Week 3 - The Long Haul

Morning,   As I have been thinking about you guys this week, I have often been finding myself singing, "Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at suppertime". Wonderful old song!!! Brings back sweet memories!   Anyway, so again the task this week is:     1. to either purchase at least 8.3 pounds of sugar/honey for every two people in your family   OR   to take an envelope, and put in $5 for every 2 people in your family so you can save up to buy it in greater bulk.     2. If you purchase this week, be sure to label it with the date of purchase. (Properly canned sugar and honey last for many years, but you will still want to be rotating it after you get your full amount in storage, and you will want first in/first out.) Then put the sugar in the place you have designated for your year's supply.   Sweet storing, Marie

Week 3 - Provident Pantry

You guys rock!!!

So, you have your menus for 9 days - check!

 

And you have made your ingredient lists for those menus - check!

 

You have identified problem areas, i.e. my fresh carrot storage problem, and changed or adapted the ingredients list - check! (With our carrot problem, I realized that the other way Mark likes carrots is cooked in orange juice, so I changed fresh carrots to dried carrots and Tang to my ingredient list.)

 

Now this week, add up the amounts you need for each ingredient and times it by 10 so you know how much you need of that ingredient.

For example, we use some milk almost every day, and that I have discovered that for the 9 days, I will need 24 cups of milk. 24 cups of milk times 10 is 240 cups of milk. And 240 cups of milk is 15 gallons. Now... times 10 is a piece of cake. Converting to gallons...not so much. So here is one of my favorite internet converting sites:

http://www.calculateme.com/Volume/index.htm

 

If you have another site that works well for you, please share it with the rest of us.

Now, while I would love to have fresh milk, obviously I won't have room for 15 gallons in my refrigerator, so my task now is to decide on which powdered/canned milk when reconstituted with water will taste the best. So I'll ask you guys. Do you have a favorite that your family will actually drink or have on cereal?

 

Now when you have your menus, and calculated ingredients list in place, please send them off to me this week. I will be using these lists to determine our shopping lists for the next weeks. We will be working through a number of basics first. (Don't worry, we'll work in the tapioca and jalepenos down the road.)

There is fun in the preparing,

Marie

P.S. I know there are a few of you who are a little concerned about your families not having enough variety, along the lines of, "Are they going to get sick of having 9 days of meals repeated 10 times if they had to live on that food for 3 months?" I chose this method simply because I thought that it was easily doable and easily calculatable (times 10). However, if you want to prepare a whole month of menus and times it by 3, here is a site I really like:

http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/babysteps/step-3-three-months-of-normal-food/