Let's Talk Food Storage

Food storage!! What a daunting set of words. Who has the time or the money to have a food storage? I didn't think I did, but little did I know that I already had started my food storage. If you have one extra can of corn in your cupboard or extra rolls of toilet paper in your closet, you have the beginning of food storage. I had always shopped sales and stocked up at case lot's but I had never associated those habits with food storage. When I stopped to think about it, I got really excited! Maybe, this wouldn't be as hard as I had thought. I also wanted to take a different approach to food storage.

When I heard the word food storage, I always thought of wheat. Tons and tons of wheat, rice and beans. Stuff that my family does not eat. You've heard the advice, eat what you store and store what you eat. Well I took that heart. To begin with I worked on just coming up with a 3 month supply of food that I knew my family would eat. As I have gathered "MY" staple foods, I have started to add the wheat, the rice, the beans, the margarine powder and egg powder and much more to our supply. And I use it! I figured that if I was going to store it, then we had to learn how to use it and surprisingly the food is GOOD! I'll post some recipes for you in another post. These are just a few way's that I worked on my 3 month supply.

1. Buy in bulk!! I started to scrimp away money for the case lot sales. I bought cases of things like green beans, corn, fruit cocktail, creamed soup, spaghetti sauce, sugar, flour, and canola oil, just to name a few. I bought things that I knew I could use to make meals. I bought staples. I bought comfort foods in bulk and things that were easy to make such as Top Ramen and Macaroni and cheese. Quite quickly my 3 month supply grew.

2. Clip coupons!! I cannot emphasize enough how much money you can save, it your diligent in clipping coupons. Watch the sale ads. I love buy one get one Free sales and I love clearance sales. A great way to stock your freezer is to buy quick sale meat. It's still good, it's just close to it's expiration's date. Take it home and freeze it when you find meat on a good sale.

3. I learned to juggle the food that I had. I loved having extra because it meant that if a good sale did come up, rather than spending $10.00 on say, cereal, I could spend that $10.00 extra dollars on hamburger, because I had enough cereal at home in storage.

I love the saying, where there's a will there's a way! My neighbor once shared an idea with me. When they were first married, she put a box in her kitchen as a reminder to work on food storage. Every day she would trip over that box and so every time she went to the store she would buy 1 thing to put in that box. When it was full she would close it up and put it away for food storage.

In these economic times, aren't we glad that we have been counseled to set aside food in our homes! I know that I have had times where I have been very grateful for my little food storage that I have. It's possible, I promise. Here is a link to a great article, it's well worth the time it takes to read it.