Kathy Bray - Not Your Mothers Food Storage

2010 Kathy Bray and Jan Barker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P. O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City, Utah 84130. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book Company.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bray, Kathy.

Not your mothers food storage / Kathy Bray and Jan Barker.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-60641-666-2 (paperbound)

1. FoodStorage. I. Barker, Jan. II. Title.

TX601.B733 2010

641.4'8dc22 2010011137

Printed in the United States of AmericaMalloy Lithographing Incorporated, Ann Arbor, MI

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all those families who want food storage but dont know where to start

Special thanks to Julie Ann Pullman, Jans daughter, for her invaluable input and for asking the right questions

Chapter 1

Planning Your Breakfast Meals

This is not your mothers book on food storage. In it you wont find a store it for some future time when you might need it in case of a disaster program. Instead, youll discover a program that will simplify your life today. Using this method to plan your food storage means youll no longer be dependent on the supermarket: There will be no more quick runs to the grocery store to pick up something for dinner. (That alone will save you time and money.) Instead, youll always have several meals planned, and youll be able to use the food in your pantry to prepare themanytime. These will be meals your family loves to eat. After all, why waste money storing food you may not even like?

For ten years, Jan has used this system to plan meals, buy food at sale prices, use it in her everyday cooking, and replace it when the items go on sale again. And, thankfully, it bears little resemblance to the once-hailed programs that led to buckets of stored wheat, honey, powdered milk, and oil collecting dust in the basement for years at a time.

When I was younger, those bucketsalong with a generous supply of rice, beans, and freeze-dried goodswere our familys food storage plan. And, believe me, I never thought wed actually have to eat it.

When we moved from northern California to Utah in 1986, we filled nearly a quarter of the U-Haul truck with our accumulated food storage. The recession of the early 1980s had wiped us out financially, and we were starting over. With my husbands failing health, I became the main breadwinner.

After a month of looking, I was humbled and happy to get a job at a local print shop making five dollars an hour, even though I was used to earning thirty dollars per billed hour in California. But, we had our food storage, and thats what fed us for six weeks, during which time I bought only eggs and a few fresh vegetables. I dont know what we would have done were it not for our food storage. But, still, I struggled to make meals out of what we had available. And I definitely didnt look forward to eating those mealswith the exception of my homemade bread.

We were obedient and felt the Lords hand over our lives during that time. We didnt starve. We ate what we had stored. And while we were grateful to have any food at all, the drastic change in our diet was hard to manage. As soon as we were able, what was left of our food storage was replaced by foods we actually liked to eat.

Jan learned this lesson, too, but in a different way. She and her husband, Jeff, started their food storage with a rather expensive system containing all of the staples plus cases of freeze-dried foods. One day, Jeff decided that if they were going to store all this food, they might as well figure out how to use it. They opened can after can, offering the contents to their somewhat bewildered children. No one wanted to eat any of it. Instead of raves, it brought shouts of Yuck! from everyone. There wasnt anything wrong with the food. Sure, the kids would have eaten it if starvation threatened. Maybe. But it was definitely not the taste they were used to. And if they werent starving, they werent going to eat it.

Now, were not against freeze-dried food. Its nourishing and can be used in a lot of ways. But if youre going to store it, plan on getting your family used to eating it.

After that experience, Jan said, Forget that! The kids would rather eat SpaghettiOs, so Ill store SpaghettiOs, which she purchased at the next case-lot sale. From that time on they would store only the food their family likes and is used to eating. She wrote down a menu for each day of the week, which became her guide for buying food storage. Now she always has food on hand to make the meals her family likes.

And Jan didnt stop at food. She decided she could use the same method with nonfood items. For example, she looked at how much toilet paper the family went through in a week and easily figured out what they needed to store for a month and then for a year.

Acquiring a three-month supply this way is easy. And you can always extend your supply to six months or even a year if you are financially able to. This book, however, is dedicated to helping you acquire and maintain a three-month supply of food and nonfood items.

When Jan explained this concept to me, I caught the vision of how easy it is to meld meal planning and food storage into a reliable, can-do system. Not to mention how much everyday stress it relieves to already have a meal plan in place. We wrote our ideas down on paper, and soon Not Your Mothers Food Storage was the result.

Because the system is based on foods your family likes to eat, youll find that it works well both for those who like to cook from scratch and those who prefer to rely heavily on convenience foods. Not Your Mothers Food Storage is unlike any other food storage book because we help you plan your meals before you start buying the food. If you already have a lot of food storage, you can use the worksheets in the book to figure out how many meals you can make with what you already have stored. This is good for inventory, and you may find out that youre missing items from your food storage that are required to make some of your familys favorite meals.

Many of you probably already plan menus for a week and then create a shopping list based on those daily menus. This food storage plan works in much the same way: You plan a set number of breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals that you can rotate over a period of three months. The next step is to create a shopping list of storable food items that can be used to make the meals youve planned. Next, you calculate how much of each storable item youll need to last for three months. Finally, you begin purchasing and