For years I
have been trying to organize a food storage program for my family. I have had many failures and during the process I also came to realize
that I was wasting money. I bought food
storage and thought it looked so good on the shelf, but before I knew it, the
dates had expired, and I had to throw a lot of it away. Today, I finally have
a good routine down that works for my family, so I thought I would share my ideas in the hope that I
can save you time and money!
My
first realization was
that if I was going to store food, I could not just look at it, I had to use
it; I had to rotate it. Otherwise, what was the point?
The second realization was that I had to actually store food that we
would eat. Can you imagine being in a situation where you had to rely only on your food storage and as a result being forced to eat green beans as your only vegetable everyday? Yeah, that is just not going to work!
So, I came up with a month of menus and made a
list of all the ingredients that I would need for that month. I slowly built up to an extra 1-month supply
and finally up to a 3-month supply.♦
The 2 great benefits of a 3-month supply of food in your pantry is
that #1 you don’t go to your pantry and find you are out of something when you
are in the middle of cooking and have to run to the store (I hate that) or go
to a neighbors to borrow (I hate that too), and #2 you have a supply of food in
an emergency situation.
Included in this blog, I have all the information on getting
started, my menus and recipes. Feel free
to use any of my ideas. When I have
something listed as “large”, that usually means I buy it at Costco. Also, weekly, I have a “HOT DEALS THIS WEEK”
section that will show good buys that week that would be great to stock up on.
By the way, this is all designed for a family of 4, so
you will have to adjust for larger or smaller families.
Have
fun shopping !
