Food Storage For Thought

Lately I've been thinking a lot about food storage and making sure our house is in order. Getting started with food storage is very intimidating, especially when you have next to no space to keep anything. When I first moved in, about 2 weeks before we got married, I managed to keep all the food in the kitchen, along with all of my pots, pans, bowls and other kitchen gadgets. If you know me, you know that's no small feat considering I used to sell Pampered Chef and I just LOVE to cook. So, I have a lot of kitchen "stuff".



Then when we got married we got more kitchen stuff of course, and I had to struggle to find places to put the new kitchen stuff and still have room for the food. At this point I decided to start keeping some of the extra cans of food in the 3x4 closet in our second bedroom/TV room. There were a few very small shelves in there, but with the other regular storage stuff it soon got too crowded in there. Finally we found a black steel shelving unit at Aldi for $60. Woohoo!! We got that set up in our kitchen/main room and BAM! Food storage became so much easier.



A couple of weeks later we noticed the same shelving unit at Aldi had gone on clearance for $30 so we bought another one and with permission, put it in our landlord's food storage room which happens to be just off our apartment.



I have 2 food storage goals for this new year:
1. Get our 3-month supply of everyday food in order
2. Implement a plan for water storage

In order to accomplish the 3-month supply, I've been compiling recipes with only a few "problematic" ingredients. Normally I like to cook with a lot of fresh ingredients, but in an emergency situation, there is the possibility of no fresh food available, so I've decided that I'll build the pantry ingredients into my pantry supply, and then find freeze-dried versions of the "problematic" ingredients. I've found that my most common problematic ingredients tend to be: celery, onions, eggs, and butter. All of those can be purchased freeze-dried. My mother-in-law gave us a bunch of wheat and other food storage for Christmas. Now it's just a matter of testing these recipes I've compiled to make sure that we can palate them once a week for 3 months.

Water storage is not proving as difficult as I thought it might. I'm planning on purchasing six to eight 5-gallon stackable containers for a start. These cost $8-$12 a piece, depending on the kind you get. I think 30 gallons of water would last the two of us 15-20 days, with minimal water for washing. A 55-gallon drum would be ideal, but we have nowhere to put one so we're sticking with the stackable 5-gallon.

I'd love to hear what your ideas are about food storage and any recipes you have found or creative ways to implement both short and long-term food storage!