When Dan married me, he thought he was getting a girl who was fairly hip, with just enough dorkiness to be the right one for him. Never in his wildest dreams did he ever think that he had married a woman who would one day grind wheat and bake bread. These days, Dan gets the heebie-jeebies whenever he sees me walk in the door with plastic buckets or fifty pounds of wheat. Poor guy. Life is never quite what any of us expected.
But while we’re on the topic of food storage, I recently had a food storage epiphany. Heaven knows I’m no expert on the matter and there are plenty of blogs out there with lots of great ideas, so my recent break through will probably sound either obvious or ridiculous. But I still figured I’d share it here.
For a while there I was really getting behind the whole, buy a little extra when I go shopping strategy of food storage. But in our current kitchen, I’ve got very little storage space for extra cans of enchilada sauce. I was feeling a need to get more organized, so I moved on to case lot sales.
Those had me feeling pretty good for a while too, but case lot sales are usually limited to canned veggies, tomato sauce, tomato or cream of mushroom soup, and canned black, pinto, or kidney beans. I guess I could buy a couple cases of salt too, but I try to buy only what we consume regularly. Case lot sales are a great way to save money, but not such a great long-term strategy for food storage.
I felt like I needed to start creating menus so that I would know what other ingredients to keep on hand in case we ever found ourselves living off of the pinto and black beans. I’m sure they’d taste much better in a soup or as enchiladas than straight out of the can.
Then one day, while I was in the shower—that is where I do most of my deep thinking—I started thinking about recent reports that properly stored dry beans and wheat basically last forever and don’t need to be rotated. Suddenly food storage seemed easy. I just have to buy the right number of buckets to store the correct pounds of wheat, beans, and rice as calculated by this handy dandy little guy, and I’m basically set for my food storage. Or at least until we get another baby.
Only, I’m realizing that I’m still not “set” because I’ll have to buy a few other food items to help us consume the wheat, beans, and rice, or at least to turn the wheat into bread. And all of this has got me noticing a trend. It seems that when it comes to food storage, I’m good at buying the obvious things, but not so great at figuring out what else I need to buy so that I’ll have something to put the enchilada sauce on and I won’t find myself drinking it instead.
And if that’s not hard enough, I’ll also have to figure out how to sneak the larger items into our basement so that Dan won’t get too carried away with his groaning. At least we have a basement. I’d hate to think what I’d be stuck doing if I had to put the food storage under our bed or make it into a TV stand just to store it.
5 comments:
You're way ahead of me - when I found out about the whole "just buy things you regularly eat idea," I thought that was amazing! Because I sure wouldn't know what to do with a whole lot of beans. But I'll get there one day... And I have to add, I really appreciate that you know how to use the correct form of "yea," (instead of "yeah"). Of course that would be expected since you're an expert in all things grammar, but I still appreciate it in the face of so much misuse. :)
Should I be really ashamed that I have food storage under my bed? Not a lot. I feel I should confess here. Just some oats!!:) I would add it to the other beds, though, and have thought about having Zack build a bed base that lifts up and I could store things inside. Again, I feel the shame!! Since Katie mentioned grammar, I must admit that I noticed the incorrect use of "know" in the second paragraph! :) I hope you forgive me. And not point out the many, many errors in my comment or on my blog! How weird that I left such a long comment. That came out of nowhere. Happy storing!!
You are totally on top of things! I just have a 3-month supply of the things we actually eat in a rotation, and I've never had space for more than that. But I have a problem with buying things my kids would rather starve than eat. (And yes, they would.) So, I'm just going to get a year supply of sugar, flour (or wheat, whatev) and pancake mix and call it good. Jake and I can get those nice freeze-dried buckets from Costco that last like 10 years. Nice.
I don't mean to make anyone embarrassed about food storage under their bed. I just meant that if Dan was constantly aware of it, then I'd be constantly reminded that he is not happy with the fact that we have food storage.
I thought it was yay! :-)
Post a Comment