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!