Food Storage 101

The LDS Public Affairs has asked members to blog or email etc... about how they utilize their food storage

I quote:

14 August 2008

"Church Public Affairs is asking Church members to share their experiences with maintaining and utilizing food storage by posting video, text or other content on personal blogs, video-sharing sites like YouTube, social media sites like Facebook, or other Internet sites. Members can then e-mail a link to their story to publicaffairs-slc@ldschurch.org."

I had to give a lot of my food storage away when we moved to Malaysia. It was not safe to keep jarred items I had preserved myself, or canned goods for so long in a storage unit (our movers would not take them anyway). I did keep the dry pack large cans though. I have been rotating through as many of those items as I can. I have noticed that some of the dry pack flour is getting a bit stale though. So I have basically started from the beginning getting my food storage back up.

Here are some tips I have used for years, and what has worked for me when storing food (in no particular order).

• grow a garden

• you can never preserve enough tomato products

• watch the food ads and buy in bulk what your family eats, most of my cereals were bought for only 1.oo a box never more than 2.00 a box.
  
• rotate though the food you store
• keep some sort of record of what you have in storage ( I draw diagrams)
  
• learn how to do your own canning
• teach your children to grab the older products for use first
• you need more than food in your storage, think soap, tampons, antibiotics, water, pet food etc..
• use your storage like a real grocery store. Don't buy 1.00 tuna when you have some in storage that you only paid .50 cents for last spring when you bought it in bulk
• get rain checks at the customer service center if your store is out of something you want
• you may need to shop early in the week, some stores won't do rain checks
• keep a file of successful recipes for your canning. I have found that not all salsa recipes are worth my time for instance, we do have a favorite. But. I will try a new hot dog relish this year that will utilize all the green tomatoes I know I am going to be stuck with because of our slow Spring thaw.
  

Our intention when we came home was that our adult children would not be living with us, and we would turn that extra room into a huge pantry for food storage, Now I have to stuff it under the stairs, what a nightmare...but having said that...

Can I just say how fulfilling it is to open up a jar of food that I have grown, and preserved myself?