The 5 Mormon basics which I do not believe in unless you want to eat bread and water for a year.

For anyone who repeats this list I say, eat it for 3 months and then tell me about it.

These 5 basics are a supply of stapled. All of the above are used to prepare other foods. You need water to drink & cook, sugars to bake & flavor foods like breakfast cereal, edible oils and salt for baking & cooking, as well as anything else you want to add a bit of flavor to. Vitamins to supplement your reserves and maintain health. She also mentions embellishing these basic supplies each week with other foods. The basics are important, but I don't think anyone expects you to survive with only these 5 items.

Oh! I forgot to mention that the 5 basics are for those people who prepare food from scratch. I didn't mention that, forgive my oversight. I know that not everyone does that nowadays. 😳

Anyway, the CPHA has a publication that was revised in 2004 called, "The Basic Shelf Cookbook". This is a great resource for people who like to cook cheaply and from scratch from their food storage. I have used recipes from it since its first publication in '92 (I think). They are good recipes and inexpensive.

The book was designed by 2 students at Mt. St. Vincent University whose challenge was to make a cookbook that was nutritionally sound, used readily available ingredients and was written at a grade 8 reading level. At the time I was a single mom going to the Mount myself. The Basic Shelf Cookbook was what they came up with, and it saved my budget!

It's great. My children still call me for recipes from that cookbook. People who are interested in this kind of thing can still get it from CPHA in Ontario.

You can order a copy at http://www.cpha.ca/en/publications/pubs.aspx under the heading 'Nutrition' for around $8.

I hope this has been helpful to someone. I wanted to start a thread on food storage for those who are interested so we can share resources. There was a podcast that I heard by Jack Spirko about a year ago with an idea for something called 'copy canning' using rubbermade totes to keep it organised by month. I'll look that up tomorrow and post the link if its still available and maybe one of our favourite recipes from the book.

Also, I am looking for creative ways to use quinoa if anyone has any. I got a lot through Speerville Mills in NB and am looking for ideas to use it.

Thanks

Hi,I haven't found the podcast I'm looking for yet, but here's a fun one from back when Jack was recording the podcast on his way to work every day. http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/5-rules-of-food-storage-for-modern-survivalists

Thanks for taking the time to post the links and information.

I don't like the term Basics, to me it is more like 5 items. Basics would be water, protein items, carb items, fats, vitamins, etc. More categories, than items. Anyway, that doesn't matter. What matters Sue is that I see too many people who don't cook from scratch putting away pales of hard wheat, rice etc. in complete contrast to their current diet.

One thing I tell people to do is to first stock multiple serving items (but for a more non-scratch diet). If you have three bottles/bags/cans each of ketchup and mustard and coffee and sugar etc., it is more encouraging to see that stock build up and after you have three months of multi-serving items then start buying individual cans and boxes of food can fruit, can vegs etc. Individual servings are too easy to go through if you haven't achieved critical mass it is easy to be discouraged. Also plan on 3 months for multi-use items and no more than 1 month for individual items and build it up from there. If you buy a year supply of say can peaches at the same time they will expire at the same time too.

Sure, if you regularly use large amounts of wheat, sugar, oils, etc., then by all means store that stuff; but if you have never baked homemade bread in your life (and are not intending to make it a regular part of your diet) then don't store pales of hard wheat.

People who eat only fresh fruit and vegetables will have to start introducing can versions of the same into their diet to prepare for those times when they may only have canned food on hand.

I also mark the month and year I bought every item with a Sharpie marker on the package even if it has its own expiration date; that way I am eating the items in order of oldest first.

I pity the poor person who has 3 bottles of ketchup, mustard and coffee then feels encouraged. People need to be taught how to do this properly, not in a way that makes them feel good, but in the end could cost them their lives. If you see too many people who can't cook from scratch, suggest that they get a cookbook...not mustard. Yes, heat and serve stuff has a place, but you can't live off the stuff for long. Canned ravioli is best kept for bugging out.

I'm always amazed at how few people will make soup from scratch, yesterday we had roast chicken and today it gets made into chicken soup. I've also got a hamburger soup and a bean soup that is always rotated into meal planning. Throw together a batch of bisquits or a fresh loaf of bread and there's a meal for not much money. Making soup is also a great opportunity to clean out the fridge of any vegetables that are about to get bad. I've been noticing the grocery stores are keeping out vegetables that they would normally have gotten rid of, heads of lettuce with a couple of the outside leaves going brown & slimy, peppers that are starting to shrivel. A couple of other good basic cookbooks are from the Mennonite Central Committee "More-with-less" and "Simply in Season".

Did you make that chicken from scratch or buy it at the store? Not everyone is a farmer and if you haven't noticed the population has been shifting away from living on the farm to living in the city for quite some time now. The reality is that this population shift is not going to reverse over night and people aren't going to start growing their own beef from scratch. The man who buys his chicken from the store is just as tied to it as the man who buys his ravioli.

You also may not have noticed that every disaster does not involve the end of the world again 🙄 but rather is a spectrum of disasters from a single home house fire to a year of being laid off; very few disasters include living off the land for 20-30 years. If you are laid off then you need to learn to do more with less but that doesn't mean becoming a 1800s pioneer.

I get the point about learning skills, but I doubt many of you made your computer from scratch ( am not talking about putting store bought pieces together), or grew your own internet provider in the garden. My attitude is to work with what exists now, not be an armchair hippie. When I teach martial arts I don't make people commandos after one class, I take someone totally awkward and build them up to a level where I can teach them things I could not have taught them the first day they walked into the dojo.

PS: Feel free to PM me your Dahl soup recipes as I am looking for a simple one for someone (me) who has never used lentals before other than to toss a few into a beef soup.

No not my own chicken however I do have 6 hens in the backyard and I'm on a suburban lot and that's all we can have right now. They might very well end up in the soup pot when they aren't laying any longer and yes I have been involved with butchering chickens before. My point was that there are substantial savings in learning how to use what you've got, there's another meal from a roast chicken rather than throwing the bones in the garbage. I've got a family of six to feed and all are big eaters, if I wasn't resourceful our food bill would be well over $1000 a month and that would mean taking money away from things like savings, clothing or whatever else we need. I garden because I enjoy it but I'm certainly not kidding myself believing that I could grow enough to sustain us for a year. I can peaches, salsa, green beans etc because again there's a huge savings since I'm buying a few hundred pounds of fruit and vegetables during the year to preserve. Not a pioneer hippy just extremely frugal and because of it we were able to get through a lay-off that was close to a year.

Hello, everyone!
I've come to pull this thread back on the topic of food storage. A few off topic items were mentioned that could actually be made into their own threads if anyone wants to get the coversation started - go for it! Or, kindly give everyone a warning shot at the beginning of your reply that you going off topic for a minute.

I gather from what you said, HB, that you are more in favour of a Bugging Out food storage. Am I right? I think that would be a fantastic thread to get started.

I, on the other hand, am in favour of a Bugging In food storage approach. But we may find some common ground because of course, there is overlap. Dr. Prepper's earlier podcasts at blog talk radio, and blog posts at totallyready.com have talked a lot about building up a general store in your home with foods etc. that one is able to pull from every day; not only in an emergency. I am feeling that that is the way to go for my husband and me. But, it's not the only way. That's the great thing about prepping; there's something for everyone, and I applaud that.

So, I want to keep this thread going with helpful ideas and a Bugging In mentality for those of us who want to talk about that. I wish I had defined that more clearly in my original post, but it can't be changed now.

I don't know who our moderators are, so I hope the powers-that-be don't mind my taking responsibilty for this thread like this! No stepping on toes was intended!

I'm always amazed at how few people will make soup from scratch, yesterday we had roast chicken and today it gets made into chicken soup. I've also got a hamburger soup and a bean soup that is always rotated into meal planning. Throw together a batch of bisquits or a fresh loaf of bread and there's a meal for not much money. Making soup is also a great opportunity to clean out the fridge of any vegetables that are about to get bad. I've been noticing the grocery stores are keeping out vegetables that they would normally have gotten rid of, heads of lettuce with a couple of the outside leaves going brown & slimy, peppers that are starting to shrivel. A couple of other good basic cookbooks are from the Mennonite Central Committee "More-with-less" and "Simply in Season".

I think it's great to have the knowledge to make 2 meals from 1, Foxglove. Frugality is part of prepping as far as I'm concerned. It can be expensive planning for today + for if the SHTF if you aren't careful.

Thanks for the book titles. I looked them up at Amazon, but they don't have the 'look inside' option so I'll wait until we get to the city to look for them in a bookstore. I'd like to know if they will be mostly duplication for me or not. I've been drooling over books in Lehman's catalogue but it's the same thing - nice write-ups, but what's inside? Can you tell I've been burned a few times? lol

Do you have a specific place for your food storage or is it scattered around your house?

Hi Sue

My main food storage is in one location and then I will pull from that and bring things into the kitchen as needed. If you look into my kitchen cupboards you'd see mostly bottles of sauces, spices, baking powder, salt and things like that but nothing that looks like you could make a meal of it. I like having my food storage in one location so that I can easily see what is getting low and also so that everything gets rotated properly.

Have you checked with your local library to see if they have the cookbooks? I don't often buy cookbooks anymore because I get so many recipes off the internet for free. I'm also planning to bug in if we had to, my #1 concern is an earthquake and I do have concerns about how bad the house would be afterwards and if we could still live in it. If we had to leave the house we wouldn't be able to take all our food storage, once you pile up the clothes, sleeping bags, food, tent, cooking pots and anything else we'd need it's a lot to take and weight is an issue as well for our vehicle.

These 5 basics are a supply of staples. All of the above are used to prepare other foods. You need water to drink & cook, sugars to bake & flavor foods like breakfast cereal, edible oils and salt for baking & cooking, as well as anything else you want to add a bit of flavor to. Vitamins to supplement your reserves and maintain health. She also mentions embellishing these basic supplies each week with other foods. The basics are important, but I don't think anyone expects you to survive with only these 5 items.

Right you are, Denob. Well put! There are actually more than 5 foundation items for bugging in (a general store), as you probably know, but I wanted to jump start the topic 🙂 Thanks for your input. (I fatigue pretty easily because of health issues, so don't hold it against me if it takes a while to get back to you on a subject. I just need to rest the old brain cells once in a while 😉 )

Did you visit totallyready.com for the food storage ideas, or get a chance to listen to Jack Spirko at The Survival Podcast yet? He just did another podcast on food storage this week I have yet to listen to. I really like the copy canning method he uses. So simple, a caveman could do it! lol 😆

I have listened to Jack since about 6 months into his show (downloaded the previous shows that I had missed too). Last summer I stopped because I thought he was getting too vulgar. Then I woke up again, and decided that his approach to prepping spoke to me too much to give it up! You, know?

I just finished listening to the most recent food storage podcast at the Survival Podcast. Wow! I'm not in favour of eating wild greens as he suggests. Saw my house rabbit get worms too fast from lawn 'salads' to want to give it a try 😮

But as for striving to make your food storage work for you, wow! He was workin' it!

The episode can be found here...
http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/episode-636-the-time-to-store-food-is-now