Storing extras

I went to a Mormon site on storing food. I wasn't aware (not being Mormon) that they have been instructed to keep a year's extra food on hand at all times. Seems a bit extreme to me. Or it used to. If you told me a year ago that we should have a year's supply of food on hand, I would have called you crazy. Now, however, it doesn't seem so wrong.

So, I decided to read the article and I got some pretty good ideas from it. I had started buying individual items and putting them back but I really didn't have a plan. Now I do. They suggested a really good plan. They've been doing this a lot longer than me. Here, basically, is what they do.

Sit down and figure out some basic meals that your family eats. Now, if you're going to figure on a financial crisis that our nation is about to face, you'll have to figure that some ingredients are going to be hard to find. You'll have to figure meals that have ingredients that are mostly things you can put all the stuff away for, or have common ingredients that won't be hard to find, or can be substituted.

I'll give an example. I used Spanish Rice. My recipe calls for 1 pound of ground beef, but let's face it, in an emergency you could use wild game and grind up anything you hunt in a hand grinder. It also calls for 2 cups of rice, 1 large can of tomato sauce, 1 can tomato paste, 1 quart of stewed tomatoes (I stew my own), 2 tbsp of chili powder, and 2 tsp each of salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder and celery seed. If you could only come up with 7 recipes, you would have 1 recipe a day, and eat it once a week, so you would multiply everything times 52 to get your quantities for a year's worth. The more recipes you can come up with, the more variety you have. So, that's 104 cups of rice (no, I don't know how many pounds that is), 52 cans of tomato sauce, 52 cans of tomato paste, 4-1/3 cups of chili powder, about 2.5 cups of the other spices, 52 quarts of stewed tomatoes.

It would make more sense to come up with more than one recipe a day for a week. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to put up 52 quarts of stewed tomatoes. Right now, I only have 5 recipes, but I'm working on it. You also need to come up with breakfast ideas. And you have to think about what stores well. If your family likes pizza, you have to remember, to substitute the eggs. I found a site that says you can 2 tbsp of cornstarch, arrowroot flour or potato starch for the eggs. You also have to remember that cheese may be hard to find.

Once you have everything listed, then you go and add up all that you need in ingredients. For me, I don't think I'll need a whole year's worth. I'm shooting for 6 month's worth. For one thing, I don't have the space in my 1500 and something square foot house to store that much food. Nor do I have the ability to buy that much food in the time I believe we have left. Nor do I believe this will last that long. And if it gets out that I have a year's supply of food in my neighborhood, I better have an arsenal to protect it. It will be bad enough if the economy hits bottom that I have a garden.

Which brings me to the second part. You can dehydrate vegetables and store those. As soon as I can, I'm going to start that. It's getting hotter here in Texas already. We'll be setting the dehydrator up in the garage so as not to make the AC run harder. I just printed a jerky recipe off the Internet. I'm wondering if I can rehydrate jerky into a stew if times got hard enough?

I'm also hoping this is all for naught. I'm sort of like Glenn Beck. I would love to be wrong. But, I don't think I am.

I'm still an American. I was raised on stories of the great Depression from my grandparents. We can huddle together and make it. We are a tough breed. We can make it.

Lori Ann Smith