Storing Dry Foods for Emergencies

Empty Wine Pails make great storage containers. We fill ours with pasta, rice, Kraft Dinner, Corn, wheat, sugar, salt and other dry foods.

Some, like pasta, we leave in the original packaging and pack them into the pails.

Others, like corn, wheat and rice, we open and dump into the clean pails. You must clean and dry  the pails thoroughly before using of course.

Once we have about 25 pails filled, we open our oxygen absorbers and drop those inside then we seal the lid tightly.

We label all the pails with the date, what food is in each and how much is there, plus the name of the person in our community who contributed the specific food item. We do this in case plans change and a member wants to go elsewhere. We can then fairly easily give them whatever food they have contributed to the group.

Then we store the foods in various spots - some get the spare room in the basement but it has a woodstove so it gets really hot in the winter. Some foods can't be stored there. Others go out to one of our storage sheds. The outdoor sheds are only for foods that can withstand extremes of temperature.

The nice thing about the pails is how they stack. The drawback is that they are cylindrical in shape. We could stack better if they were square or rectangular. We do have rectangular pails but they are smaller so we use those for other food items such as our saved Chinese food condiment packages (Soy sauce and plum sauce) and our saved McDonald's condiment packages (vinegar, ketchup, salt and pepper)

Keep An Eye Out For Food On Sale

I was at the store the other day and I found a great deal on crackers. Things like crackers will last for decades if you keep them cool and dry. They may go a tad stale but you can still eat them. So if the price is right I say grab them. You may be glad you did.

When you see stuff on sale. Its a great idea to stock up.

Frankenstorm - A Tip For Storing Water

I hope everyone came through Hurricane Sandy and Frankenstorm with no problems. I also hope you were all prepared with a minimum 72 hours of food and water and that your car was gassed and ready to go.

White Orange Juice Containers of Water

Here's a little tip for those who don't have much room to store food, water and other supplies. Fill some jugs HALF-FULL with water  (I use a 2 L pop bottle and 4 L empty orange juice containers) Put those jugs of water in your freezer, filling up all the empty space. Use 500 ml empty water bottles if you can't fit a big jug or bottle in.

When the water is frozen, put them in your refrigerator. Put MORE in the freezer and when those are frozen, leave them there.

If your power goes out the jugs and bottles of water will help keep your food cold and thus be available to eat. If you run out of water you can defrost the frozen jugs and bottles and bingo, there's fresh clean water for drinking.

And if you happen to have empty space in your freezer, keep some jugs or bottles of water in there all the time, don't wait for a storm warning. This will not only provide you with instant water and a method of keeping food cold, it also saves energy because a full freezer doesn't have to work as hard.

Easy Ways to Save & Store Water for Emergency Survival

This is a 3.78L (almost 4 quarts) jug that used to contain orange juice. Every time I finish one, I wash it well and fill it with tap water. Then I add it to my water storage for emergencies.

An adult needs between 3 to 5 L of water daily to survive. This jug has enough water to keep me alive for one day.

This is one of the best ways to make sure you have enough water in an emergency.

Below you can see enough water to keep one adult alive for 5 days (5 jugs).

Yes they take up room, but they can go on shelves in a closet, on the floor of a closet, in a basement room, or if you don't have snow and freezing temperatures, you can store them in a garage or barn or even on your porch.

I'm experimenting this winter with filling some 3/4 full (to allow for expansion) and putting them in my barn.

Last winter I tried using the disposable containers you can buy for water coolers but they cracked. I think I might try the tougher non-disposable ones this year.

We have other stores of water too. My wife keeps 4 of the water cooler jugs filled and in a closet. We also have several trays of bottle water and try to never let them get below two extras in the house at all times.

But the orange juice containers are so handy we have about 35 filled and stored now, plus about 2 dozen empty ones strung on a bungie cord in the barn. We can quickly fill those if we have warning of a disaster possibility. And we're adding more every week each time we finish a jug of juice.

Dehydrate Your Foods!

My wife dehydrates leftover vegetables and fruits. So here she is to tell you all about it.

Dehydrating Apples

Hi. I'm a huge fan of dehydrating food. You know how you buy celery but only use a little bit and the rest wilts and you end up throwing it out? Well I cut off what I'm going to use and then I immediately dehydrate the rest! I save the leaves for making soup - just wash and dry them and toss them in a freezer bag into the freezer.

Sometimes I buy bruised fruit, like bananas, on sale, then I dehydrate them. I have two dehydrators and have also used my oven in a pinch (but you have to buy the mesh mats or the food falls through the oven racks)

I've dehydrated bananas, apples, lemons, rhubarb, carrots, celery, potatoes, brussel sprouts, cabbage, yams (sweet potatoes), zucchini, cherries, mushroooms, bell peppers, and all kinds of herbs including parsley.

Dehydrated Rhubarb

Dehydrated Brussel Sprouts

I store my dehydrated foods in sterilized glass jars. I use leftover jars from other foods - salsa jars, herb bottles, spaghetti sauce jars, etc. When I say sterilized I mean put 'em in the dishwasher on sani-wash.

Then I keep the dehydrated food in a dark cupboard. I'm running out of room so have to find another dark spot. A closet works fine.

There's two great things about dehydrating food for emergency food supplies - they last a long time and they take up very little room. You can see how much room 24 brussel sprouts took up once I dehydrated them! To cook 'em just rehydrate overnight or toss directly into your pot.

Free Storage Containers for Emergency Survival Food Stores

One of the things every Prepper needs is good airtight storage containers for storing food.

Now you can go purchase containers but that gets expensive. So to save some money I have found a good source. Restaurants.

Many restaurants order food in bulk. Thing like pickles and fetta cheese. Often this stuff comes in nice air tight food grade pails that are just tossed out after use. I have one restaurant that gives me one large pickle pail each week for free and another that gives me all the pails I want for $1 each.

Caveat: the pails are not clean. I do have to spend a few minutes washing each one out but I figure the savings more than make up for my time.

So ask around at your local restaurants. You might be surprised at what you can get.

Oh one more thing - make sure the pails are completely dry before you put food in them!

15 Reasons You Should Stockpile Honey

Honey is another great staple to store for survival and emergency planning. There are 15 uses for honey:

1. Skin moisturizer
2. Antiseptic
3. Acne Removal
4. Energy Booster
5. Immune System Booster
6. Enhances Vitamin A
7. Improves Blood Flow
8. Helps Sore Throats
9. Colon Damage Prevention
10. Parasite Remover
11. Burn Remedy
12. Antibacterial Solution
13. Relaxant
14. Helps prevent Cancer and Heart Disease
15. Treat Diabetic Ulcers

Read more details on 15 Uses for Honey and find out how to use it for each of the 15 suggestions above. Mix it with other ingredients, drink it, lather it on your skin -- find out how to use it in this article.

Don't Make Excuses to Not Prepare for Emergency Situations

People often tell me they can't stockpile food for emergencies because a) they can't afford to or b) they have no room in their house/apartment.

Well I'm here to tell you how wrong you are!

Money and Budgets

Let's talk about money and budgeting for emergency survival preparedness:

Even if you can't budget $50.00 a month, maybe you can set aside $25.00 to purchase basic survival foods such as a bag of rice

Try buying one extra item each time you grocery shop. Buy one can of tuna (on sale of course) one week. Buy a box of cereal another. These are your Zombie Apocalpyse Supplies! Set them aside. Label them "ZA" or "Survival" or whatever you want to call them. Do whatever you need to do to start stockpiling food supplies for emergencies

Buy bruised fruit on sale (my wife got 20 bananas for $1.00 a few weeks ago) and then dehydrate it and store it.

I'm pretty sure that you can give up one or two cups of coffee each week to buy some food for survival and emergency crisis situations.

Lack of Space

My wife's amazing at finding spaces where she can store our emergency survival foods. Here's some of her ideas:

* Under the bed. Guess what - you can store a lot of bottles of water or cans of food under a bed

* In closets. Use the floor for boxes of food, then put your shoes on top. Move your purses off the shelf and put food there

* Inside empty containers. My wife collects antique tins. One day she realized that all the tins she had on display are empty. They're already taking up space so all she did was start storing candies, soap and other little items in them. You will need to have a sheet in your Survival Emergency Plans binder that outlines where every food item is stored

* Re-organize the Spare bedroom. You should consider turning your spare guest room into a ZA room. Why waste the space on a few guests a few times a year? Turn it into a storage room for emergency supplies. We started by stacking wine pails full of pasta, rice, corn, wheat etc between the guest bed and the wall. We quickly ran out of room so we added cheap plastic shelving in the same room. These hold small items like canned goods, sugar, honey, oil and so on.

We were still too limited space-wise so we got rid of the guest bed. Now we have a choice. We can eliminate the guest bed completely and visitors will have to get a motel/hotel room OR we can have pails of food/water with a mattress on top.

We could also go with empty rain barrels full of food or water instead of wine pails, then put a mattress on top. We'd fix it up so it looks good and put a long bed skirt over the pails so it doesn't look junky.

* Under the sink(s) You don't need all the junk that we all keep under the kitchen and bathroom sinks. Clean it out and store small food items that will not be harmed by moisture. We store soap, extra toilet paper, shampoos, dental supplies such as floss and toothpaste, as well as canned goods under our sinks. You can also store water there.

Dehydrating Foods for Survival in a Zombie Apocalypse

Ronco  5-Tray Electric Food Dehydrator

Dehydrating Rhubarb

Dehydrating fruits and vegetables is a great way to store nutritious foods for a Zombie Apocalypse. It's cheap and it's easy. You can buy a dehydrator for anywhere from $30.00 to $300.00. Yes the more expensive ones are faster and more efficient. But the cheaper ones work fine. We have both.

You can also use your oven as long as you can set it to 125'. Some ovens won't set that low. Ours has a special dehydrator setting. We bought mesh to cover the oven racks so the fruit and vegetable pieces don't fall through.

We use ours to dehydrate rhubarb, lemons, celery, potatoes, yams, mushrooms, cabbage, bananas, apples, zucchini and more. We pick fresh from the garden. We buy bruised fruit on sale. We dehydrate leftovers that were sure to be tossed or fed to our pigs.

Cut the Rhubarb

To dehydrate you need a sharp knife. There's other things you can use such as a shredder for cabbage, or a saline solution to stop apples turing brown but you don't have to have them! Just thinly slice your fruit or vegetable, put it on the trays, turn the dehydrator on to the correct temperature (usually 125-135' for fruit or vegetables) and let it go for 8 to 12 hours.

Check on the food after about 8 hours to be sure it's not over-drying. When it's hard or leathery, let it sit for a few minutes to cool then store in a clean glass jar. You don't have to buy fancy mason jars, just save and wash your jam jars, salsa jars, spaghetti sauce jars - whatever you have on hand.

Dehydrating foods to store for emergency situations is a space saver. Recently my wife took 10 cups of fresh rhubarb and dehydrated it. She ended up with 2 cups of dried rhubarb.

Label your jar with the name of what's inside, the date (we use month and year) and if you remember, the amount of fresh you started with. When you're ready to use the dried food, you will need to find out whether you leave overnight in water to rehydrate or toss it in as is and cook as dried or eat right from the jar.

Dried rhubarb for example rehydrates well if put in pan of water (you don't need much, just barely cover the dried fruit) and leave overnight.  When we do apples we sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on some so we can eat them as a treat. Experiment. Remember to try things out now so that when the Zombie Apocalypse hits you aren't left wondering what the heck you do with the stuff you prepped and stored beforehand.

Excalibur 3900 Deluxe Series 9 Tray Food Dehydrator - Black Here's the big 9-tray food dehydrator we use. It works great. It gives efficient all-round drying as there is a fan inside that circulates the hot air.

You don't get even drying in the cheaper dehydrators but we have one of those too. All my wife does is rotate the trays every few hours.


Caveat: I use the words Zombie Apocalypse tongue-in-cheek. It's a way of making us all sit up and take notice of what's going on in the world. Hopefully it will encourage you to get started on your Emergency Food Preparation and Survival Plan

An Emergency Preparedness To-Do List

If you don't have an Emergency Survival To-Do List, maybe it's time to think about writing one up. Figure out what you've done and what you still need to do to prepare for an emergency situation. 


What food have you stockpiled? What do you still need in the way of food for one year?


What about water? 


What about weapons?


What about gathering and storing firewood ahead of time? 


These are all things you need to think about as a Prepper.


This is not the same thing as your Emergency Survival Plan.  Your Emergency Preparedness Plan is what you create first. It's your overall plan of how you and your family and friends plan to survive a catastrophe. 


The To-Do list is what you're going to focus on in the next few months or during this year. For example our To-Do list includes the following:


* Buy more oats. We plan on breakfasts of Oatmeal each day and for a year's worth of such breakfasts we need a specific amount of oats. This year's focus is to reach our goal for enough oats for one year for 6 people. 
* Buy more corn - need to reach our goal of enough for one year for 6 people
* Buy more dried beans - need to reach our goal of enough for one year for 6 people
* Make a manual pump for our drilled well. The time to build this is now, not after a disaster. We need more than one.
* Cut and store firewood. Firewood takes time to cure and it takes time, effort and gas to power a chain saw to cut trees. The time to do this is now
* Make a root cellar. We have a work weekend coming up in July. Both my step-sons are coming up to help me dig out under the mudroom to make a small root cellar. We need it now so that not only is it done and ready but my wife and I can experiment with how best to use it to keep our vegetables and fruits for prolonged periods of time
* Buy more baking powder - this is something my wife has worked out that she needs to bake one Irish Soda Bread loaf for 365 days for 6 adults. 
* Extend the herb garden and rhubarb patch
* Plant squash and pumpkin this year in addition to last year's vegetables (zucchini, onions, peppers)
* Organize our available storage areas and figure out what items need to be kept in each. We have some climate controlled areas but we also have some with extreme fluctuations in temperature and humidity so we are starting to create a  list of what items can go where.  I'll go into detail on this in another blog post.


What's on your To-Do list? 

Food Hoarding in Iran

Hoarding of goods is becoming a significant issue in Iran as the economic sanctions start to take hold. The Iranian Minister of Industries, Mines and Commerce Mehdi Ghazanfari said, advising Iranians against hoarding goods. “Piling up goods at home isn’t to the benefit of consumers and we don’t advise it”

Now this may not be affecting us in the West but its important to learn the lessons that observing what happens in the rest of the world can teach us and apply them to ourselves. Food shortages can happen for many reasons. Its best to be prepared.

Rice. A low cost survival food.

In another example of how it really is not that expensive to stockpile food I found 8kg bags of rice at the store for less than $5 bucks a bag. And as rice has an extremely long shelf life it is a fantastic way to stockpile for a disaster.

An 8kg bag of rice will feed you for a week so you dont need to spend a lot to provide for a long time.

Stockpile Things Other Than Food

Human beings by nature tend to be short sighted. We often think only of today or perhaps tomorrow. We have a hard time thinking a year or perhaps longer down the road. But long term planing is very important for any of us who believe that the ZA (Zombie Apocalypse) could last for more than a few days or weeks.

Stockpiling food is a prime example of short sighted thinking. While I agree it is incredibly important to have as much food on hand as you possibly can. You also need to think about what you are going to do when that stockpile inevitably runs out. What do you need to have in order to start producing your own food. Do you have seeds for planting? Do you have the tools you need? Do you have the skills you need? Do you know how to hunt? Do you know how to fish? And yes you can stockpile skills and knowledge. You may not hunt of fish or farm but you can learn about these things and stockpile it in your head for a rainy day. You can also get books and print things of value off the Internet and add them to your survival library.

Medical supplies are another incredibly important thing to stock up on. You will not be able to run to the store and get a bottle of peroxide during the ZA. Ammunition for your guns. Fuel like gasoline, diesel, propane. Matches. Cleaning supplies like bleach and ammonia. The list of things that would be great to have is endless so each of us has to come up with our own ideas of what is important.

Remember also that you may be able to trade extra things you have for supplies you need. So if you have the opportunity to get more of something than you think you need don't pass it up. I found .22cal ammo on sale for $10 per box of 550 rounds. I now have way more than I need but I know lots of people wont. It could be worth more than gold to someone who has run out.

So yes food comes first. But food is only the beginning.
 
   

Survival Food Groups Choices: The Basics

We've talked about the 7 basic survival food groups my family uses to plan and store emergency food for a crisis. I've also mentioned spices and dried soup mixes as an extra to provide more variety. But do you know what food choices there are within each group?



Grains

Rice, oats, wheat, pasta, cornmeal, flour



Legumes

Dried beans, split peas, lentils, dry soup mix (my fav!)



Fats/Oils

Vegetable & Olive Oil, Mayonnaise, Peanut Butter, Shortening



Sugars

Sugar, honey, molasses, corn syrup, flavored gelatin, powdered fruit drinks



Milk

Powdered milk, canned milk - evaporated and condensed



Remember that different foods have different shelf lives. So for example I only buy vegetable oil, not olive oil, because vegetable oil lasts indefinitely but olive oil does not.



Canned goods only last about 3 years then you must use them and buy new. So I don't buy canned goods, but that's a personal choice. I'm far too lazy to rotate my food supplies!

More Than the Basics: Additional Foods to add to Your Emergency Storage

I've been working on our plan to buy and store enough basic foods for my family for 3 months. Our goal this year is to concentrate on the 7 basic foods I talked about in a couple of other blog posts.



But we also need other supplies to supplement our basic stockpile. Extra supplies include long-term foods that help give variety to meals and add nutritional value.



If I just had my 7 basic foods PLUS dried soup mixes (I didn't mention those before but I'm hooked on stockpiling as many dried soup mixes as I can!), I could make oatmeal with milk and honey for breakfast, a tortilla and soup for lunch, and tortillas, rice and beans for supper. That's pretty decent in terms of helping to fill someone up but let's look at nutritional value.



1 cup cooked oatmeal, 2 tortillas, 1 cup of rice, 1 cup of pinto beans and 1 cup of  beef vegetable soup made from water and dried soup mix provides one adult with the following % of my daily needs for these nutrients:



Fats 55%

Salt 95%

Fiber 83%

Vitamin A 5%

Vitamin C 5%

Calcium 59%

Iron 133%



It's pretty obvious that I need more of Vitamins A and C as well as Calcium. I can live without the fats but I'll start losing weight pretty fast. And more fiber would certainly help.



The question now is to find out what foods will give us those missing vitamins AND have a long storage life. Foods that are high in Vitamin C that my family likes are raspberries (1 cup = 54%) and potatoes (1 large - 37%). The problem is they don't provide enough and I'd have to lay in a stock of dried raspberries or potato powder and those are expensive.



Sprouts The Magical Powerhouse



But I have a solution. Sprouts. Sprouts are an amazing powerhouse of nutrition. They also give high yield of edibles compared to the small amount of raw seeds you start with. As an example, 1 cup of sprouted kidney beans provides 119% of your daily Vitamin C needs! So start sprouting right now. You want to be sure you know how to do it in case of an emergency. I'll talk more about how we grow our sprouts in future blog posts.



There is one caveat - kidney bean sprouts are toxic if eaten raw, so must be cooked. To be safe, cook all bean sprouts (mung, lentils, navy etc) before eating. Just toss them into stews or soups or stir fry them to remove the toxins. Soaking beans overnight prior to sprouting will also help neutralize the toxins present in them but better safe than sorry, especially if you are in a crisis (emergency) survival situation where little or no medical help is available.



You can eat most other sprouts such as alfalfa raw. Think about what a great "salad" you can toss together during a crisis - 3 or 4 varieties of sprouts and some homegrown herbs such as parsley make a tasty (and nutritional) addition to an emergency survival meal. Or stuff them into your tortilla with a few beans. Yum!



Vitamin A Foods

1 cup of dehydrated carrots provides 1013% of daily Vitamin A needs. Wow. So that means to have 100% all you need is 1/10th of a cup. Now dehydrated carrots are expensive but what a magical food!



This will blow your mind - did you know that you can get 44% of your daily Vitamin A needs from 1 Tablespoon of chili powder or cayenne pepper?  So why not stock up on one or both of these spices? There's another magical spice you might want to have on hand - paprika - it gives 71% of your daily Vitamin A needs in 1 Tablespoon.

























Calcium

We need 41% more of our daily calcium needs.  How can we do that? Well, we could stock up on Calcium Pills but they are expensive and gradually lose potency over time. So let's look at foods rich in Calcium. 1 cup of cooked rhubarb gives us 35% so if you have rhubarb in your garden (as I do) you've got a great source of extra calcium when it's in season.



Those magical dehydrated carrots are helpful and if you're eating them to get their high Vitamin A, guess what - you've just given yourself an extra 16% of your daily calcium and iron needs too! They sure pack a nutrition punch in every cup. 



I'm going to talk about menus and recipes and dried soup mixes in another blog post so stay tuned. I'm also going to show you my successful sprouting of Alfalfa and share how I save and store my seeds.