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!

Paper vs. Gold

Mr. Wonderful and I often read a little before we turn out the lights,  and the other night I noticed his bookmark on the bed between us.  It was a nice wooden bookmark that my parents got for him when they visited Palmyra a couple years ago.  Engraved in the bookmark was the phrase "My golden plates are made of paper."  So I joked, "Does that make them paper plates?"  I got a friendly eye roll and chuckle about it, then we turned out the lights and went to sleep.

I've thought a little more about it, though.  I think I treat my Book of Mormon more like paper plates than I do like golden plates.  I snack a little, then promptly put them aside when I should be feasting on them and treasuring them.

Yes, I have a penchant for wringing a spiritual metaphor out of every situation in my life.  It works for me! :)

Mice for Breakfast.

It's not as gross as it sounds...  Actually, "mice" is Roo's word for Rice Krispies.  :)  So, over a bowl of "mice" this morning, I was pondering my morning routine - or lack thereof.  I am soooo not a morning person.  And it doesn't help that a mild case of insomnia has plagued me for the last few months.  Bleh.  Melatonin seems to help a bit, but I wish I didn't need it!  I'm generally a very healthy person, which is such a blessing, but also tends to make me feel quite betrayed by my body when some little thing actually does go a little off kilter.

Morning has not been a friend of mine for a very long time, if ever, and I have pondered for months over whether it was my own fault or mother nature's.  My ego, of course, would like to be able to point at some small medical imbalance to blame.  Alas, after several months (okay, years) of denial, I have come to the irritating conclusion that it must be my fault, and mine alone.  Poo.

I'm not so weird, right?  For wanting to blame anything, anyone but me?  Sad, but human, I guess.  Don't we all tend to think that life will be better if we can just blame someone or something else for all that is wrong with us?  Where does this delusion come from?  The one that tells us nothing is wrong with us - it must be something else?  Does that come with this mortal body?  I assume there is a large element of pride involved.  Pride seems so inescapable sometimes.

Here's another question:  Why am I so silly as to think that finding someone or something else to blame this on would make me feel better?  I think I've been almost hopeful to find some piece of literature, some medical opinion, that would tell me I was just a little short of vitamin Q or something.  Take a pill... PRESTO!  Sleep like a baby, waken refreshed!  It's never quite as simple as that, though, is it?  It would be a shame to find out it was something really wrong, some strange disease or common, chronic illness that was making it hard to go to sleep and wake up in the morning.  Was that what I really wanted?

The more I thought consciously about this, the more ashamed I became.  Of course, I am fairly capable of pushing shame aside for quite a while.  Live in my egotistical delusions for as long as possible.  But my cushy little ride down the river Denial has all but come to an end.  Not such smooth sailing anymore.  I keep trying to push my little dinghy just a little farther, but I know in my heart that this trip has to end.  You see, there is mud all around me, and a field of waist-high weeds up ahead.

I now know the weeds are a blessing, though.  See, each one represents some little nagging thought popping up in my way.  They represent every time that little voice has reminded me to "Cease to be idle" or, the big one, "Cease to sleep longer than is needful."  And then "Retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated." (D&C 88:124)  And I believe I read in President Hinckley's biography that he said something along the lines of "Go to bed at ten, get up at six, and the rest of the day will take care of itself.)  :P  And a recent article in the Ensign about "Opening the Heavens" (August 2009) and the value of early morning scripture study.

And the mud.  That's Truth - the mounting evidence that I don't have anywhere to run.  It's just my carnal, selfish, human nature resisting the discomfort of admitting what I have seen as defeat and the growth that might result from it.  I wonder why we shrink from growth so much? Or, is it just me?  :)  I hope not.

Well, thankfully, I have begun to see a little more clearly, at least on this issue.  And I'm thankful for the weeds and the mud.  Anything that takes me of this dangerous river of Denial is a blessing, maybe not welcome at first, but when my eyes are finally opened.  The Savior made mud and smeared it on the eyes of a blind man once, and then the blind man could see.  I guess that's what he does for me, too.  Smears my blind eyes with a little mud (truth), so that I can really see.

I guess it was Google that actually finally knocked me out of the boat into the mud.  I was searching for some easy quick solution for my problem so that I wouldn't have to blame myself, and, wouldn't you know it, the bulk of the search results pointed right back at me!  Rude.  Almost everything suggested that  if I wanted to wake up energized in the mornings, I should go to bed earlier, pick a wake-up time and STICK TO IT!  They said that my body would eventually adjust and would be more efficient at resting if my sleep schedule was regular and predictable.  Imagine that.  My chiropractor was right - he pretty much told me the same thing years ago.  *sheepish grin*

So, this is not to say that my battle with morning is over.  For instance, I slept until 9:30 this morning.  Oops.  But last Monday and Tuesday, I did get up at 6.  It was wonderful!  I had quiet time to pray and read my scriptures, got to enjoy breakfast with my Bug,  and got a lot more stuff done around here those days.  The rest of the week I was out of town or sick, and you know how hard it is to get back on the bandwagon after even a small distraction.  But, no matter, I'm going to succeed!  You know, I find it no small coincidence that one of Lucifer's names was 'son of the morning'...

When I miss you, I just smell my armpits...

:)  Sounds like a lovely little insult, right?  And I said this to Mr. Wonderful yesterday...  It actually came about because I had to borrow his deodorant (We were out of town for the night, and I forgot mine.).  I commented that it smelled really good, like him, and laughed that I would be smelling very manly for the day.  Then said that maybe I would just be reminded of him all day, thus leading to the aforementioned "insult."  LOL  It actually just got us both laughing.  A good way to start the morning!  Feel free to use it as a friendly insult, though. :)