A years worth of food storage in 4 months!

 

I've got the food storage/emergency preparedness bug again. Apparently I'm catching all sorts of "bugs". Summer just does something to me. It lights a fire in me and I like to keep busy!

I love all things emergency preparedness. I have a pretty thorough car kit where I went through as many as different car kits online that I could find, and really molded it into what I think is the perfect, most realistic kit.

I have 72 hour kits for my little family that I also went through countless kits and put together kits that fit my family.

And food storage hasn't been an exception. I dunno about you guys, but a years worth of food storage seems SO daunting. But after doing a LOT of research I'm here to tell you, it doesn't have to be!

I'm a BIG fan of what is called a rotating food storage. It's key to the way that my food storage works! If you don't keep it rotating, things will go bad...and well that's not good! :)

Here's what I did: I went into my food storage closet and inventoried what I had as a starting point. From there I wrote down 31 different dinners. Yep, only dinners.

From there, I wrote down the ingredients of what I needed to make those dinners. Then on the same sheet, I wrote down what fruit/veggie and/or side we would have with each dinner. It will make grocery shopping and meal planning substantially easier!

Then I took some cute scrapbook paper and cut it into 3x3 squares. On each of those squares I wrote the meal on the front, and ingredients on the back.

This makes meal planning for the month super easy! For the first month (since I only shop for groceries every 2 weeks) you will choose 15 meals to grocery shop for for the first 2 weeks, and then the additional 16 meals for the second two weeks.

BUT you don't only buy what you need for that ONE dinner. You MULTIPLY the ingredients by THREE. Since you already have 31 different meals and it is all food storage friendly (I have a chest freezer to freeze what I need) you will have three months worth of that dinner. So by the end of four months of grocery shopping and buying 3 times the ingredients for the meal you will have enough for a years worth of food storage dinners! Remember to rotate, so the new stuff goes in the back, so the older stuff gets eaten first.

As far as breakfasts we keep it super simple with oatmeal and occasional pancakes, muffins, etc. And lunches...just eat leftovers (so you may want to take that into account when gauging how much of an ingredient you need for a meal). That's it. You can also have extra soups etc on hand for lunches in case you get sick of leftovers.

Not only does this help you build up your food storage fast, but it also makes meal planning SUPER easy. After the first month, in order to mix things up, shake up the jar and draw out a meal. That's what you'll have for dinner that night. Just make sure you don't repeat a meal until you've drawn out the rest of the months worth. And if you ever want to add another meal or try out a new recipe, go for it! Variety is fun! BUT with 31 different dinners, you'll still have variety and you won't be eating the same thing every single week if you're in a rut!

I hope this post made sense! I just wanted to share with you my fun new system! If you have any questions, please let me know!