Ping, if appropriate. Kinda basic, but you never know who is new to FR and/or prepping. :)
Caution: Bacon and chocolate will shrink your favorite clothes!
Dried beans .....a meal all by themselves!!! If one can garner the fixins for cornbread he’s in business!!!
“needs to include bacon and chocolate”
Bacon. You must be from “Southern” Wisconsin. :-)
A 20-pound bag of rice is nice to have, too! Like pasta, rice keeps for a very long time.
Weird that they didn’t!
"I don't need to store food. I'm going to come into your house and take everything you have worked so hard to store. Me and my crew are your worst nightmare"!
Convicted felon Tyler Smith of NGC "Doomsday Preppers"
/johnny
Preppers’ PING!!
Hat tip to Freeper Diana in Wisconsin fro the heads-up!
I get my Dak canned ham from CVS when they are on sale. I also buy a lot of staples and then vacuum pack them myself with oxygen absorbers verse paying a lot more buying them commercially on line. I also dehydrate and pack my own vegtables.
Also I am repeating myself, but I am NO fan of these food kits with preppared meals! You will be better off with the makings which you can create a varity of different meals verses having 8-12 selection, because some of them you are bond not to like.
Lastly get yourself if you can a invite to a LDS cannery. You can’t beat the prices and if you get a chance to work in the cannery it can be fun and educational. Wish I could get another invite.
You have to carefully store drink powders with sugar. Sugar is hydrophilic it will suck moisture out of the atmosphere. Your beverage powder will turn into a beverage rock.
M4when hungry
BTW, Quick Oats are cheap and can be prepared without heating, by putting the oats in a canning jar, add water, even room temp water, and a pinch of salt, put the top on, and in a couple of hours you have oatmeal to add peanut butter to and a handful of raisins. Use twice amount of water to oats. I’ve tested it. It works like a charm. If you have a means to heat water, the process is even quicker using boiling water without putting the oats in the water heating container.
Usually the day after Halloween, Valentine Day, Easter, etc. the local markets mark the bags of candy down to half price. Things like Hershey bars, Milky Way, Snickers, Reeses, M & M's, etc.
And in the Sunday papers in the weeks leading up to those holidays there are almost always discount coupons for the bags of candy.
Put these two together and you can get the candy for almost nothing.
Throw the candy in the freezer and it will last a long time. Even longer - if you have a vacuum sealer.
The solution is to grind them up to flour with an extra coffee grinder and cook them up in under 10 minutes. Same nutrition, shorter prep time.
I notice that most prepper recommendations for food make what is to me a fairly obvious mistake.
They recommend foods that require water and cooking before eating. You won’t always have water and fuel. In addition, many of these foods require careful storage to prevent spoiling. This is particularly true in the South, where high humidity will spoil a lot of foods quickly once the AC goes.
The solution is regular canned foods, bought on sale at the grocery or Costco. Fully edible just by opening the can, and water already included. Easily maintained in almost any weather conditions except prolonged submersion or freezing weather.
The only real disadvantage is weight, and sometimes bulk. But unless you’re planning to go mobile, which has its own problems, I fail to see how this is much of a problem.
Some personal thoughts on emergency foods:
1. Store what you eat, and at least occasionally eat what you store. You don’t want to find that you have a year’s worth of food for your family, but no idea how to cook any of it, nor do you want to find that you hate something you have a lot of such as the LDS stored rice (it is slightly different and takes a little longer to cook than the directions say or than other rice, or the centers are crunchy).
2. Store several different kinds of food, with the kinds depending on your situation. As an example, those with lots of water even in an emergency but no space may want freeze-dried or dehydrated, while those who have to store water too but have space and don’t care about weight will want canned. But even if you have mostly freeze-dried, have a little ready to eat in your emergency stores, and vice versa.
3. Buy a year ahead for items with a long shelf-life. Next year’s vitamins should already be on your shelf because they are so cheap and easy to store, and it’s nice to make sure you don’t have to worry about micro-nutrients in an emergency. The same is true for spaghetti, rice, dried beans (but only if you know how to cook with them!), and other items that last 30 years.
4. At least once a quarter, more often if your emergency food is LDS or from some other low-cost source, open up something from your long-term storage and cook it, serve it to the family, and experiment with recipes.
5. Store soap, tp, and other cleaning supplies along with food. Sanitation could be as big an issue in an emergency as food would be.
6. Buy in bulk when you see a good deal. As one example, I get cans of ready-to-eat soup when they are on deep discount, and one can stirred into a pot of rice makes an adequate side dish or meal for the family for almost no money. Rice is cheap and filling, and if you throw in $1.00 to $3.00 of soup, the cost is still negligible for the calories provided.
7. I count how much I have stored in “man-days” of food. That’s how many multiples of 2,000 calories I have (okay, an adult needs more than 2,000 a day, but not by much, and I figure that difference will come from pigeons and squirrels). It’s a whole lot easier to check that I have a balance of food groups and “x” man-days per person than it is to figure out whether I have enough using any other approach I can think of.
Make sure you've got plenty of fluids on hand.
Our daughter sent a picture of empty egg shelves at their local grocery store yesterday. They live in Wichita KA, and people went out to stock up for the snow storm. It is a flat 0º F there now.