So, What Do You Store?

For the last couple of months my life has been consumed with food storage. Making strawberry jam. Drying apricot leather, pears, peaches. Freezing peaches. Canning peaches, tomatoes, spaghetti sauce, beans. I even tried canning some apricots this year. It's also case lot shopping time. I was pretty excited and have waited anxiously for the ads to state case lots have arrived. Why? because we had run out of, literally completely used up, many items while we lived off our food storage for 6 months.

I have gotten asked quite a few times, when people hear about living off our food storage, what we have in our food storage. This question has always surprised me a little. What we store is what we eat. That's right, food storage means getting out your recipe books, figuring out what ingredients you need to make those meals and then keeping those supplies on hand. Now granted it does take a little thinking outside the box because fresh food doesn't store long term. Occasionally it means making things a little differently or going without a certain ingredient. But really what I store, is what we eat. It was so nice to really not feel like we had to make major changes in the way we eat  to live off our food storage.

I must also confess that we didn't completely live off our stored food. For the six months my husband was off work I had a budget of about $100 a month for food and other needed personal and household supplies. That was because I hate drinking powdered milk so I still chose to buy milk. Also, I still liked eating things like salad (pretty hard to store that)  yogurt, eggs, cheese so as long as we were able I would buy these when I found a good deal.   We could have lived completely on our food storage but it would have meant going without some "luxuries" which I'm grateful we didn't have to. Thank goodness we could mostly eat what we had stored for it made things easier to handle on such a tight budget. We were truly blessed.

Okay, so back to what we store. If my kids had a say it would be spaghetti, pasta, cold cereal, pizza and cookies. So of course I make sure we store ingredients for those things. I must say that after lots of months of practice I think my husband makes better pizza than you can buy.

So, as you can see the usual, beans, rice, wheat isn't my focus. In fact I only store a few cans of beans because my family doesn't really like them. I store just enough to make chili a few times a year.

Wheat, on the other hand I store a lot of this. If you store wheat you also need a grinder. Need a way to use that wheat. Also you need recipes for how to make bread. Here's one I like. Then make sure you store the ingredients for this. I also store white flour since I still use this in a lot of my baking. I just buy 25 lb bags. Put it in a large black garbage bag and then put into a 5 gallon bucket.We have six buckets. For my family, without limiting how we use it, lasted about 6 months.  It would have been really hard on my kids to have to have wheat in everything. They handle wheat bread and really enjoyed having pizza the way they are used to-with white four.

This is probably easiest done in a list so here's what we store ( in no particular order, just as I thought of it):

• Cold Cereal
• Pasta-all types
• Sauces-Spaghetti and Alfredo
• Oats-for oatmeal, granola, cookies
• White Flour
• Wheat
• Rice
• Canned chicken (Put a star by this one for used a lot and should have stored more).
• Canned and dried fruit. I have also bought freeze dried raspberries and strawberries. These are very similar to what you get in Special K. They are a little expensive and store forever so we only intended to use when we had to, not day to day. My kids loved eating these. They put them in cereal or ate them as they were. You can reconstitute them with water but my kids preferred them dry. We also used them in Jell-o.
• I also store a lot of frozen fruit. (Buy from the dollar store)
• Canned vegetable (we do corn, green beans, mushrooms).
• Freeze dried/dehydrated carrots,peas, onions. These work great in cooking. You can reconstitute them ahead of time  but I just add them as is and let the moisture from what I'm making soften them. Works great!
• Canned tomatoes, sauce and paste
• Olive, pickles, ketchup, salad dressing (mix with canned chicken for sandwiches), mayo, mustard, BBQ sauce, soy sauce, vinegar
• Pantry staples-spices, baking powder, soda, salt, oil, shortening, honey, sugars- you get the picture.
• Oh don't forget yeast pretty hard to make bread without it.
• Chocolate chips, marshmallows, coconut (my son loves it).
• Powder eggs. I don't like to eat these straight (Hence why I bought eggs) but love to use these for baking, even cookies. Here's a link for info on them and how to use them.
• Butter. I freeze it. I do have some butter powder but haven't really tried it yet. Would have had to if we went longer than 6 months. Thank goodness for a freezer. I also substitute oil and shortening when I need to.
• Meats-store in a freezer. We definitely limited how much we ate meat and used a lot more canned chicken. 
• Powder milk-I really prefer not to drink but love for baking and cooking. I have also done this when needed to help stretch a budget.  Works find to mix with 2%
• Cheese-This is one area I struggled with and often bought. I do buy grated cheese and freeze. I usually have about a 2 month supply. I do have an container of freeze dried. I need to figure out how to use this. Didn't really ever get to trying this.
• Canned soup. My kids love spaghetti-O's, tomato or chicken noodle soup for lunch. Just fill a thermos with boiling water. Warm the soup, dump the hot water out of the thermos and fill with boiling soup. They claim it's still warm at lunch. Of course store crackers to go with the soup.
• Cream Chicken and mushroom soup for cooking.
• Chicken broth
• Frozen go-gurts.
• Peanut butter-we did a lot of homemade wheat bread and peanut butter sandwiches.
• Jell-0.
• Potato flakes-for mashed potatoes and baking.
• Juice-kids love to make smoothies.
• Granola bars, crackers, chips, pretzels. I stock up when on sell. I really only store about a 2 month supply tops so this is one thing we just went without after awhile.
• Cake and muffin mixes
• Tortilla shells-freeze them.
• Not food but I also store toilet paper. A lot of toilet paper. Also, other household and personal supplies. You know soaps, toothpaste, sanitary items (I do have 5 girls), cleaning supplies, etc. Really saved us to not have to buy these.
• I probably should add we have a generator. Wouldn't want my food storage, in the freezer, to be lost just because the power went out. Incidentally we had that happen for about 3 days a few years ago. Was the main reason we bought a generator when we got a freezer.

There you go. I'm sure I've forgotten something. The main thing is store what you eat. That way you can rotate it and it's really not a big adjustment to have to live off of it.