand. I got this idea from Marie Ricks, a speaker on household organization at BYU's Education Week. She suggests doing an annual inventory of your storage. To make this easier, make a master list of everything you want to stock in your home store. I made an Excel document that lists everything, from big items like wheat or canned tomatoes, to small things that are easy to overlook, like unflavored gelatin and vanilla extract and soy sauce. I also wrote up a rough guess of how much of each item is a year's supply of that item.

Use that list to take inventory periodically. When it is time to restock the food storage, I print out this form and walk around the storage room, jotting down about how many cans I have of the different items. I notice which piles are low and what we need to restock. From that inventory list, I make up a separate shopping list of the items I need to restock. I might separate that shopping list by store: some items are best bought at Costco, others at case lot sales. I watch for good deals on those items over the next couple of months.

I dread taking inventory each year, because it seems like it will be a lot of work. I am usually surprised that once I decide to do it, I'm done in a half hour. With the pre-printed form it doesn't take long.

I've read about systems that keep track of how many cans you have at all times, that require you to mark when you take an item from storage. That seems like way too much work to me. I don't need to know how much I have at all times; I just need to know that I have roughly enough for a year or so. A quick look at the storage room once a year is good enough for me.

How do you organize your storage?

Water Storage Tips

2008-09-22T20:27:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine was asked to do a presentation at a Relief Society Home, Family, and Personal Enrichment meeting on water storage and purification. He has given permission for this to be freely shared, so I thought I would link to it here.

Fill Your Freezer

2008-09-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

We often equate food storage with drastic things like earthquakes and severe power outages and other natural disasters. As such, I have seen some people afraid to use their freezer as a resource in their food storage.

Of course, we believe in being prepared because any number of things can happen. And it would be a bummer to lose a freezer full of food if an emergency included the loss of power.

But in our world of crazy financial markets, rising food and gas prices, layoffs, and so on, food storage can be a hedge against non-natural 'disasters' in our lives. As such, I think the freezer is a good resource to round out a food storage plan. My freezer also helps keep me from having to go to the store as often, and makes my day-to-day cooking a lot easier.

My favorite things to store in the freezer include:

Frozen veggies (I like to buy a bunch when they are on sale. Since we did a little garden this year, that supply also includes the tomato-pepper goulash that I have made. I will also be cutting up our peppers that are almost ripe.)
Frozen fruit (I will buy big bags at Costco, and I loooove to cut up and freeze fruit when in season - like peaches! YUM! I sometimes will buy the big #10 size cans of fruit and tomatoes and freeze smaller portions as well.)
Wheat flour (I grind a bunch at a time and freeze in gallon bags to help retain nutrients)
Cannery pancake mix
Yeast (I buy the instant yeast, which is vacuum sealed. It lasts a long time...even after being opened.)
Bread (I stock up on our favorite kind and also freeze my own when I make it)
Leftovers (great for lunches for hubby and for me, for that matter)
Juice concentrates (I focus on OJ. Especially with the whole bee illness issue, I like having some citrus in my freezer...besides, it is cheaper to make your own juice.)
Specialty grains (I buy some specialty grains like quinoa and like to keep them fresh in my freezer -- these are the kinds of things I could use even if the power went out, too)
Gogurts for the kids' lunches
Cheese that I buy in big bags -- we use a lot of cheese around here!

And, speaking of lunches, I buy lunch meat in bulk and wrap individual serving sizes in plastic wrap. That way, my kids can grab a serving to throw in their lunch, and it helps keep the food cooler, at least for a while.

Since I tend to use canned meats (we don't eat a lot), I usually don't store much meat, which is another reason I don't worry so much about leaning on my freezer. In a power outage, I could eat a lot of what I store in my freezer.

Anyway, there are some of my ideas. Of course, making whole meals and freezing them is a great idea for day-to-day life, too (we just had a Home, Family, and Personal Enrichment class on that...taught by a personal chef!)

What do you like to store in your freezer?

Sharing food in times of need

2008-09-21T17:50:00.000-07:00

Quote today from Elder Vaughn J. Featherstone, April 1976 general conference:

I should like to address a few remarks to those who ask, “Do I share with my neighbors who have not followed the counsel? And what about the nonmembers who do not have a year’s supply? Do we have to share with them?” No, we don’t have to share—we get to share! Let us not be concerned about silly thoughts of whether we would share or not. Of course we would share! What would Jesus do? I could not possibly eat food and see my neighbors starving. And if you starve to death after sharing, “greater love hath no man than this …” (John 15:13.)
Now what about those who would plunder and break in and take that which we have stored for our families’ needs? Don’t give this one more idle thought. There is a God in heaven whom we have obeyed. Do you suppose he would abandon those who have kept his commandments? He said, “If ye are prepared, ye need not fear.” (D&C 38:30.) Prepare, O men of Zion, and fear not. Let Zion put on her beautiful garments. Let us put on the full armor of God. Let us be pure in heart, love mercy, be just, and stand in holy places.

Grandma's ice cream

2008-09-20T18:36:00.000-07:00

2 cans evaporated milk
4 cups milk
1 cup scalded milk
1 package unflavored gelatin
1/4 cup water
pinch salt
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
drop lemon extract (to counter the canned milk taste)
1 1/2 cups sugar

Mix scalded milk with one package of unflavored gelatin that has been soaked in 1/4 cup water. Add remaining ingredients. Mix well. Freeze ice cream in an ice cream freezer.

-=-=-=-=-

Officially this recipe is ice milk, since it doesn't have cream. This is my husband's grandmother's recipe. It makes a nice Sunday dessert. All the ingredients can be stored, so you don't have to go to the store on Sunday to get ice cream. Grandma sprinkles Nestle Quik or chocolate syrup on the finished ice cream for chocolate flavor.

How I love case lot sales! Or, why Utah is awesome

2008-09-19T19:37:00.001-07:00

One of the best things about living in Utah is the case lot sales.

I spent the first six years of my marriage in California. I bought in bulk there too. When canned tomatoes went on sale for 33 cents per can, I would load up the cart with 60 to 90 cans if I could. But the boxes were not on the shelves, so the cans were loose in the cart. The checker had to count out each can individually and the receipts were a few feet long. Usually I couldn't get the quantities I wanted in one trip, so I had to go back.

Bulk buying sometimes made for awkward conversation with the checker. In 1998 I bought eight 5-pound bags of flour for 69 cents each. The checker asked, "Do you like to bake cakes?" Buying large quantities of sale items was seen as a little weird.

Now, during a case lot sale, I just walk through the case lot section of the store and throw a case of peanut butter or canned vegetables or tomato sauce into the cart. The checker asks how many cases I have of which items, and scans it from a paper by the register. It's so convenient. At some stores, you can even fill out the case lot order form, wait a few days, and come to pick it up. They will even load it in the car for you.

If you live in an area without case lot sales, you can usually special order large quantities of sale items if you go to the manager's desk. The grocery store people prefer that to you clearing the shelves.

If you are in Utah county, Macey's grocery store just started their case lot sale. I went in their Pleasant Grove store on Wednesday at lunch time, and that place was hopping. The clerk was astonished. "Usually we get this kind of traffic on the last day of the sale, not the first," he said. More people are getting serious about food storage. Harmon's case lot sale finishes up on Saturday. They have a great price on olive oil.

Fighting inflation with home storage

2008-09-18T15:04:00.001-07:00

Fuel prices have recently gone down a bit in my area, though they have gone up dramatically recently in places affected by Hurricane Ike. We had a big run up of prices in general in the spring, and then things calmed down somewhat over the summer. But I don't think we're done with inflation. Inflation is ultimately caused by expansion of the money supply, and all the bailouts going on in the government right now mean that either dramatic tax increases or dramatic money printing is in our future.

How can you protect your family against inflation? The simplest means is by buying future needs now, according to your financial means and ability to store. And this meshes very well with what prophets have asked us to do. In the 70s, church members were asked to store a year's supply of food, clothing, and where possible, fuel. I still think this sounds like smart advice, even if the official word from Salt Lake has changed.

Food storage. We're covering food storage here on this blog, of course. One thing I've noticed about rising food prices is that not all prices rise at once. For example, wheat prices tripled last winter. However, prices on bread and flour tortillas and Wheaties have slightly risen, but they have not tripled. Last time I looked at Super Walmart, generic raisin bran was still priced at a low $1.81 per box. That can't last forever if wheat prices stay high. The cereal manufacturers and the stores are afraid to be the first to raise prices, so they have taken a loss during the past few months.

While prices are still low and we have storage space, we are putting boxes of cold cereal in the basement and wheat tortillas in the freezer. Eventually prices may rise high enough that we'll switch to hot cereal for breakfast and I'll have to make tortillas from scratch. But I'll try to postpone that day by buying in advance.

I've also noticed that some stores have raised prices, and others haven't. Keep reading the weekly grocery store ads so you have an idea of what different stores are charging for groceries.

Now is a good time to store meat, either by canning or freezing, if you can find good prices still. Animals are fed grains, and grain prices have risen dramatically. Meat prices went down last year because it was too expensive for farmers to continue feeding their animals, so they went to market sooner. That can't last forever.

Other home storage. Other non-perishable items used regularly in your home can also be stored. We store things like aluminum foil, plastic wrap, over the counter medicine, shampoo, conditioner, dish soap, laundry soap, hand soap, razors, cleaners, Q-tips, toilet paper, paper towels, and Ziploc bags. Did you know that plastic is a petroleum product? Little plastic grocery bags have doubled in price this year because of rising fuel prices. Metals prices have also gone up. If this hasn't already affected aluminum foil prices, it probably will.

Clothes storage. Clothes are expensive to buy new. Around here, clothes are relatively expensive even at thrift stores. However, clothes are still very cheap at yard sales. Think ahead about your family's future needs. I freaked when I realized my 10- and 8-year olds are going to be wearing adult sized clothes within the next 3-5 years. I've been shopping yard sales this year, and picking up cheap clothes in good condition in the sizes my kids will be growing into. I am still finding some clothes for 25 cents per item. We have the storage space and we aren't moving, so I feel confident about storing them.

Sewing skills may eventually become important if clothing prices rise. My sewing skills are very basic, so that's even more motivation for me to store clothes ahead.

Fuel storage, where possible. Fuel storage is trickier. There are ways of storing liquid fuels like gasoline, but there are special rules you need to follow so you don't burn down your house. Charcoal and wood can be stored. We bought a wood stove fireplace insert this year as a preparedness item, in case natural gas prices rise high enough to make wood worth the hassle.

You can also store items that require less fuel. With a solar oven, you wouldn't need as much cooking fuel. Bikes make it possible to get by with less transportation fuel.

What other ideas do you have?

Baby food

2008-09-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

My sister has a toddler. Last time she came to visit, I saw some of her good ideas for baby food for young children.

She hates spoon feeding babies. So she figured out some cool ways of making regular food into finger food for babies. She figures that if the baby can't digest it in its regular cooked form, they really don't need it. The babies like to feed themselves, so she lets them.

Oatmeal bars. She cooks oatmeal really thick, so it stays in chunks. She cooks it with water or formula for babies under one year, or with whole milk for babies over one year. She'll microwave it, let it cool, and then cut it up into little squares. The baby picks the squares up and feeds himself.

Beans. She cooks up a batch of dry beans until they are soft. After they are cooked, she spreads them out on a cookie sheet, freezes it, and puts the frozen beans into a freezer bag in the freezer. Then she has a bag full of individually frozen beans. When it's time to eat, she takes the correct amount, microwave it, and serves it to the baby. This is cleaner and cheaper than canned beans, and you don't have a can in the fridge.

Vegetables and fruits. She'll use regular canned fruit and vegetables for babies. She looks for low sodium versions. Canned vegetables are very soft. If the pieces are large, she cuts them down. She places the food on the plate and the baby feeds himself.

Bread. In her experience, babies can eat dense homemade bread more easily than fluffy store-bought bread. Because it is denser, it is more like a cracker.

Breastfeeding. Breast milk is best for babies. In most cases it's best for their health, it's best economically, and once you and the baby know what you're doing, it's more convenient. Do all you can to breast feed your children. Breastfeeding helps your family be more self-sufficient as well. I bought some formula a couple of months ago for a 72 hour kit (even though our family doesn't have a baby, in an emergency formula and diapers are the items most desperately needed). I was very surprised how much the price had gone up in the last 4 years.

If you have to formula feed your baby, consider working towards storing a supply that will last until the baby is a year old. This will protect you from inflation or interruptions in the food distribution network. Formula-fed babies are dependent on formula. It would be heart-breaking to see a baby hungry because formula wasn't available.

Other homemade baby food ideas. You can puree fruits and vegetables yourself, freeze them in ice cube trays, and then thaw when it's time to feed the baby. You can use potato flakes as baby food. And of course you can mash up whatever the rest of the family is eating. That's usually what we did.

Food storage for twenty-somethings: Dealing with limited money and storage space, little experience, and frequent moves

2008-09-17T06:11:00.000-07:00

My husband and I started using food storage as newlyweds in our 20s. This is a great time to learn how to use food storage. The sooner you learn these skills, the longer those skills will be able to bless your family. You can establish habits of using basic food early on, before children come along or while their tastes are relatively pliable. These habits can save you lots of money over time, and knowing these skills makes you and your family more confident and less stressed when hard times come.

But learning food storage in your 20s presents difficulties to most couples. Money is usually tight. Moves are often frequent: we moved six times in the first six years of our marriage. Most of those moves were in small apartments or homes, and it was hard to find space for all of this stuff. The biggest problem I had was inexperience. I didn't know what I was doing. I tried to learn from books, but there are some things that you have to learn from your own trial and error.

Dealing with frequent moves. If you have an idea of when you are going to be moving, you can plan your food storage accordingly. When you stock up on foods, try not to buy more than you can eat before your move. For example, if you know you are going to move at the end of the semester, only bulk buy the items you know you will eat before the move.

Try to eat up as much of your food before your move as possible. Go into self-imposed grocery exile to use up the extra items on your shelves. This will require some creative cooking. Think creatively, or use the ingredients search tool on allrecipes.com for ideas.

Seek inspiration in this matter. In some cases you may feel prompted to buy food storage even though you may have to move it later.

If you need shelves for your storage, buy shelves that can move with you. My husband built shelves into the garage of our first house, and spent a lot on lumber. We would have been better off buying shelves that could have moved with us to our new home. Now we have these steel shelving units from Home Depot. They were cheaper and sturdier than lumber, and we could take them to another home if we move.

A helpful hint: if you do have to move food storage and the elders help you move, make sure it doesn't get stacked on only one side of the truck. Ask me how I know. We had to pull over on the side of a busy freeway and redistribute the boxes in the moving truck so we weren't at risk of rolling over.

Dealing with a small budget. Here are my post about getting food storage without much money. During the early years of our marriage, we lived on very little. This was possible because we ate simple foods from our food storage.

Dealing with limited storage space. We stored our food storage in some weird ways that probably had our families shaking their heads. Here is my post about some of the things we have done.

Dealing with limited experience. So you didn't learn any of this when you were growing up? That is true for many of us. The only way to learn is to try. Accept that you are going to make mistakes along the way. Get information, and then experiment to see how it works in your situation.

Creative storage space ideas

2008-09-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

We lived in small apartments when we first got married. Five years later, we bought our first home. It was 1200 square feet without a basement. We had three children while we lived there, so we had proportionally more food to store. We had to be creative about where we stored food. Here are some ideas that worked for us. I hope you will add your own ideas in the comments.

Cases of #10 cans as furniture. Cases of 6 #10 cans, available at the cannery, are convenient to use as stand-in furniture for things you may not have when first setting up house. Because these boxes are all the same size, you can use them like Legos to "build" the furniture you need. We placed our TV on a stack of 3 boxes covered with a tablecloth when we were newlyweds, because we didn't have a TV stand. After my babies were born, I slept in a recliner moved into the master bedroom for a few weeks. I needed a place to put my drink, so we made an end table out of 4 cases of food storage. You could use the same idea for a temporary night stand.

We used food storage boxes to build a guest bed. We had a cheap air mattress, but it's hard to get up from an air mattress flat on the floor. We raised it up with food storage boxes stacked two deep. We also put one layer of food storage boxes under my oldest child's bed. You can fit a surprising amount of food under a bed.

Food storage under furniture. Can a few boxes fit under a night stand? We considered putting some food storage boxes in our old couch. The springs were old, and anyone who sat on that couch sank down too low. We thought about getting rid of the springs under the cushions, filling the area with food storage boxes, and replacing the cushions on top. It might have made the couch more comfortable, but we never tried it out.

Using space in creative ways. Think creatively about the space available. Many homes have corners that aren't being used. In our first home, the master bedroom was larger than we needed. We had extra room along one wall, so we stacked food storage boxes neatly along that wall. Food usually isn't stored in the master bedroom, but that was the space we had available, so we used it. We also had half a wall available in a child's room. We placed a steel shelving unit from Home Depot in there and stacked bulk purchased groceries in there, being sure to store the extra chocolate chips out of the reach of the kids. We should have covered up the shelves with a curtain or something to make it look better, but we never got around to it.

Think creatively about closet space too. If you have an extra linen closet, consider storing food there. We opted to store extra sheets in the garage so we could store extra food in the house. We lived in the desert where the food would not have stored well in the garage.

Crawl space. My sister's house doesn't have a basement, but it does have a crawl space under the house. She stores food there.

Organization. Storing food in this way takes an extra amount of organization. After taking apart the guest bed a few times to find the ingredient I needed, I finally made a "map" of what was where inside the bed. We put the food we used most so it was most easily accessible, and we labeled the boxes on the tops as well as the sides.

It is very very frustrating to not be able to find what you need when you need it. I know there are kidney beans in my basement somewhere, because I bought them in January. But could I find them last Wednesday, when I was canning beans? No. Sigh. If you can't find it when you need it, it's almost like you didn't store it in the first place.

These ideas sound weird to some people, I'm sure. But we were doing the best we could with our space available. Home decorating is not one of my talents. I'm sure someone who is good at home decorating could creatively store food and still have a cute home.

Please share your ideas in the comments!

All about powdered milk

2008-09-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

Cost of reconstituted powdered milk versus fresh milk

Crystal at Everyday Food Storage has done the math on the cost of reconstituted powdered milk per gallon. One can of powdered milk from the cannery makes a little over 5 1/2 gallons. Milk prices have jumped around a lot in the past couple of years. Recent prices per gallon, according to Crystal:

around 2006 $1.15
late 2007 $2.36
June 2008-present $1.87

In the late 1990s, the price of powdered milk worked out to about 75 cents per gallon, which was about half the cost of fresh milk at that time. My husband and I drank it then because it saved so much money.

Because of the recent price increases, powdered milk is actually more expensive than fresh milk in some cases. We bought our last batch of powdered milk at last winter's high price of $2.36 per gallon. I was surprised to find skim milk on sale for $1.66 per gallon at the grocery store last week. We have been drinking powdered milk for the last year, so we can rotate milk that was going to go to waste otherwise. We have used up the last of the old milk, and now that milk prices have gone down, we'll happily switch back to drinking fresh milk. We'll continue to store powdered milk, and use it up before it goes bad, but we won't use it everyday in the name of frugality.

Our family's history with powdered milk

My husband and I started drinking powdered milk as newlyweds to save money. It was also more convenient in some ways. We didn't have to go to the grocery store as often. We could mix up small batches that would not go to waste. I used it to make yogurt occasionally.

We switched to fresh milk when our children were young. Children under age 2 need milk fat for their brain development. We got used to drinking fresh milk as well.

We started using powdered milk again last year. We thought we would have to move, so we used the powdered milk so we would have less food storage to move. We mixed the reconstituted powdered milk with whole milk to make 2% (half powdered, half whole) or 1% (1 quart whole, 3 quarts powdered) milk. The kids got used to the taste and didn't seem to mind.

Last year we also got some old powdered milk from my mom. She had canned it prior to Y2K. It was time to use it before it went bad, and she kindly gave it to us. It had been stored in a hot garage, and it didn't taste as good as it used to. But it wasn't terrible, and the price was right. We just finished using up that old milk.

Differences between brands of powdered milk

We have some experience with three brands of milk: the milk from LDS canneries, Country Cream, and Morning Moo. My sister has also used Nido, which is whole powdered milk distributed by Nestle.

Generally, the milk from the cannery is cheapest, but there are brands that taste better.

My mom thinks that Country Cream tastes best. She says that refrigerated reconstituted Country Cream is indistinguishable from store bought skimmed milk. Country Cream is sold at Macey's grocery stores in Utah Valley.

Morning Moo is officially "milk alternative." It is made from whey. It contains much less protein than regular powdered milk. I opted against storing Morning Moo because one of the main reasons you store powdered milk is for the protein. I also tried a can of 9 year old Morning Moo stored in my mom's garage. It tasted much worse than cannery powdered milk of the same age stored in the same conditions. I'm not picky about powdered milk taste, but it was barely palatable.

Nido is great to store if you have little babies that need the milk fat. My sister has found it in the Hispanic section of the grocery store, or in ethnic markets. She finds it convenient so she doesn't have to shop for whole milk at the grocery store. It might be nice for families to store for making ice cream or other special treats. I've never tasted it, but we have a can in our basement.

Difference between instant and non-instant powdered milk

There are two kinds of powdered milk: instant and non-instant. Instant powdered milk is available in the boxes at the grocery store. Non-instant is what you get at the cannery. Instant looks like little flakes, and stirs up a lot more easily. Non-instant takes some work with the whisk or the blender for it to mix up. It takes twice the volume of instant powdered milk to reconstitute into a gallon of milk, compared to non-instant. So, if you are following a recipe that calls for powdered milk, it's really important to know what kind of powdered milk they are talking about.

How to reconstitute powdered milk

We reconstitute our powdered milk with a whisk. Our family drinks a lot of milk now, so I usually stir up a week's worth at a time. I store them in old milk jugs that I rinse out with diluted bleach, to get the sour milk smell out. To make 1 gallon of cannery powdered milk, I measure out 3 cups of powdered milk in a large plastic bowl. Then I add 1 quart of water and stir vigorously with a whisk. I scrape the sides of the bowl to incorporate the little milk "seeds" that need to be stirred in. When it is thoroughly mixed, I pour it into the old milk jug. Then I add another two quarts of water. There are a lot of bubbles on top. I place the jug in the fridge while I wait for the bubbles to go down. A few hours later I'll fill up the jug to the top with water. I put the top on and shake it. I've seen other recipes call for adding vanilla and sugar to powdered milk to make it palatable. I think that makes the milk taste weird, so we don't do it.

Other cool things to make from powdered milk

Check out Crystal's ideas at Everyday Food Storage.

Remember all of Hillbilly Housewife's ideas, including a recipe for cottage cheese. She also has instructions for homemade yogurt. I intend to write a post about that someday.

Tamale Pie

2008-09-13T19:07:00.000-07:00

Here's another food storage recipe that's a favorite at our house. I got it from Jackie Clay.

Tamale Pie

1/2 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup white flour or freshly ground whole wheat flour
1/4 cup honey or white sugar
1/4 cup shortening (or coconut oil)
1 egg (or rehydrated egg powder, or 1 heaping tbsp. soy flour and 1 tbsp. water)
1 cup rehydrated dry milk
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup cooked hamburger (Jackie Clay uses home canned) or beef TVP
2 cups tomato sauce
1/2 cup dry chopped onions
1/4 cup dry chopped green peppers or chile peppers
2 tsp mild chili powder
1/2 cup canned corn

Mix first eight ingredients well, making a medium batter (not runny or not stiff). Then in medium sized cast iron frying pan or 8 x 8 cake pan, mix the last six ingredients well, then top with cornmeal batter. Bake at 350 degrees until top turns golden brown. Serve hot with cold salsa.

How to get food storage when you can’t afford it

2008-09-12T19:30:00.001-07:00

Food storage can seem expensive when you are just starting out. What can you do to make it affordable when money is tight? I hope we can start a discussion to see what you have found helpful.

Here are some of my ideas:

Buy food in bulk at the absolute lowest price. I detailed how to do that in this post. This method of shopping will naturally build a three-month supply of most staples.
Buy the long term storage foods with the intent of using some of it. Bulk rice, wheat, oats, and beans are the cheapest foods out there during normal economic times. If you eat some of that food instead of your regular groceries, you can use the money saved towards food storage. In addition, you will have learned how to cook with the simple foods. Those skills are just as useful as the actual food storage.
Perhaps you will be lucky and find "used" food storage. Sometimes people move and leave food storage behind. If you help people move, you may be poised to accept such offers. I've seen people giving away their old food storage on Craigslist.
Eat less expensive foods, and put the savings towards food storage. Perhaps eat out less, or use fewer convenience foods, or add a meatless meal to your week.
Preserve fruit or vegetables that would otherwise go to waste. My friend April is really good at this. She prunes the neighbors' fruit trees in the spring for a share of the fall crop. She will also walk around older downtown neighborhoods and look for fruit trees that are not being harvested. She'll knock on the door and ask if she can pick them. According to her, they usually say yes. She dries the fruit into fruit leather and serves it all year. Similarly, last fall after the first frost, I looked around for green tomatoes going to waste. I used them to make a delicious salsa verde.
Make more foods from scratch. Bread and yogurt can be made at home for much less than they can be purchased at the store. This requires time and planning, but once you learn how, it takes less time than you would think. Purchase food storage items with the savings.
I read this idea in the January 1993 Ensign: Newlyweds set aside some groceries each week as "frugal food storage." If they were invited out to dinner, they set aside the groceries they would have used for dinner that week as food storage, and they spent a few dollars each week on staples.

What other ideas do you have?

Canning meats, beans, and broth

2008-09-11T21:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday’s Deseret News article about pressure canning reminded me that I wanted to write a little about pressure canning and how it relates to food storage.

Most people pressure can in order to preserve low acid garden vegetables, such as green beans. I haven’t yet had a huge enough garden that I had leftover green beans to preserve. But I have used a pressure cooker quite a bit, to can broth, meats, and beans.

Canned beans, meat, and broth have several advantages:

Canned food is immediate and easy to use. It doesn’t have to be thawed. This is very handy at 4 p.m. when you haven’t planned dinner yet. Canned broth is convenient to just pour from the jar. Frozen broth is harder to use. Dry beans store well, but canned beans are a lot handier.
Canned meat is safe during power outages, when frozen food is at risk of spoiling.
Canned meat and beans taste better. The pressure canner tenderizes tough meats and thoroughly softens the beans. They are delicious.

Like the newspaper article said, pressure cooking isn’t scary. Yes, you have to follow the instructions precisely and have a healthy respect for the canner. But it isn’t terribly difficult once you get used to it. And it’s not terribly time consuming either, if you are going to be home and around the kitchen that day. Most of the work in preserving shredded chicken meat, for example, is in cooking up the chicken and picking it off the bone. You can either freeze that meat, or put it into canning jars and pressure can it. Babysitting the canner takes up an extra couple of hours (75 minutes for pints, plus the time it takes the canner to get to the correct pressure), but you can do other things in the kitchen at the same time. You can hear the weight on pressure cooker jiggling, and that tells you it’s still under pressure.

I won’t go into a detailed description of pressure canning; you can find that elsewhere online. Actually, you should get the Ball Blue Book and follow their detailed instructions with pictures. Or get a friend to walk you though the first time. Canning is more fun with a friend.

Added 9-30-08: Abby from Safely Gathered In wrote an awesome post about how to use a pressure canner to can green beans. She took pictures every step of the way. Check it out!

Buy Low, Eat High

2008-09-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

Sara's last post about food storage as a hedge to inflation reminded me of a post I wrote back when the rice situation was so crazy. Thought I would share it here.

This is a crazy time, with food prices and shortages and all.

I'm recalling President Hinckley's talk in 1998 when he read from Genesis 41 and then said:

I want to make it very clear that I am not prophesying, that I am not predicting years of famine in the future. But I am suggesting that the time has come to get our houses in order.

So many of our people are living on the very edge of their incomes. In fact, some are living on borrowings.

We have witnessed in recent weeks wide and fearsome swings in the markets of the world. The economy is a fragile thing. A stumble in the economy in Jakarta or Moscow can immediately affect the entire world. It can eventually reach down to each of us as individuals. There is a portent of stormy weather ahead to which we had better give heed.

Of course, I cannot interpret the prophet's words for anyone else, but I can't help but feel that we are experiencing a glimpse of what stormy weather can look like, and what the impact of an interconnected worldwide economy can be. As he said, if something happens in one part of the world, it can affect us all.

I remember when a big storm hit the East coast when I was living there. It only shut things down for three days, but people went crazy and bought the stores out of bread and produce. I was stunned when it took a month for the produce to really come back up to a normal supply.

We are seeing similar panicking now. You can't just walk into Costco (or any grocery store, for that matter) and get a 25 bag of rice. You can't go to your cannery and pick up more than a couple of bags of food. And prices of what you can buy (such as wheat) continue to go up.

President Hinckley also talked a lot about avoiding consumer debt, about not living on the edges of our incomes. This situation we face now to me seems like a simple example of why this is wise counsel. If one has a fixed food budget, one cannot simply go and pay premium prices for commodities, unless one has some extra money tucked away...which is yet another element of preparedness counsel we have received.

I've also been struck by how the focus for food storage has changed from storing commodities first, to storing three months' worth of what our families regularly eat. Might such a focus also help us at times like this? If we are working on our three-month supply, do we really need to go out and pay premium prices for commodities right now? Might this be a good time to stock up on other foods that aren't getting so much attention? Plant a garden? Learn how to make bread? etc....

I dunno. I suppose for each family, the solution might be a little different, depending on budget and existing storage and typical eating patterns. But I've been thinking about the idea of 'Buy Low, Eat High.' If prices continue to soar, will I really want to pay bookoo bucks for a loaf of bread, or should I just make some (I need to use up that flour that is getting old anyway....)?

It is clear to me that prophetic counsel has the power to protect us from times of panic. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

How are you approaching things right now? Are you buying high? Are you going to ride it out and live on your storage? Are you ignoring the panic and storing other things?

Food storage as an inflation hedge

2008-09-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

In spring 2007, milk prices jumped up a lot. A few months later, we visited my husband's grandparents. They have a great pantry and food storage system, and they drink powdered milk. I mentioned something about the increase in the price of milk. They said, "Has the price really gone up?" They hadn't noticed, because they were still drinking milk at last year's prices. Because they use their food storage, they were protected from that price increase.

Back in April this year, I read an article from the Wall Street Journal entitled Load up the Pantry. He makes the argument that, financially speaking, you are more likely to get a better "return" on an investment in nonperishable foods than on money in the bank. You can get at best 3% in a (good) savings account or CD, and food prices are rising more than that. Higher food prices are likely over time because of increased demand in Asia, and higher fuel prices. Did you know that fertilizer is a petroleum product? Fuel is also used in tractors, and to transport food to market. Even though gas prices have come down slightly recently, they are likely to continue to go up over the next few years, and that leads to higher food prices.

I was very surprised to read this argument from someone in the mainstream media. A few years ago, only a kook (or a Mormon) would have argued that people should store food as an actual investment. Times certainly are changing quickly.

I've been reading the explanations of different economists to try to figure out what is going on with the economy, and to figure out how we should deal with our household money. Economists give advice about investment ideas to fight inflation. Some are recommending investing in precious metals, foreign currencies, commodities and so on. However, all of these investments are more risky than just buying your future needs now. If you will use it someday, buying food and other future needs now is a very low-risk proposition.

Food storage protects our families in many ways. Not only is it useful in times of disaster or job loss, but it can also serve as a hedge against inflation.

Storing fats (not on your body)

2008-09-05T07:44:00.001-07:00

Some fat is important in our diets. Traditional people who ate protein and no fat suffered something called rabbit starvation. Even Weight Watchers is now calling for their dieters to eat some healthy oil each day. Fats are especially important in the diets of young children.

But fats are tricky to store. Butter needs to be refrigerated or frozen. Some oils need refrigeration, or go rancid within months.

Coconut oil is an exception. Coconut oil stores well at room temperature for at least two years. Coconut oil is 90% saturated fat. It is solid at 76 degrees F and lower. Because it is saturated, that means it is more stable and doesn't become rancid as quickly as other oils. This is the kind of oil that movie theaters traditionally cooked popcorn in. It has a high smoke point, which makes it good for frying.

There is a little bit of a health controversy about this oil. Back in the 1990s coconut and palm oils (tropical oils) were vilified for their saturated fat content. Now some people think coconut oil is a super health food. I'm not sure which is which; health information can be controversial and I'll let you do your own research.

According to the Weston Price people linked above, coconut oil contains lauric acid, which is also in breast milk. Coconut oil seems like a healthy fat to have in storage for babies and young children, who need fat in their diets for proper brain development.

There are two different kinds of coconut oil: "virgin" and refined. Virgin coconut oil smells like coconut, which is delicious for some things and not desirable for other things. I made a chocolate cake with virgin coconut oil once, and the chocolate and coconut tastes did not blend together well. Virgin coconut oil is also outrageously priced at my health food store (about $16 per pound). Some people think it's healthier though.

I buy LouAna coconut oil, which is "refined." The LouAna coconut oil has a neutral smell and taste. It's white like shortening. Because it melts over 76 degrees, it's liquid in the summer at my house and solid the rest of the year. I find it at Super Wal-mart next to the shortening. At Super Wal-mart its price is comparable to the price of butter.

Olive oil is a healthy fat. This fat stores well too. It also has an expiration date of two years from manufacture. It stores best out of the sunlight. After it is opened it can go rancid faster, so small bottles may be best.

If you are not opposed to trans fats, there are other options here. Shortening is shelf stable. Margarine may be too, depending on the margarine. I remember hearing that in World War II margarine was white sticks with a bubble of yellow food coloring on top that people would use to color the margarine. Solid margarine without milk ingredients, like Nucoa, would probably store about as well as shortening on the shelf, though this is probably against the manufacturer's instructions.

Vegetable oils have an expiration date of about 12-18 months out. Like olive oil, once opened it can go rancid faster.

Clarified butter, or ghee, is shelf stable. Making ghee involves melting the butter and skimming off the milk solids, then storing the remaining liquid in a jar. This is a common fat in India. Here is an article about making ghee, with pictures.

Also, last year I saw R e d Feather canned butter for the first time at Macey's grocery store in Utah Valley. I haven't used it yet, but perhaps someone here can give us a review!

Other high-fat "storable" foods include peanut butter, mayonnaise, salad dressings, and tuna in oil.

Ideas from the Hillbilly Housewife

2008-09-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

I found the Hillbilly Housewife last year. Her website has some great ideas for frugal recipes using basic ingredients. For example:

Magic Milkshakes taste like Wendy's frosties and are made up of food storage ingredients.

The Urban Dairy has a lot of great information about using powdered milk. Did you know that you can make something that tastes like cottage or ricotta cheese with powdered milk, vinegar, and salt? I tried this recipe once, and it worked great in lasagna.

Here's a stack of homemade convenience food recipes.

If grocery money is tight for the week, she has an emergency $45 menu and a $70 low cost menu.

Making school lunches for kids? She has lots of good ideas and recipes here and here. My daughter wanted to take burritos for school lunch all last year. I got the idea from this website.

Do you have a used bread machine with no manual? Here's a generic bread machine manual to help you learn how to use it. (Or you can often can find the manual to your particular machine on the internet.)

The owner of the site has changed in the last year, but the website still has lots of good stuff.

Soy flour egg substitute

2008-09-04T12:21:00.000-07:00

Another gem from the Tightwad Gazette is the use of soy flour as an egg substitution in baking. Powdered eggs can be pretty pricey. We store soybeans instead.

To replace one egg in baking, add 1 heaping tablespoon of soy flour and 1 tablespoon of water. (That's the recipe as given in the Tightwad Gazette. I always found that I needed to add a little extra water. Maybe my heaping tablespoons are more heaping than hers.)

Soybeans can be ground in some wheat grinders. I have a Whispermill (that I will write a review of someday), and it can grind soybeans. Soybeans are oily so read the grinder's manual to make sure that it can handle soybeans.

Or you can pick up soy flour at a health food store. Soybeans have fat in them, which means that soy flour would probably go rancid within a year or so. I've never noticed rancid soy flour, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. If you're looking at long term storage, store whole soybeans.

I've used this in a lot of different kinds of baking. The soy flour will give a little off taste to the dough, so beware if you or your family likes to munch on the cookie dough. You don't taste the soy in the final baked product.

A Food Storage Day!

2008-09-02T21:39:00.000-07:00

A woman I know was behind me in line at the grocery store as I heard the total of my two carts' worth of case lot finds (I'm not done yet)! She looked a bit incredulous, even worried. "That's as much as I spend on a whole months' worth of groceries," she said.

I assured her that this was a very pricey trip to the store for me, too, but that the cost would spread out for months because...

I restocked my three-month supply today!

I am not advocating spending a whole months' budget on your food storage if you can't. We have been told to be prudent and to not go to extremes. You can definitely build a three-month supply a little at a time by buying a few extra items each time you go shopping.

But I have not shopped for our three-month staples for quite a while (they lasted longer than three months the last time around), and I tend to do better just sort of doing it in spurts. And we are at a place financially where we can do this.

No matter how you approach your three-month supply (even if right now it's only a weeks' supply), it feels so good to have a little extra food on hand. It's like I have my own store downstairs. I rarely have to run to the store to cook -- I just use what we have, and the foods that I keep stocked last me for quite a while.

After coming home from that trip, my kids decided they wanted cup-o-noodles for dinner, which was fine by me, since I was so tired.

But since they weren't going to eat my cooking, I decided to whip up something that the majority of them don't like. I made it with a little twist tonite -- a build-your-own shepherd's pie.

I used canned beef chunks from the cannery, just heated up in a bowl, cooked in the broth for flavor and moisture. I cooked frozen corn and peas & carrots in one pan, and fresh baby carrots in another. To the cooking water (to take advantage of whatever minerals and vitamins were in the water), I added potato pearls. Then hubby and I just put the veggie/tater mixture(s) of our choice over a layer of meat, and sprinkled a bit of shredded cheese over the top, and voila! We had an easy and hearty meal.

And we had it all to ourselves. :)

Store what you eat; eat what you store: The controversy

2008-09-02T15:53:00.000-07:00

I know people who bought food storage in the 70s, let it sit in their garages for 20+ years, and then throw it all away. You probably know of people who have done the same thing.

Food storage experts saw the same thing. The waste is painful to observe. From these experiences the experts started citing the adage “store what you eat and eat what you store.”

This advice makes sense to me, and I have tried to follow it. We use most of the items in our storage regularly. There are a few exceptions, but most of our storage is rotated within a few years.

But then—

Last spring, I went to the Lindon, Utah cannery to replace some of our wheat. At the bottom of the order form, it had some questions and answers about food storage. It said specifically that members should not be counseled to “store what you eat; eat what you store” in regards to long term food storage.

I thought about it, and realized I had never heard that counsel from official church sources. A quick search of lds.org reveals only one hit for “store what you eat,” and that is in an answer to “I have a question” in the New Era from 1984.

“Store what you eat; eat what you store” is good counsel for the three-month supply currently recommended by the church. But I think the church is saying that this constraint should not keep you from storing in inexpensive long-term storage foods, even if you don’t foresee yourself using those foods. Eventually, gradually, you can learn how to use them if you have them. And if you store them well, they should last a long time. We once got 30-year-old hand-me-down wheat that made bread just like the fresh wheat.

Oatmeal for dummies

2008-09-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

I grew up eating Quaker maple & brown sugar instant oatmeal. I hate to buy convenience food, and I had plenty of quick oats in storage, so I tried to figure out how to make oatmeal quickly in the morning. I read recipes for instant oatmeal, but the recipes sounded like a lot of work. It involved a blender and measuring everything out into little baggies.

I did finally figure it out. Here is the amazing secret recipe (ahem):

"Instant" microwave oatmeal

1/2 cup quick oats (old fashioned oats come out tasting chewier and aren't like instant oatmeal)
1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 to 3/4 cups water (we like our oatmeal thick. Use more water for thinner oatmeal)
pancake syrup or brown sugar

Place ingredients into a bowl. Stir thoroughly so the salt is dissolved. Microwave on high for 1 1/2 minutes. Pour syrup or spoon brown sugar on top to taste, stir. Serve with milk.

The salt is critical, in my opinion. It tastes like a bland pasty mush without salt. If the salt is unevenly dissolved it will taste salty in places and bland in other places.

I store the measuring cup and spoon in the oats container so it's quicker to prepare in the morning. I made a special mark on the water measuring cup so the kids would know how much water there should be. Starting at about age 4 my kids could prepare this for themselves if I measured the water for them and handled the hot oatmeal as it came out of the microwave. It's a good way to teach introductory cooking skills like measuring ingredients.

This is probably a "no duh" kind of recipe for most people. This is basically the microwave instructions on the quick oats box, except for flavoring it with pancake syrup. But it must not be that obvious, since so many people use the instant oatmeal. It really does cook up about as quick as the real instant oatmeal. And it's a lot better than measuring out oatmeal into little baggies.

Ideas for other flavors: For fruit flavors, stir in some jam or jelly, or mash in a banana or stir in some raisins. The kids went through a "chocolate oatmeal" kick a year or so ago. We were out of pancake syrup so they stirred in chocolate syrup instead. It sounded weird to me until I remembered all of the chocolate cereals on the breakfast aisle. I guess chocolate oatmeal is moderately more healthy than those.

Savvyshopperdeals.com (for Utah county residents)

2008-09-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

Savvyshopperdeals.com has a free email newsletter that lets you know the good deals going on at the different grocery and discount stores this week. I have a habit of looking through the grocery ads each week to look for good deals on the staples we have in food storage. I like Amy's newsletter because it makes life easier for me, and she also catches deals on items I buy so infrequently that I don't know what a good price is. She also coordinates coupons with the sales. I haven't used coupons much, because I don't find it very convenient when I'm buying in bulk, but it's nice to see the possibilities there.

Chicken enchilada soup

2008-09-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

I grew up in southern California, and we like Mexican food. I ate a chicken enchilada soup at Chili's a long time ago. I loved it and looked for a recipe. I found this one. Originally it called for Velveeta within the soup, but we don't buy Velveeta, and putting the cheese within the soup would have really increased the calories. So I omitted the cheese from the soup and we garnish the top with grated cheese instead. Our whole family loves it.

Chicken Enchilada Soup
Serves 12

1 teaspoon oil
1 lb chicken breast
1/2 cup diced onion
1 clove garlic, pressed
4 cups chicken broth
1 cup masa harina de maiz (corn tortilla "flour" found in the Mexican food section of the supermarket)
3 cups water
1 cup tomato sauce
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons chili powder
1/2 teaspoon cumin
shredded cheddar cheese
tortilla chips

Add oil to a large pot on medium heat. Add chicken breast and brown for 4-5 minutes per side. Set aside. Add onions to garlic in pot. Saute over medium heat for about 2 minutes until clear. Add broth. Mix masa with two cups of water; add to pot. Add remaining water, tomato sauce, and spices to pot. Bring to a boil. Shred chicken into bite-sized pieces and add to pot. Reduce heat and simmer 30-40 minutes till thick. Garnish with crumbled chips and cheese.

You can also add various veggies to the soup. I often add zucchini this time of year. Sometimes I also add dehydrated carrots from the cannery that we've had way too long and really need to be used up.

-=-=-=-

The food storage angle:

I bought a lot of masa harina de maiz for our food storage when we were newlyweds. I figured we would use it for making tortillas, but I never did figure out how to make tortillas well. So...we still have some of it, 13 years later. Luckily it is still good. And luckily, we are using up that masa little by little with this recipe.

So, if you have an ingredient that's been in your food storage for too long, look around for a recipe that uses it. The allrecipes.com ingredient search is a useful tool for searching for recipes that use a certain ingredient.

Sara's food storage background

2008-09-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a little about me:

I'm a 35 year old married mom of 3 elementary-school aged kids. We live in Orem, Utah. I've been married for 13 years. I've been interested in food storage and basic cooking since I was engaged. My husband bought me a wheat grinder for my birthday during our engagement, and I was happy about it, so that tells you a little about what a dork I am.

I grew up a member of the church in suburban southern California. I grew up with a little bit of food storage background. My mom did some of this in the 70s when I was little. We had a lot of wheat in our garage. But we didn't use food storage routinely.

I learned most of these skills as a young married person, with the help of my mom, Relief Society sisters, and books. These skills have helped us live cheaply so I can be a stay-at-home mom despite the times when we have had a low income. Along the way I learned how to make bread, yogurt, wheat crackers, salsa, and pressure can meat and broth.

When we were newlyweds, we were given some food storage from the cannery. We figured out that the cannery powdered milk cost 75 cents per gallon back then. I think fresh milk was around $1.75 at the time. We got used to drinking powdered milk, and it did save a lot of money. We switched to fresh when our kids were little, because milk fat is important for little kids, but we switched back to powdered a few years ago. The kids really don't seem to mind.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way. When I was a newlywed, I signed up to bring rolls to a Homemaking night. They didn't rise in time and I brought hard rolls. I tried to make plum jam, but it became plum syrup. I have tried to make tortillas a few times, but still haven't figured that one out. But some of the experiments worked, and when they did, I had learned something new.

We have moved a lot in our 13 years of marriage. We've lived in small apartments, small homes without basements, and now a home with a basement with a dedicated food storage room. We've stashed our storage a lot of different places. Two cases of #10 cans covered with a tablecloth became our TV stand when we were newlyweds. In our earlier small house, we created a guest bed by stacking boxes of #10 cans 2 deep underneath an air mattress. There was a little extra room in the master bedroom in that house, so we stacked boxes along one wall in there.

Now my kids are old enough to participate. Last week my 10-year-old daughter put the ingredients for bread in the bread machine. My 5-year-old daughter turned the crank on the food mill to make tomato sauce. My 8-year-old son ran down to the basement to get us more ketchup when we ran out. Life is fun.

Just like Wendy's Chili

2008-09-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

Serves 12

2 lbs ground beef
32 oz. tomato sauce
29 oz can kidney beans with liquid, or 1 2/3 cup dry kidney beans, soaked and cooked until soft
29 oz. can pinto beans with liquid, or 1 2/3 cup dry pinto beans, soaked and cooked until soft
1 cup diced onion
1/2 cup diced green chiles
1/4 cup diced celery
29 oz can diced tomatoes
4 Tablespoons chili powder
1 1/2 teaspoons black pepper
2 teaspoons salt (if dry beans are used, add 2 more teaspoons salt)

Brown the ground beef with the onions and celery. Drain the fat. Crumble beef into pea-sized pieces. In a large pot, combine the beef with all other remaining ingredients. Bring to a simmer over low heat. Cook, stirring every 15 minutes, for 2 to 3 hours. Or cook in a crockpot all day on low, or for a half day on high.

Serve with chopped lettuce, grated cheese and taco chips for a taco salad.

How does this recipe fit into my family recipe criteria? It's healthy, cheap, yummy, and uses ingredients from the food storage. It's quicker to prepare if you use pre-canned beans. It's cheaper if you don't. We usually prepare this with dried beans. That makes it take longer, so I have to plan ahead and cook up a lot of beans at the same time.

Are these ingredients "storable" though? Ground beef usually isn't considered part of food storage. We have a large freezer and I buy meat in bulk. However, ground beef can be canned. I've done it before. The celery isn't really part of food storage either. If I don't have it on hand, I have skipped it before. Or if I have a garden going, I have chopped up the stems of Swiss chard. They taste like celery, are healthier than celery, and it's much easier to grow than celery. For onions, I usually use dehydrated onions purchased in bulk from the LDS cannery. I put onions in the garden this year, so I'm finally using fresh onions and remembering why I don't like dealing with them!

The other ingredients are routine parts of our storage: tomato sauce, canned diced tomatoes, canned green chiles, spices. We buy these in bulk every year when they go on sale, usually during Utah's terrific case lot sales (a subject of another post).

Searching for the Holy Grail of Family Recipes: Cheap, Healthy, Quick, Tasty, and Using Food Storage Ingredients

2008-08-31T20:23:00.000-07:00

I’m always on the lookout for family recipes that meet these criteria:

Healthy
Cheap
Quick
Tasty
Using ingredients that store well

These recipes aren’t easy to find. Most modern recipes maximize quick and tasty, or quick and healthy. They call for ingredients that are expensive prepackaged convenience foods, or foods that aren’t stored easily. Or a recipe might use food storage ingredients but it tastes weird, and the family protests.

I like to use recipes with basic ingredients. The problem is that often basic ingredients take longer to cook. I try to find recipes that don’t take a lot of extra time, or I get around that extra time by making large batches and freezing.

I look for recipes by asking around, or by searching on allrecipes.com. For example, I wanted to find a good recipe for sloppy joes. I looked on allrecipes.com and found many different recipes for sloppy joes. I looked at the highest rated ones, and then looked for the ones that called for basic ingredients: tomato sauce or ketchup with added seasonings, instead of condensed chicken gumbo soup (which we don’t store).

Finding recipes that use "storable" ingredients helps you to “eat what you store.” With these recipes, you get more familiar with the basic ingredients in your storage and you can rotate them. Also, any recipes that call for food in your storage will save you time grocery shopping. You won’t need to run to the store to get the missing ingredient.

I’ll share some of the recipes my family has found, and I hope you will do the same. Of course family needs and tastes differ. Your family cookbook will be customized to the needs and taste of your own family.

Feeling Rich

2008-08-31T18:37:00.000-07:00

“Doesn’t it make you feel rich, Ma, just to think of the whole winter’s provisions laid in, already?” said Laura.
--By the Shores of Silver Lake, p. 134

I read and reread the Little House on the Prairie series as a kid. This line stayed with me. Laura’s family had recently arrived in Dakota Territory. They had a chance to stay in the surveyors’ house for the winter. The house was stocked with groceries for the winter. To Laura, that felt rich.

The groceries were simple: flour, beans, salt meat, potatoes, “even some canned stuff.” That sounds about like the same kind of long-term food storage we are going about getting. When you think about it, country people have always sought to have a year’s supply of food. They needed to store enough of the harvest to get them through to the next harvest.

Most modern people wouldn’t think that a basement full of food makes a person rich. But there is a tremendous feeling of security that comes with stored food. We know that if life changed suddenly—if my husband lost his job or the economy suddenly changed—we would have food. There is also the additional security that comes with obedience to prophetic counsel. From a certain perspective, this feeling of security is true richness.

The Tightwad Gazette and Food Storage, or How to get food storage when you can't afford it

2008-08-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

The Complete Tightwad Gazette, by Amy Dacyczyn. I love this book! The books are based on a newsletter that ran from about1991-96. Most of the material from the newsletters are now compiled in The Complete Tightwad Gazette.

When I was a newlywed, I studied these books (back when this book was two smaller books and an ongoing newsletter subscription). It gave a lot of ideas about how to save money on groceries when my husband and I were poor college students. I soon found that her style of purchasing groceries nicely adapted to a food storage-based lifestyle.

Here are the specific articles I found useful regarding food storage:

The price book, p. 33. Often grocery store rock-bottom sale prices are lower than wholesale prices. When the rock-bottom sale occurred, Amy would stock up on the sale item. Keeping a notebook that recorded the lowest price helped her determine what a good sale price is. (Recent food price inflation is making it difficult to determine current rock bottom prices, but that's a topic for another post.)

How to buy food in bulk, p. 35. Instead of buying the food needed for one week as most people do, she stocks up on non-perishable sale items. She buys in quantities to get her through to the next sale or until it’s convenient to get to the store again.

The pantry principle, p. 474. “The basic premise is that you stockpile your pantry (and/or kitchen, freezer, basement, closet, and/or the space under your bed) with food purchased at the absolute lowest possible price. The sole purpose of grocery shopping becomes replenishing your pantry, not buying specific ingredients to prepare specific meals. This is a subtle but important distinction.”

The Dacyczyn family did not set out to buy a year’s supply of food, but the ideas are easy enough to adapt to a Mormon idea of food storage. As a newlywed, I bulk bought according to my storage space and moving plans. (We tried to time our purchases to avoid moving extra food.) As our family and our storage space grew, I tried to get more specific about getting a year’s supply of various grocery items.

By using this method, you can start to accumulate food storage without requiring extra money in the budget. The rock bottom prices of grocery staples are routinely half off the everyday price. Buying at those prices as much as possible creates savings that you can use to start to accumulate stored food.

Fun with Food Storage!

2008-08-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

A few of us have gotten together to share some of our experiences and ideas with regard to food storage. Sara, OkieDokie, and Michelle (m&m) will talk about shopping for, storing, and using food storage. Whether you are a seasoned food storage expert looking for others' ideas, or are just beginning to think about starting your food storage, whether you are a Mormon or have never heard of the Mormons, we hope to help you get your brain juices going. If you are a bit intimidated by it all, we hope to help you see that food storage can be simple and practical -- and even fun.

Do you have questions? Ideas? Recipes? Product reviews? Stories to share? We'd love to hear from you! Use the comments feature or send an email to Michelle at hotmail, with the username mulling_and_musing (underscores are part of the username). If you would like to contribute as a permablogger, let us know -- the more the merrier!

Stay tuned as we get some of our ideas transferred from our brains to the blog. In the meantime, you can peruse Michelle's three month supply blog to see some of what she shared with her ward back when she was the emergency preparedness coordinator.