So you've started stockpiling food - grains, beans, water, salt and other items. But have you planned meals? It doesn't do much good to simply store foods when you don't have a plan for cooking and eating.
What if I store lots of flour but then realized that i haven't thought much about what to do with that flour. I've got beans but nothing to put with them. Or I've got a food item that I could cook with electricity but it never occurred to me to figure out how or if I could cook it during a crisis when power may be out. What if I want to make tortillas and suddenly realize I haven't got an ingredient I need.
That's why we have a meal plan. My wife has planned meals for every day of the aftermath of any catastrophic incident (flood, earthquake, viral outbreak, EMP, tornado, ice storms, economic collapse, etc)
Planning what we will eat every day for breakfast, lunch, supper and snacks allows us to buy exactly what we need to prepare those meals. Here is my wife's plan, but the quantities will vary depending how many of our community make it to our agreed-on safety place, and how much food we have managed to store there ahead of time.
The list below has quantities for one adult assuming we are rationing food, and that most of our canned goods are gone. It is our basic meal plan which we hope to supplement either with larger quantities or other nutritious foods:
Our Basic Weekly Meals
Breakfast: 1 c. oatmeal, 1/2 tsp. honey, 1 slice irish soda bread, 1 cup of tea or coffee
Snack: 1 c. corn mush, 1/2 tsp. honey
Lunch: 1 cup soup broth with pasta and some dehydrated vegetables or fresh vegetables if available, 1 cornmeal dumpling
Snack: 1 c. corn mush, 1/2 tsp honey, 1 cup pine needle tea
Supper: 1 c. beans, 1 c. rice, 3 tortillas
This provides approximately 2300 calories per person per day. My wife is in charge of making sure we all purchase enough of each ingredient to make these foods.
Pine Needle tea will be available throughout each day in unlimited quantities as it prevents scurvy and is an excellent source of Vitamin C.
We also have planned special meals and treats. This will provide some variety in tastes and also be a small morale booster. It is important to plan and store such food items.
Our Special Meals:
1 night each week will be Kraft Dinner. We buy it on sale when it's 33cents per box.
1 night each month will be tuna with pasta for a tuna casserole (while our cans of tuna last)
1 night each month will be rice cooked in broth (a flavoured bouillon cube) with some of the dried vegetables my wife has been making with her dehydrator
1 night each week there will be a dessert of some kind
Friday night special: this will be a shot of liquor for each adult and chocolate milk for the children (using powdered milk)
Sunday afternoon will incorporate a short break time with one candy per person and some games or reading time.
Depending on the time of year we hope to be able to add apples from trees, rhubarb, fruit from wild bushes and vegetables from the gardens to supplement our diet.
We will also add foods found in the wild and any animals we can hunt or fish we can catch. And of course we have to have a method of cooking these foods for a large group. I'll talk more about that in another blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment