My trip to BYU Women's Conference

I finally made it! My sister-in-law has been going for 11 years! I've tried to go for the last 2 or 3, but just couldn't make it work.  I've always envied the people who have had the chance to go to things like that - EFY, Education Week, Timeout for Women, etc. - so it was so cool that things came together at the last second so I could go. It wouldn't have happened without the generosity of my SIL and her wonderful mom ((((HUGS)))).

I was already pretty wiped out from a couple of stressful weeks, so hiking around the BYU campus seemed pretty crazy, but it worked out just fine. I ended up just staying in the Marriott Center the first day to attend whatever was going on there, because I just didn't feel up to running around. I knew that I would be fine no matter which classes I ended up attending, though, and it was true.

It's pretty cool to sing hymns with 15,000 other women :D There was a huge variety of women, as I expected. Some wore sweats, some wore dresses and heels. I wore jeans and a T with my walking shoes. EVERYONE carried a bag with snacks, water, notebook, etc.

I do have to say that I was really surprised at how vicious a huge group of LDS ladies could be, though. They need traffic signals! I just about got mashed all the time! And the organizers make a big deal about not saving seats or eating in classrooms (apparently they repeat this every year), but guess what was going on everywhere I went...

The second day, I was lucky that all 3 classes I wanted to attend were in the Wilkinson Student Center. I barely squeaked into each class. You have 30 minutes between classes to figure out where you're going, find a bathroom, grab a bite, or whatever you need to do. I learned pretty quickly, though, that if I wanted to be in a certain class, I had better skip everything and just find the line for that class and stay in it! Food and potty breaks are for the weak!

I think the last class I attended was the best one I went to. It was about delighting in the scriptures, and it was just what I hoped it would be! Then Elder Bednar and his wife were the speakers at the closing session in the Marriott Center, and they did not disappoint!

If you get a chance to watch any of the rebroadcasts of some of the event during May, I would highly encourage listening! It was great!!

A month later... Thoughts on our food storage only month.

Well, I've had a long time to mull over the things I learned during February (and long enough to forget some things, so I had better write them down).  It was an interesting month.   I REEEEAAALLLY fought the temptation to give in and give up, and I'm glad I made it.  My little family were troopers, too.  :)

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's one of my fridge at the end of February.  Yeah..... it was looking kinda pathetic.  Powdered milk, prune juice (no one's favorite), chocolate syrup (for the milk, of course), cream cheese, sour cream, eggs (thanks to my SIL), and leftover chicken noodle soup.  That's pretty much it.  I still had some meat in my freezer and all the condiments in the fridge door, but this really shows how things were looking and feeling by the end of the month.  On the upside, an empty fridge is so easy to clean...

I learned some pretty important stuff! First of all, I need to go over my food storage more often to make sure I really know what I have.  I didn't realize that we only had wheat, but no flour put away.  We have a grinder and made our own wheat for most of the month (after we ran out of what was in the house), but I would really like to have some pre-ground flour in our storage.  Whole wheat is just harder to work with for some projects.  Doable, but not my favorite.

I also figured out that if we had to live on food storage alone for very long, we would be in baaaaaad shape without egg and butter powder.  Cheese, too, I imagine.  I know we'd miss fruits pretty badly, too (veggies I can grow more easily). These are definitely going to be higher in my priority list now for obtaining more storage.

We have two Basic Year's Supplies from Emergency Essentials in our garage, but when they say basic, they MEAN basic.  Long-term, drypack food storage isn't cheap, and each of those Year Supplies cost about $800, but it won't be enough.  I will be socking away some of our tax return money to buy a couple of EE's Premium Year Supplies, too.  Yeah, that's gonna set me back at least 5 grand.  I know.  I'm not saying that we should wait  until we can afford these expensive options to start storing food (and there are cheaper options at EE) - it's just my goal.  In the meantime, we will take advantage of case sales in Utah, and good buys here at Sam's Club, etc.  I really like having as much non-drypack storage as is practical for rotation.  I'm sure I'll have to buy a pallet jack and keep that long-term storage wrapped on pallets for future moves, but I'm willing to do that.  Sounds like overkill?  Try living on just your food storage for a month and see if you don't agree...

I started socking away stuff as soon as we got married, 13 years ago, so I know you can make a big difference doing little things.  So don't get discouraged if these bigger purchases are not within reach for you and yours.  Every little bit is a blessing.  Move forward with faith, and the Lord will surely bless your efforts and help bridge the gap if you have truly done all that you could.   Just make food storage part of your mind-set every time you go to the grocery store.  Go without that vacation and buy food storage!  Yes, REALLY!  You'll never be sorry!

The other thing that hit home with greater intensity is the NECESSITY of learning how to garden and how to can fruits and veggies - two things I have never done on my own.  I stayed out of the way whenever mom and dad ventured to can anything, and just helped with the gardens a little.  Learning to do both on my own should be an interesting adventure...  Plenty of fodder for future blog entries, I'm sure.  I will be googling beginner gardens right away.  It's time to plant where I live.  :)

The secret to making good homemade wheat bread...

...is to make it with 1/2 white flour.  Not what you wanted to hear?  Well, that's how I do it, anyway.  I'll post my recipe (Really, it's Mr. Wonderful's Aunt Elaine's recipe, via Mr. W's sister) and method here.  If you wanted to try it with a greater ratio of wheat to white, I suggest longer kneading times and punching it down three times (you'll see that in the recipe and pics).  Sorry for the mediocre pics, but I was in a very practical mood and just wanted to get it done, so they're not very pretty.   Oh well, here we go:

*Important Note*

All the pics below are of the 4 loaf recipe.  I  only show two loaves in my finish picture, but that's because I decided to freeze the dough for two of the loaves - we'll discuss that more later...

Ingredients for 2 loaves -

3 cups white flour

3 cups wheat flour

2 1/2 teaspoons dry yeast

1/4 cup sugar

2 1/4 cups very warm water

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1 egg

2 Tablespoons vegetable or canola oil

Ingredients for 4 loaves - 

6 cups white flour

6 cups wheat flour

2 1/2 Tablespoons dry yeast

1/2 cup sugar

4 1/2 cups very warm water

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon salt

1 egg

1/4 cup vegetable or canola oil

Instructions - 

Put all the flour in a large bowl.  Make a well (crater?) in the flour.

In a separate bowl, combine water, yeast, sugar, salt, and vanilla.

Let this sit until it gets bubbly on top (see pic below).

Add the bubbly mixture and the egg to the flour and mix well.  I use a spoon at first,

until it is mixed enough for me to get my hands in there to pull it out onto a clean surface.

As you can see, the dough comes out of the dough still quite dry, but don't worry.

As you slowly drizzle the oil onto the dough and knead it in a little at a time, your dough will get a lot prettier.  I actually don't start timing my kneading until I have worked in all the oil and loose flour.

Kneading might seem intimidating, but it's really not that hard.  There's no really correct way, just as long as you keep working the dough.  I press the heels of my hands in and work it back and forth until it has spread enough to fold back over onto itself and then do it over and over again.  I even pick it up and slam it down a few times to break up the monotony and really work that wheat flour (This is the first time I had used fresh ground wheat flour - thanks to my sweet Mr. W and is buff-ness :) )  If you are using more wheat than this, I suggest really beating the snot out of it.  Knead the dough for 10 minutes.  It's a great arm and shoulder workout, too  ;)

When your 10 minutes is finally up, work the dough into a ball and set it in a bowl to rise (I wash and use the same mixing bowl).  Oil the top with a couple of more drops of oil (a little goes a long way) so it doesn't dry out.  I usually put a clean flour sack towel over the bowl, too, to protect it a little more.

Wait for the dough to double in size.

The time it takes will vary, according to how warm your kitchen is and how fast your yeast is.

This is the fun part.  Put your fist right down through the middle of the dough.

This is called punching it down.  Pretty straight-forward, right?

Fold the dough in on itself and form it back into a ball.  If you are using quick-rising yeast, you are ready to divide the dough into loaves.  If you are using regular yeast, oil the top of the ball again and wait for it to double in size so it can be punched down again.  

I use a bread knife (quite appropriate, I think) to divide my dough ball into loaves.  They are never exactly equal, but you have to learn to be okay with that, or drive yourself nuts.  Form these smaller dough balls into loaves and place them seam side (ugly side) down into well-greased bread pans.  Oil the tops again and wait for the dough to rise to almost full bread-loaf size, but not all the way.  Remember it will rise slightly more in the oven.  Place the loaves in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for 20-30 minutes.  You'll have to watch it for the last few minutes until the tops are just golden brown.

Ahhhh... the smell of baking bread is intoxicating!!  I usually butter the tops of the loaves when they come out.  This time I didn't, and they were still perfect.

Now, what about the other two loaves?  Well, as soon as I formed the dough into loaves, I wrapped two of them in plastic wrap and then in tinfoil for the freezer.  I've wanted to try it for a long time.  After all, Rhoade's bake and serve does it, right?  Well, they must know something I don't.  First, I'm sure using a flash freezer is a big help to them.  My freezer?  Not so much flash.  So a golf ball sized lump pressed it's way out of each wrapped loaf as the dough continued to rise in my freezer.  No big deal.  After I thawed the dough in the fridge a couple of days later, I just cut off the little freezer-burned part and put my loaves in greased pans to rise.  Only... they didn't rise so much...  They only rose... raised... rized... -- :p, whatever -- to about half of the desired height.  We baked them anyway, and they were still yummy, but crustier than usual and, of course, smaller.  Oh well.  It was worth a shot.   :)

Still alive and well during the Great Food Storage Experiment!

So, this has been an interesting project.  The rules have been broken a couple of more times - once because Bug needed to take cake and root beer to school for part of a book report (we were out of eggs, and cheated to buy frosting, and there was no way I was gonna try root beer), and another time for the temple road trip with our ward (we had to provide lunch and snacks for Roo, so we bought some crackers and cookies and bananas... and helped her eat them ;)  ).  Oh yeah, we learned we only had wheat, but no flour in our storage, and ran out of margarine, too, so I went to the store for those.  No, I was not gonna be that rigid about this.

I think we've done really well, though.  It has been sooooooo eye-opening.  Bug doesn't like not having small bags of chips or crackers around for after-school snacking, and Roo misses hot dogs, but we've done okay.  Here's a helpful hint:  living on food storage is a good way to break your munching habit.  There's just not as much stuff laying around to munch on.  I should get on the scale and see if that has done me any measurable good so far...

We're gonna stick it out for this last week, so I don't want to write down all my thoughts on the subject just yet.  Maybe this week we can experiment with making some snack crackers and actually make bread.  Mr. Wonderful has been using his breadmaker almost everyday, but that bread is sooooo crusty, and we're out of yeast again...  Hmmm.... sounds like I'll have to at least go buy yeast...

Continuing Lessons

Well, we've kept at it.  Small victories :)  The smell of freshly baked bread is a long lost friend.  I think heaven smells a little like that.  So I've been learning a few things that I could just learn by taking inventory, but these lessons certainly mean more when I see how their necessity could become reality in a short time! For instance, butter, cheese, and eggs - three things of which I do not have nearly enough stored away right now.  These will become my next priority in food storage.

I haven't broken into the dried beans and such.  I guess I feel like I could do those if I had to, so I don't really see the need to break into them right now.  As far as incorporating them into our diet, they're already there, just wet pack from the stores and I'm okay with that.

There are a bunch of things that I already new logically but are being reinforced by this little experiment.  I can see that I need to take gardening more seriously and learn how to can.  I can also see how valuable it would be over time to learn how to keep chickens and rabbits and maybe even some cows...  Not something I have seriously thought about for my life, but I could get over that really quickly now that the value of those things are becoming more clear.

We have started recycling more, too, which I mentioned in my initial post about this experiment (I'm wearing out that word...).

Lesson #1 and the first broken rule for the month.

Lesson #1 - Keep an eye on your yeast.  If you think you may have to actually use it, you may want it to be good.

First rule broken - Bug needed orange juice for a science project, so we had to go buy some.  You know, if we had to live on nothing but food storage for a long time, I would miss orange juice.

What do cowards eat for dinner?

Spaghetti!!  That's right.  I am a wuss.  A total weenie in complete denial.  My I-don't-wanna-stretch-myself muscles are in good shape.  But I haven't given up yet!  Please don't give up on me!

Ah, Spam. The Mystery Meat.

Yes, we went the Spam Casserole route.  I actually grew up eating this, and my little family loves it, and it's easy.  Win-win!  I don't have a pic of the finished product, but the pic below shows how easy it is - only 5 ingredients!  

1 1/2 cups elbow macaroni cooked very al dente

1 can cream soup (my favorite is potato)

1 can Spam chopped

1/3 cup ketchup 

1/2 cup cheese (I always put more than that :) )

Mix together and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees and viola (I think it's bad luck to use a French term when talking about Spam...)!  Easy peasy, and kids love it!

Okay so it's not health food, but tonight was about confidence, so I went easy on dinner.  Tomorrow, maybe homemade bread...

... And so it begins...

There it sits.  Taunting me.  You can see about half of our drypack storage in this pic.  The other half is behind other garage clutter.  You can't see all the 5 gallon buckets or the two weeks worth of water, but that's okay.  We're definitely not breaking into either of those for this experiment, or the 72 hour kits sitting on top of the stack.

I find I have been dreading this with every fiber of my being!  I REALLY don't want to do this.  I know.  I'm a wimp.  That's actually part of why we're doing this and why I am being so public about it.  I have a hard time following through on things, and I want to prove to myself that I can be better.  A guy gave a talk in church Sunday about obedience and told a story about a family whose baby had to wear special shoes connected by an 8 inch bar for a whole year to correct a deformity in one foot.  The first few days were barely short of torture, of course, but the doctor insisted that they must be consistent, that the blisters on the baby's foot would cause him enough pain that he would have to accept the treatment and quit fighting it.  Well, the parents loved their little boy enough to follow through, and years later, they couldn't even remember which of his feet had been the bad one!

So I guess I feel a little like that baby today.  I don't like the feeling of this new corrective period, but I have to be the enforcer as well, so I will make myself follow through.  Sometimes being an adult stinks.

But, the morning was pretty uneventful.  We ate the same breakfast stuff that we always do.  I wasn't ambitious enough to get up and make cracked wheat or anything.  I ate the last bowl of rice krispies with the end of the milk, though, so that's about it for cold cereal and store bought milk.   Bug really doesn't like oatmeal, but maybe I can get her to experiment with it and other stuff in the coming days.  Roo loves toast, but we're nearly out of store bought bread, too.  Good think I know how to make bread!  The challenge will be making it with home ground wheat...

I don't know that I will plan anything too bizarre for dinner.  Some spaghetti out of storage, or Spam casserole.  Yup.  We love Spam around here and it's part of our food storage :)  I'll let you know how it goes!

More about the task at hand...

Just for clarification, this is just a month of FOOD storage.  I'm not brave enough to try all the other emergency preparedness stuff just yet!  I also know we are not anywhere near being the first to try this, and we certainly won't be the last, but we think it will be good for US!  I just decided to blog about it for fun.  I like reading this kind of stuff from other folks, so I thought I would share, too.

We've lived on food storage before, kind of... We've had tight times before where we only had about 30 bucks to spend on milk, eggs, and cheese every couple of weeks.  But this time we're gonna try to do without even those trips.  Also, as I said in my last post, we usually have lots of cased food (Utah has the best case sales, but now we've moved out of state!).  This time, though, I want to get into the dry pack storage more - and not just the potato pearls :) !

This time is not so different in at least one way - we are having some tight times right now!  We started our own business just over a year ago, and those of you who have done the same know that the first few years of a new business are commonly Feast or Famine years.  So, rather than just agonizing over our situation, I thought I would try to gain something valuable from it.  Learning how to actually survive on just what we have seems worthwhile to me.

My 12-year-old, Bug, is thinking that school lunches sound much more tempting with this experiment looming in front of her... Family dinners with my hubby's brother's fam and sis-in-law's fam will be a welcome reprieve every week, as well, I'm sure.  Other than that, though, it's back to basics!  Thankfully, I make some fabulous homemade bread, so that's one thing I'm not worried about.  I'll share the recipe later.

Some of the side benefits I'm hoping for:  a lost pound or two?  That would be cool.  Cutting down on waste.  We're your typical American family who makes waaay to much garbage for just being the four of us.  Part of the idea for this experiment came from an article I read recently about a family who tasked themselves with learning to recycle and reduce the amount of garbage they produced.  Somehow, in my mind, this evolved into using our food storage.

The other phrase that keeps coming to mind is "I am not a cook!" (Done in my best Richard Nixon voice)  I am LAZY.   I'm embarrassed to think how often we eat frozen burritos, or mac and cheese for dinner because nobody wants to cook anything.  I wish I enjoyed fixing meals for my family!  I'm such a picky eater, though, that I have hesitated to get outside my comfort zone.  In some ways, this won't help much (we don't have a lot of fresh veggies and exotic foods like that in our dry pack storage).  But we'll just see.

Thanks for the well wishes here and on Facebook!

New Project

My poor blog is going stale already after only 4 posts!  So I gave it a little facelift to help motivate myself to visit something that is visually pleasing to me.  Next, I think our little family is about to undergo an experiment...  Starting in February, we are not going to buy any food for a month!  WHAT??!!  Yeah, it sounds a little crazy to me, too, and it was MY idea!

The goal is to live one month on food storage (yes, the  shortest month in the calendar).  Crazy, yes, but I got to thinking that maybe it would be a good practice run.  I mean, what would happen if the crazies running this country drove it into the ditch next week?  (I know - that's not sounding very hypothetical these days)  Yeah, we have food storage out in our garage in perfect little boxes with pretty little labels, but we don't actually rotate it into our regular fare as we should.  So, it's time for an extreme makeover.  Yup.  Masochistic?  Nah...

So, we've got about 10 days to prepare for this little adventure, and there are rules to the preparations we are going to be allowed to undertake.  No, I won't be stocking up on all of our favorites and perishables beforehand, as tempting as that sounds.  We won't just use our "in house" storage all month, either.  I have enough canned and boxed foods inside the house to get us by for a month, but that would be cheating!  We're gonna pretend that we have to make it last a lot longer and force the garage storage into our daily diets!

Cheerleaders are welcome!   Advice, too!  I plan on posting a couple of times leading up to the big experiment, and almost daily during the month.  So check back and cheer us on!