“Store what you eat and eat what you store”. This advice is as good now as it was when my grandmother said it. I was raised with the idea that your food storage should be made up of the foods you like to eat now. An emergency will be stressful enough on your family. This isn’t the time to start making every meal with the 500 lbs. of wheat you have stored. Storing a wide variety of foods will help keep your family healthy and happy.
Rotating your food storage is the best way to keep it fresh and learn how to incorporate it into your daily life. I try to make one meal each week that uses food storage ingredients. We pick a recipe as a family. Usually it is one that we already love. Then I substitute some of the ingredients with
dehydrated or
freeze dried foods. If possible I make it completely from food storage (we have a great
YouTube channel, where our resident cook, Grant, shows you how easy it is to make delicious recipes exclusively from food storage). I’ve made mistakes along the way: apparently my family does NOT like split peas, but they love freeze dried spinach! These experiments have helped me create the best food storage for my family.
I keep all of the recipes we have tried in my Food Storage Binder. If it ever became necessary for us to rely completely on our storage I feel confident that I can make meals my family will love.
--Dawn
12 comments
lm
The binder idea of recipes is a good idea
Mark
I have to say that I haven't really made any special provisions to store food. I have a lot of canned stuff, but it's definitely not stuff we normally eat. I'll have to work on this.
MrsAndy
Great idea with the binder of tested recipes! I will have to check out your upcoming post on the organization of it. Thanks!
Brenda
Storing what you like is exactly what I have been trying to make my husband understand. There is no sense in taking up valuable storage space on something that you do not like! We have a started a large garden with plans to expand it over the next few years. We have 1 acre of land and about half of it will be dedicated to growing food. You can grow a large quantity in a small space. I have leaf lettuce growing in gutters attached to our fence and it is doing great! I will be doing a LOT of canning!
lfhpueblo
Yeap, we have lentils in our food storage, but I know for a fact that I do not like lentils. Hoping my hubby will. We'll keep them though, because in a time of emergency I could make myself eat them if I needed to. Good advice to purchase what you like, but sometimes the best deals on food storage items are in a group and you do not pick which items you want, rather you take the group as a whole to get the discount deal. Wish deals had some choices in them, but haven't see any out there that have.
cas2047
We're starting to add the dehydrated foods into our diets. With the high cost of the freeze dried foods, coupled with the fact that they hae such a long shelf life, we'll use those less. However we do plan on conducting a few weekend tests where the power and water will be shutoff and we'll make it through the weekend using our preps, and we'll use some freeze dried foods during those weekends.
bridget
I started an emergency binder about a year ago and had a food section in the binder but over the year, my recipes have outgrown my binder. I have now started a binder strictly for recipes. I included different tabs: solar cooking, conversion/substitues, dutch oven cooking….
In the past few months, I have actually started incorporating our food storage into the regular meals so that I know which things are a hit and which are not that great for us.
Nancy
Good article!
Dawn
Hi Becky;
I have an upcoming post that will outline how I have organized my food storage binder. Thanks so much for your interest!
Vicky B
We are eating our EE food on a regular basis and adding more all of the time.
Becky C.
Can I ask what makes up your food storage binder?
N McCoy
It only makes sense to store what you eat. Not only that, but rotate the things you have in your storage, by fixing meals now. Then if you do have things that aren't familiar to your family, they will be used to it, if ever needed.