I was re-reading some of my earlier posts about canned food and storage food. While we can all agree that pre-packaged food is often not the healthiest thing for you to eat, I think that we can also agree that when you haven’t eaten if three day you’re probably gong to be a little more forgiving of some MSG or high fructose corn syrup in whatever it is you’ve stumbled across to eat.
Making anything ‘from scratch’ using long-life, shelf-stable food is challenging. Yes, you can open a jar of spaghetti sauce, crack open a can of ground beef, and pull some spaghetti out of a box. Presto – dinner is served. But for anything more complex than that, with more than three or four ingredients, you really have to do some careful menu planning.
This website has been one of my favorites since I found it. It is dormant and hasn’t been updated in years, but theres a pretty lengthy list of recipes, with pictures, for all sortsa meal using genuine long-term, shelf-stable stuff. I highly recommend viewing it: Safely Gathered In . And, yup, its from the LDS/Mormons…naturally. I’mm posting about it because although I’ve mentioned it in the past, there’s always a bunch of recent readers who may not have been around when I last linked to it.
I’ve long thought there needs to be some genuine ‘cooking with storage/stored food’ cookbook. Something that wasn’t just theory, but something with actual hands-on cooking, lotsa photos, and solid metrics about quantities, calories, and fuel consumption. I’ve read a few books that tried to be that, and I thought they failed miserably. Mostly because at some point in the recipe, a fresh ingredient was called for. No, I think a cookbook for using nothing but literal sits-on-a-shelf ingredients would fill a void in the preparedness marketplace. It wouldnt make anone rich, but it’d be nice to have.
Concur.
But that would force some people to transition their thinking for “I’ve got a bunch of STUFF” to “I’m actually taking the time to detail-plan my survival”.
90% of folks aren’t mentally there yet.
They should be, but they aren’t.
Thank you for that link! Hadn’t seen it before and, quickly looking through it, I saw several recipes that made me say “Hmmm, that sounds good!”
Big Al in AZ
I listened to an interview of this kid from Africa who got a scholarship and came to the US to do college and ended up making something of himself in software or engineering or whatever. My key takeaway from the half hour interview was when they were asking him about growing up in poverty and hunger… he said they had goats and chickens, so his family was quite well off compared to most. He said, if you take care of your animals, they will take care of you. Amazing advice from a young man. The eggs and milk from the chickens and goats are what sustained his family year in and year out. Chickens ate bugs and goats ate weeds. Keep their water clean as possible and predators away, and you are able to survive.
I point this out, because no matter how amazing your food stash is, you will eventually need to start replacing consumed food. Goats and chickens seem pretty solid for the milk and eggs. A garden, some fruit trees, some grains… there are different directions you can go depending on where you live.
I know the native americans had the 3 sisters, where they would plant corn on a dirt mound and then beans around the side to grow up the corn stalks and then squash at the base. Nutritionally, this is pretty solid. With nixtalization, the corn and beans have a lot of calories and amino acids. The eggs and milk fill in a lot of the rest. I completely support having a couple years food on hand to get yourself up and running after shtf, but unless there is some kind of long term solution, aren’t you just living long enough to see everyone else die first?
“Cooking With Home Storage” Peggy Layton / Vickie Tate
Longstanding classic everyone should have on their shelf….
https://www.amazon.com/Cookin-Home-Storage-Peggy-Layton/dp/1893519015
That’s a good one! Tho I don’t know where my copy is right now.
Another good one is Apocalypse Chow by Jon & Robin Robertson. They live in Florida & have 1st hand experience with the aftermath of hurricanes. I didn’t realize until after I bought it that it’s vegetarian, but that workout out well when my daughter became a vegetarian. I found out that I really liked the Black Bean Patties.
https://www.commanderzero.com/?p=612&
Definitely not the funniest prep but I have put a number of older cook books away. The oldest being a re-print from 1700’s colonial America. I have also put a few Native American cookbooks away too. For those interested in some good ol’ Colonial American cooking/baking check out Jas Townsend and son
I love Jas Townsend & Sons you tube videos. They are always interesting. Never knew how good just a plain old roasted onion tastes til I tried it after seeing that video.
My wife makes medieval leather clothing and I keep trying to get her to expand her thinking to the Colonial era. Lots of bags and belts for reenactors there but she sticks to her comfort zone.
I’ve seen many of the Townsend films but if you go to the company website you find out they are very left wing, support BLM and want to ban guns, which for people who know their history is very odd.
Its odd that I found nothing on their site to support your statement
It was in a blog when the Father ran it but seems to have been removed from the web now so I’m hoping the son is knows his history too well for that.
More likely just learned to STFU so as not to scare the straights.
Cretinism is inherited, but it doesn’t preclude cleverness.
orange fool indeed
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-eighteenth-century-custard-recipe-that-enraged-trump-supporters
Check out prepschooldaily.blogspot.com. She does alot with preps on hand.
Yes!
She also posts a great deal of information about health, herbal treatments, and general health issues. She spends the time to dig out obscure sources of information and will post links to same. She also just started doing a USB drive of the site, similar to what ‘SurvivalBlog.xom’ does each year.
The site is definitely putting on the daily blog reading-rotation.
We’ve had some nice stuff from ‘The Storm Gourmet’ by Daphne Nikolopoulos.
We have an off-grid, as in no refrigeration, ski in cabin. We stock it in fall with a winter’s worth of food so we can ski in without mongo packs.
The book’s premise is that you have time on your hands and want something other than yet another can of chili, which is a good match for us after a long day of skiing around, when the snow is going sideways past the cabin window. It does call for fresh stuff – say garlic or parsley – but we just substitute dried.
Not mine, I just read her website.
Free online info
https://prepschooldaily.blogspot.com/p/food-storage-made-fabulous-book-contents.html
Actual books or kindle form
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Eats-TEOTWAWKI-Caf%C3%A9-Powdered/dp/B0BYBH7G1G/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1VOQMTRR8SCFH&keywords=good+eats+at+the+teotwawki+cafe&qid=1678970548&sprefix=good+eats+at+the+teotwawki+cafe%2Caps%2C347&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.com/Food-Storage-Made-Fabulous-Principles/dp/B08NF32HG1/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2B27PJ10X4I1A&keywords=food+storage+made+fabulous+jennifer+rader&qid=1678970641&sprefix=food+storage+made+fabulous+jennifer+rade%2Caps%2C281&sr=8-1
I read a note on Bayou Renaissance Man about a Montana company making pemmican. I ordered some (they are building a new facility and are out of most product) but they have some made with lard not the normal tallow. Just meat and fat it tasted like cardboard by itself. However I mixed it into some chickpea curry and it really added to the dish. Kind of pricey but I think worth the cost. Fat calories in the winter will keep you alive and kicking. Steadfast Provisions if you want to look them up.
Anyone preparing to live long term on stored foods should also be storing vitamins. Most foods lose vitamins with storage and (re) heating. Simple vitamins are like medicines in that they store well long term if kept in the proverbial “cool dry place.” Vitamin C may be one of the most important.
Agreed.
A decent multi-vit + Vit C + Vit D, does so much to maintain health. And they take up so little space to store.
Thanks for the link, I’m in the very short rows of life but this will help my descendants if SHTF and even in their daily life. Assuming they pay any attention to my prepping advice, which is iffy at best unfortunately.
Thanks for relinkIng. I’ve tried many of the recipes on the site over the years from canned goods in the pantry. All of them tasted pretty good. I like the pantry chicken and rice and the coconut chicken curry.
Are there any good cookbooks or websites that use MRE’s as a base and then extend for a family. For short term situations, MRE’s seem like a great month or two of disaster preps. E.g. western NC.
Anyone looking to eat MREs for 2 months has their own reward.
You be better off living on roadkill.
For once in awhile, or an emergency pack ration, they’re an interesting change-of-pace.
If it’s eat one or starve, that’s where they belong.
But by-choice for any extended period (i.e. longer than a week)?
Insanity, only excusable if the first sergeant (and the enemy) is giving you no other options.
Even the military tries to limit their use to one meal a day in extended circumstances, and brings out hot chow 1-2 times/day in field situations (even simple 1-3 day events) barring in extremis deployments.
If you’re not Force Recon or LRRPs on deep recon, you aren’t deployed to the polar ice, and you aren’t trapped inside a tanker truck on an island populated by genetically engineered dinosaurs, you shouldn’t be eating MREs more than twice in a row, pretty much ever, if there’s any other option.
That should tell you where MREs belong on any prepper’s menu, esp. one where currently you have all possible options for food selection and storage.
The prepper food pyramid in ascending order is Starvation, then MREs (or any equivalent), then Anything Else. Try to remain in the Anything Else section, by all means.
The old C Rations in a can were far better than easily portable MREs. The only unpalatable one was Green Eggs and Spam but there was always some crazy person who’d trade their Spaghetti or Beans and Meatballs for it.
Actually, Green Eggs & Ham provided the only palatable breakfast option in a case of Cs.
The one no one wanted was Ham & Motherf***ers (Lima Beans), where you needed a microscope to spot the ham, and the Lima Beans tasted like they were canned raw in piss, whether you heated them or not.
You couldn’t give that one away for anything.
Take a look on YT I don’t know of any channels but have seen the odd film about adding things to them.
Wendy DeWitt did some stuff on food storage about 15 years or more ago–she is Mormon and her stake asked her to teach classes. This ebook has recipes:
https://allaboutfoodstorage.com/wp-content/uploads/EVERYTHING-UNDER-THE-SUN-2010-word.pdf
There’s also a video of her presentation, but it’s more focused on the basics of food storage itself rather than meal prep. It’s low-resolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOLuIApyNPc
“100 Day Pantry “ by Jan Jackson. Recipes using only shelf stable foods and do not even require additional water. Also “A Year Without The Grocery Store” by Karen Morris.
I’m LDS and yes our church teaches preparedness as a critical part of life.
Not just food but finances, household repair items ect.., just everything related to the needs of daily life. The bishops pantry is online and brick and mortar in some locations and you do not need to belong to the church to shop there. Bulk food ect.. Not a huge selection but the prices are great. There is even a printable chart the church put out on what to store for a year online somewhere. Basic but a good foundation to start from. Another great resource is the Amish and Mennonite communities if you live near any. I frequent their stores often.
JT