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!