This month our family is living off of food storage to save money for a trip to Disneyland. We also wanted to get an idea of what it was really like to only eat food storage and to see where we were strong and where we were weak in terms of what we store. As part of our LDS (or Mormon) religion, we have been asked by our leaders to keep a year’s supply of food and other necessities to protect us against disasters or job loss. We have tried to follow this counsel and now we’re trying to see how we can improve!
This week has been interesting. While I thought we had a generous one year supply, I’m quickly learning that we are running out of a lot of things on THE FIRST WEEK!!!
Here’s what we ran out of:
Laundry Detergent
Bananas
Vanilla extract
Dishwasher soap
Tissues
Cooking spray
This has opened my eyes a lot to what we really need and what will get old really fast. For example, the beans I used in the taco soup did not soften because they were too old. My friend told me in this case you can only soften them in a pressure cooker. You can cook them for days regularly and they will never soften. So, good to know I should have a pressure cooker! I will be getting this one after we go to Disneyland.
We had guests who stayed over for a couple nights. I was a little embarrassed to tell them of our plan to eat from our food storage while they were here. I don’t know why I was embarrassed because they didn’t care, but I guess I thought the food I would be serving them wouldn’t be very good. They were very gracious however! We had taco soup one night (they didn’t make it for dinner that night, but our family ate it), chicken and rice the next, and rice pudding for breakfast.
I have enjoyed cleaning out the pantry of things I’ve meant to cook for a long time, but haven’t. It’s great to rotate the older items in our food storage as well as learning how to cook and prepare dried and canned foods.
I will try to post the recipes for the other things we’ve made, especially the overnight rice pudding because it’s a great cereal substitute.
Ingredients
- 2 cans ground beef
- 2 cans stewed tomatoes, with liquid
- 1 can corn, drained
- 1 can tomato sauce
- 2 cups various dried beans (soaked the night before and reserve some of the bean liquid). We used kidney, pinto, black, and lima.
- 1/4 cup dried onion
- 1/4 cup dried carrots
- 1 green pepper (dried or fresh)
- 1/2 cup zuchinni (optional)
- 2-4 cups chicken broth or reconstituted bouillon
- 1 pkg. taco seasoning
- 2 T. dried cillantro
- salt and pepper to taste
- GF Tortilla strips to top it with
Instructions
- Combine all ingredients in large slow cooker and cook on low for 8-10 hours. The ground beef we used was from the family cannery and it's fantastic! We had lots of fresh zuchinni and green pepper from our garden so we put it in instead of the dried counterparts. Top with GF tortilla strips and DF sour cream and cheese.
As I mentioned before, the beans didn’t soften all the way. The kids loved it though, there were no complaints and we served it with fresh peaches that we got at a local farm (we budgeted a small amount to buy fresh fruit and dairy items).
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