After three months of eating from our pantry, freezer, and long-term food storage, our Quarantine Food Storage Challenge is coming to an end.  Today I’m sharing some of what we learned. Hopefully something will be helpful to you as you plan to be more prepared with your own food.

First we’ll cover the three reasons we decided to end our open-ended challenge now. Then I’ll go over lessons we learned and what we plan to do about it!

For those of you who look forward to these updates, this won’t be the end of talking about food storage!  In the coming weeks, I will take the focus off MY food storage and start talking about YOUR food storage (how to get started, what to store, how much to store, how to keep track, how to use it).

As I’ve started reading through hundreds of responses in the 2020 Six Figures Under Reader Survey, I see that many of you are interested in building up your own food storage and would like some guidance.  (If you haven’t shared your thoughts, I would really love if you would take a couple of minutes to complete the survey).

Why we are ending our food storage challenge

When we started our challenge, we weren’t sure how long it would last.  I know some of you will be surprised or disappointed that we’re concluding it now, and I want to explain why we are deciding to go back to grocery shopping.  Essentially it’s because we accomplished what we set out to do. Let me break that down into specifics.

The primary reason we started the challenge was to keep ourselves and others safe by not going to the grocery store during the pandemic.  At the outset of this, there wasn’t a full understanding of how this novel coronavirus was transmitted.  Now that we have a better understanding, we feel like occasional trips to the grocery store are generally safe. Thankfully the outbreak in our area hasn’t been too terrible.

The secondary reason for undertaking a food storage challenge was to give our food storage a test drive.  While we have stored food for years, we really didn’t have a grasp of how much we would really need and what things we would wish we had more of.  We’ve figured a lot of those details out as we have monitored what we have used during the last three months challenge of not grocery shopping.  Now we have a better idea of what and how much we should store for our family.

The third reason for ending our food storage challenge now, rather than continuing the challenge indefinitely, is so we can make the effort to restock and update our food storage.  The future is uncertain in many ways, including potential continued disruptions in the food supply chain, so while we have the ability to stock up, we want to do so. You will see us implementing changes to our food storage in the near future.

What we learned from eating from our food storage challenge

How much food storage our family needs

As I’ve learned about food storage from a “scholarly” perspective, I learned how many pounds of this or that that you need per person for a certain length of time, but I had no idea how that would play out in real life. The suggested amount of 150 lb of wheat per person age 8+ (and half that for kids under 8) for a year supply doesn’t come with a menu or even a recipe book.

I had no idea if this was a low ball or high ball estimate.  I wasn’t sure if that was a “keep us alive” amount or a “life as usual” amount.  That’s about 12.5 lb per person per month.

Our family has 5 people age 8+ and 2 people under age 8 (I’m not including the baby in this count).  With that estimate, we would use 75 lb of wheat in a month.

I would have to say that estimate is nearly spot on.  We ate about 80 lb of wheat per month during our challenge.  Essentially that was just used for bread, pancakes, waffles, and other baked goods.

I’m still working on recording everything in our spreadsheet so we can calculate our own family’s consumption rate and create a customized food storage plan just for us.

What surprised us

If you followed along with our weekly updates during the challenge, you may remember that in the beginning I was having a little panic attack about some essentials that I thought we were low on like yeast, baking soda, baking powder, cocoa, salt, and oil.

In the beginning we had no idea how long the quarantine/lockdown phase would last and what shortages there would be.  We didn’t know how long we would choose to continue our challenge or if at some point it would no longer be our choice.  Either way, I wanted to be prepared, so I purchased some of these staples online.

As it turned out, I haven’t opened the 5 lb bag of yeast.  We have used only about a pound and a half of yeast in the past 3 months.  That is partly due to reducing the yeast in all of our recipes by half (with no problems).

We also haven’t had to open the 5 lb bags of baking soda or baking powder!

Of the 4 gallons of oil that I bought at the beginning of the challenge (knowing that they were essential for all of the baking I would be doing), I still have 3 left.

What we NEED to stock more of

We are probably good on wheat, powdered milk, beans, applesauce, etc, but there are some areas where our food storage is lacking. We’ll use a one-year supply as a measuring stick because that’s how many food storage recommendations are made. Feel free to divide by four if you want to build up to a 3-month supply or divide by two for a 6-month supply.

Salt– Salt is such a simple ingredient, but it’s essential!  It’s literally the cheapest food storage item out there.  And we didn’t have enough stored.  In fact, we were nearly out!  Right at the beginning of the challenge, I bought a few packages of salt from Walmart. Otherwise we would have been completely out!  That’s embarrassing!  For a year supply, it’s recommended that you store 8 lbs per person (that’s 4 regular salt containers per person).

Oil– We used just under 1 gallon of oil per month.  That means we would need roughly 12 gallons for a year supply.  This is one of those things you don’t just buy and tuck away for a disaster. It’s important to rotate through your stored oil or it will eventually go rancid.

Sugar– It’s recommended to store 60 pounds of sugar (in some form) per person for a year’s supply.  We don’t have anywhere near that, so this is definitely an area for us to work on going forward.

Oats– Oats are a major staple for us, but we haven’t stocked up for a while so we were low when the challenge started.  My MIL gave us a 25 lb bag of oats that she had, which is what we’re currently eating.

Rice– We didn’t run out of rice, but we are low and don’t have anywhere near what we would need for a year supply.

Pasta– We generally eat a lot of pasta. It’s fast, easy, and everyone likes it. We had quite a bit on hand at the beginning of our challenge, but we would have run out during the second month if we weren’t being careful with it. Of course, with an abundance of wheat and eggs, we could decide to make our own pasta, but while that would be delicious, it would no longer be fast and easy.

Peanut butter- We typically buy peanut butter for about two months at a time, but we definitely need to store more.  Peanut butter an jelly sandwiches are a staple in this house!  As long as we rotate through what we have, there won’t be a problem with spoilage or waste.

Jam/Jelly– As an important ingredient in PBJs, we need to store more jam!  In the past when we’ve had easy access to free blackberries, we’ve made loads of our own jam.  It’s been a while since we’ve made jam in large quantities, so we’ve been buying it.  We have both blackberries and raspberries growing on our property now, so hopefully we can get back into making our own jam.

Cocoa Powder– We have around 10 lb, but we need more for a long-term supply. And yes, cocoa powder is an essential storage ingredient for us!

What we WANT to stock more of

Some of the things we want to stock more of in our food storage are:

Cheese– Over the next few months, we’re planning to store more cheese.  We’ll keep a reserve in the freezer and rotate through it.  By no means will it be a year supply, but if we need to live strictly off our food storage again we can ration it.  During this challenge we stretched about 5 lb of cheese to last for two and a half months, which, for a family with cheese habits like us, is impressive.

Butter– Butter is our fat of choice when it comes to baking and cooking, but throughout this challenge we had to rely on alternatives like canola oil and shortening because we only had 5 lbs of butter in the freezer at the outset of this challenge.  We actually still have a pound of butter left because we were being careful to ration it. Like cheese, I plan to store more in the freezer.

Raisins– We eat a lot of oatmeal, cream of wheat, and other hot breakfast cereals and raisins are a favorite add-in.  We should definitely store more of them!

Chocolate Chips– For baking and for mom snacks when there isn’t anything else sweet around.

Salsa– We are fortunate to have hens that keep us well stocked up in eggs (at least in the warm months).  We love having salsa to make fried eggs more exciting.

This obviously doesn’t include the normal everyday staples that we’ll be buying when we go back to the store next week like milk, sour cream, tortillas, chicken, ground beef, or pork (if it’s available and not crazy expensive), lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, celery, strawberries, apples, bananas, and other fresh produce.

Other things we learned during the food storage challenge

Understanding  the practical implications of eating from our food storage has been very valuable and will help so much as we go forward.  But a clearer picture of how long our food storage will actually last isn’t the only good thing that came from this challenge.  Here are a few other things we learned (or re-learned).

Eat all leftovers so nothing is wasted

We’ve always been pretty good about eating leftovers and not letting them go to waste, but during this challenge we were especially conscious of not wasting food.  Our food supply felt more finite that it normally does since we weren’t shopping to replenish it.  That made us more aware of not wasting any food.

Don’t overeat just because something tastes good

Another way to waste food is to overeat.  We don’t usually think of overeating as wasting food, but that’s really what it is. Mike and I were careful to stop eating when we were full instead of continuing to eat just because something was tasty.

Try new things

We took advantage of the extra time during quarantine to experiment and try making and eating new things. A lot of you thought it was funny that I had bever made split pea soup before.  Well now we’ve had it several times and really like it!  We’ve made tortillas from scratch.  We learned a few ways to make cheese.  And now that the older kids can make bread by themselves, we’ve been enjoying delicious homemade bread even though I haven’t made any for the last month!

Whew!  That was a lot!  Thanks for sticking with me!

Like I said, next week I will take the focus off MY food storage and start talking about YOUR food storage.  I’m excited to help you get started on or improve your food storage situation.  Let me know if there’s anything specific you want me to make sure to cover!

The post What We Learned From Our Quarantine Food Storage Challenge appeared first on Six Figures Under.

It’s time for another look into how our family is handling eating from our food storage during the coronavirus quarantine.  It’s been over two months since any of us have gone to a grocery store.  Our last monthly grocery haul was March 9th.

In addition to staying safe, one of the main reasons for this food storage challenge is to take our food storage for a test drive and see what it’s like to live off of our long-term food storage.  We also want to know what our food storage is lacking so we can be better prepared in the future.

In this update I’ll share how the kids are handling this food storage challenge, what we ate during the past week, what grocery items I had delivered, and our plans going forward.

If you missed last week’s update, I shared a pantry tour update after 2 months of our challenge.  Looking at what we’ve used so far and what we still have left was pretty eye-opening.  We could conceivably keep this up for a lot longer than we thought.

I enjoyed reading your comments.  Both Sheryl and Mariana suggested shopping for things like fresh produce and peanut butter (we were running low), but keep up with the challenge.  I about died when Mariana said, “I secretly hope you will continue this challenge until the end of 2020.”

Challenges with Our Food Storage Challenge

While things have been fine generally, there have been challenging times.

I think it’s been more of a challenge for me, than anyone else, which might seem obvious since I’m the one who does most of the food planning and fixing around here.  But it kind of surprised me.

I actually thought this food storage challenge would be harder on the kids (we have six kids ages 0 to 12), but it turns out they are super resilient and total troopers through all of this.  They actually probably complain LESS about food than they normally do.  It’s mostly just 2- and 5-year-old that ever even complain, and even then, when they realize that we just don’t have any fill-in-the-blank, they get over it.

The older three are resourceful and instead of complaining that we don’t have “anything to eat” they just ask if they can make something.  They’ve enjoyed making cookies, bread, smoothies, and other snacks from scratch.  It has been great!

I will say that it would be much harder to keep this up in a pre- or post-quarantine life since with six kids we do a lot of running around which consumes a lot of our time.

Now that it’s getting hot, extra cooking and baking isn’t really appealing.  All I really want is something that won’t require heating up the house to cook.  But it will still be a good month or more before we get anything substantial out of the garden

On Thursday afternoon as I was trying to come up with a dinner plan that wouldn’t heat up the house, I texted Mike (even though he was just a couple of rooms away in the office) that I was craving pizza with and a salad and an ice cream sundae.

It was hot outside and I didn’t want to cook anything that would heat up the house.  He suggested PBJs and I seriously considered it, but we only had two loaves of bread left (from the 8 loaves that my 10-year-old made on Monday) and I wanted to have them for Friday’s lunch, so I put on my big girl pants and made spaghetti.

What We Ate

Since last week I shared an pantry tour update after two months of our Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, I didn’t share the details on what we ate.  Here’s a rough list of what we’ve eaten lately.

Breakfasts

• Oatmeal
• Cream of Wheat
• Fried Eggs with Salsa
• Sourdough Waffles

Lunches

• Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches
• Orange slices
• Pretzels (I had totally forgotten we had pretzels until I did last week’s pantry tour)
• Applesauce
• Dehydrated Pear Slices
• Pudding

Dinners

We have been eating dinner really late in the past couple of weeks as we’ve been out working on the garden until it gets dark.  Here are some of the things we ate (I don’t remember/didn’t take pictures of everything).  We had some of these meals multiple times as leftovers.

• Spaghetti- We had spaghetti a couple of times.  I made homemade sauce from tomato puree that I canned last year.
• Stirfry over rice– We used the rest of the frozen stir fry veggies along with some beef stew meat from the freezer.

• Steak, mashed potatoes, and veggies– This was the “mystery meat” steak from the deep freezer.  It wasn’t that good.

• Scrambled Eggs with Hashbrowns and sausage– I mixed everything into a bowl, like a casserole, except in a bowl.  I made one without meat and one with.  I scrambled the eggs with peppers and onions and added salsa too.  It was a hit with everyone.  We had berry smoothies.

• Puffed Pancakes– Some people call these German pancakes or Dutch Babies.  This is a favorite at our house.  We had berry smoothies.
• Creamy Tacos (with rice instead of tortillas)– Last time I made creamy taco casserole I made extra sauce and froze it.  We had it over rice with peas this week.

Replenishing Some Pantry Staples

I’ve mentioned before that I have a hard time letting my pantry staples get low.  Because I’m used to being well-stocked, when I get down to two or three jars of peanut butter I start to panic a little inside.  Sure, we could stretch that to last a few weeks, but I’m not used to getting that low.

Whenever I need to order something from Walmart (they have free shipping for $35+ orders), I consider adding any grocery staples that are a decent price.  That’s one of the things that is really great about Walmart versus Amazon– you can often find grocery items available for delivery that are the same (or nearly the same) as in-store prices.

Because we were getting low on peanut butter, I checked Walmart and I found peanut butter that was in-stock and a fantastic price.  We normally get the natural peanut butter at Sam’s Club, and this is regular peanut butter, but it will be fine.  I got five 64oz jars.

I also got 4 boxes of rotini pasta since we are low on pasta.

I also checked out jam and got a great deal on this 3-pack of raspberry preserves (I got two of them).  In fact, when I was checking out, they gave me the option of delaying my delivery to make it like 5 days instead of 2 for a savings of $3.75.  I said, “absolutely!”  It still came in 2-days.

Our Plans Going Forward

At dinner tonight we talked about when to end our food storage challenge. We feel like we have a much better idea of how long our current food storage would last us and what areas would need beefing up.

And now that more is understood about how the virus is transmitted, simply going to the grocery store once a month doesn’t seem excessively dangerous, especially if we just do a pick up at Sam’s club.

The kids actually didn’t want to “give up” on the challenge, though their eyes did light up at the mention of stocking up on ice cream!

Since our last monthly grocery shopping trip was on March 9th, we decided we will plan to do another monthly grocery shopping trip on June 9th.

We will likely still continue to do many of the same things we;re doing now like baking bread, but we will start restocking some things and add in some fresh produce and other items we’ve been missing.

Would You Do Me a Favor?

I am working on planning the future of Six Figures Under and I could really use your input.  Would you be willing to take a reader survey for me?  It’s been a looong time since I’ve done a reader survey (like years), so I would love to get your thoughts and perspective.  Learning a little about you will help me to create more tailored, awesome content that is relevant to you!

Thank you in advance!

The post Quarantine Food Storage Challenge– Update 8 (What the Kids Think) appeared first on Six Figures Under.

It’s time for another update on our Quarantine Food Storage Challenge. Two months ago we decided that we would eat from our food storage during the pandemic both to avoid going to the grocery store and to see what it’s like living on our food storage.  We’ve always been taught to have short- and long-term food stored on hand and have followed the practice since we were first married nearly 15 years ago.

Thankfully  we have never had to rely on our food storage due to a job loss, natural disaster or anything else.  So while we have food storage, we know that having and using food storage are two different things.  So we wanted to give it a try and learn from our experience so we can improve and help others learn in the process.

For the past two months I’ve been showing you what our meals each week look like.  You can find all of the Quarantine Food Storage Updates here.

Today’s update is going to be a little different.  At the beginnig of this challenge I gave you an in-depth look at our pantry, food storage, deep freezer, and fridge.  Together we took inventory of what I had.

I wrote down everything we had, well at least the long-term food storage things, home-canned produce, and pantry staples.  I wasn’t quite as thorough on things like pasta or canned goods.

Taking a Food Storage Inventory After Two Months

Now that we’re two months into our challenge we took inventory again to get an idea of how much we have used and how much we still have left.  Doing the calculations wasn’t as easy as you’d think for several reasons.  First, I can’t remember if I took into consideration the pantry containers of flour, sugar, oats, etc. that we eat from (then refill from food storage buckets).

More importantly, the sizes of our various buckets and food storage containers vary.  Some are measured by weight, others by volume.  Some were filled by others, some were filled by us.  I took the original inventory by roughly counting container sizes.  I had a column for tallying #10 cans and a column for 3 gallon buckets since the majority of our food storage is in those sizes.  But there are lots of other containers too.  So I end up with “That looks like about a 3 gallon bucket… that one is bigger, so I’ll count it as double…” and “This says 50 lbs and it looks like about what would fit in two 3 gallon buckets, so two tally marks for that.”

All that to say that it wasn’t very scientific or mathematical the first time around.  Now that I want to see exactly how much we used, I’m kicking myself for not being more thorough.  So what we have is an estimate.  But it still tells us a lot!

What We’ve Learned About How Long Our Food Storage Will Last

We went ahead and weighed some of the long-term food storage to get an idea of how long it would last at our current rate of use.  For reference, we have a family of 8, but one is a 6-month-old who is mostly just breastfed.

In the video below, I share more details about how much we used of various thing and how much we have left.  Here are just a few concrete examples.

We have used 30 lbs of powdered milk so far.  We have another 130 lb of powdered milk.  At our current rate of 15 lb of powdered milk per month, our remaining supply will last us about 8.5 months.

I was super curious about how much wheat we used versus how much we still have stored.  We used around 160 lb of wheat in the past two months.  We still have 1,200+ pounds of wheat stored.  At our current rate of 80 lb per month, our food storage of wheat will last us well over a year.

Another look into our pantry, food storage, freezer, and fridge

In the video below, we’re going to take another look and see how our food storage looks after we’ve been eating from it pretty much exclusively for the past two months.  While we haven’t gone to the store or done grocery pickup, I have ordered a few things here and there as I’ve mentioned in past updates.

Watching the video is the best way to get an idea of what we have in our pantry, food storage, fridge and freezer.  You can use the little gear icon to turn up the playback speed if you want.

We’re still carrying on with our challenge and we haven’t pinpointed a specific end date yet.  I will keep you posted!

How about you?

If you didn’t go grocery shopping for two months, what would you miss most?

The post Pantry Update– After Two Months of Quarantine Food Storage Challenge appeared first on Six Figures Under.

After over two months in quarantine, we’re still going strong eating our food storage.  The world is starting to open a little, but we’re pretty much planning on staying put, at least for now.  Mike is working at home and the kids still have a couple of weeks of school at home.  It’s really nice not spending money on gas!

We still have plenty of food, so we’re going to continue our challenge, at least for a while.  It’s hard to believe we’ve been eating so long on our food storage because it hasn’t seemed to diminish very much.  Our fridge is looking pretty empty, but we’ve barely touched the food in our deep freezer and we still have lots of long-term food storage.

Besides not having a lot of fresh produce (just canned, frozen, and dehydrated fruits and veggies), our meals this week didn’t seem too different from what we would normally eat.  Either that or we’re just getting used to this food storage menu.

I’m loving having the kids help out more in the kitchen.  My two oldest kiddos (12 and 10 1/2) can each make bread on their own, which is super convenient!  My oldest made eight loaves a couple of days ago!  It’s so soft and yummy when it’s fresh!

We’re more excited about having a garden than we ever have been I think!  When the garden comes on, we should have fresh produce coming out our ears!  Hopefully we’ll have enough to harvest that we’ll be able to can, freeze, dehydrate, and save a lot of it!

I’ll be sharing more about the progress on our garden next week.

What We Ate

Breakfast

We had oatmeal a couple of times, steel cut oats, cream of wheat, eggs, and sourdough waffles for breakfast this week.

Lunch

We had peanut butter and jelly most days this week, along with apple or orange slices.  We also finished off the string cheese we got at the beginning of March.  One day when we didn’t have bread I made pasta for lunch.  I made mac and cheese for the little kids and a chicken tomato pasta concoction for the rest of us.  There was enough to have it again as leftovers for dinner later in the week.

Dinner

I didn’t do a good job of keeping track of what we ate for dinner this week. I wrote out a menu for the week, but didn’t follow it very well, so I honestly can’t remember everything we had!  I’m notoriously bad at following my own menu.  Mike and I joke that whatever the menu says we’re guaranteed to eat something else. I do remember some of it.

Lentil Tacos

We had lentil tacos on homemade tortillas with lettuce, salsa, and homemade cheese (more on the tortillas and cheese in just a minute).

Creamy Tacos

My in-laws came over for dinner and we had creamy taco casserole, jello with pineapple, green salad, and pumpkin custard.

White Bean Chili

I cooked white beans in the crock pot and then added some dehydrated onion, diced green chilis, and some spices.

Leftovers

We had leftovers at least twice this week, but maybe three times?  All the days are blending together and apparently so are the meals!

New Things I Tried

Last week I told you that I would be trying some new things. I’ve been meaning to try at least homemade tortillas and chees for a long time, but I never seemed to get around to it.  I figured that telling you about it would hold me accountable and it did!

Also, thank you Jennifer, Rebecca, Jennifer, Jen, Laura, and Kandice for your tortilla and cheese input last week!  Your suggestions both on the blog and on YouTube were really helpful.

Here’s how it went:

Making Homemade Tortillas

Tortillas are a favorite for everyone around here, whether it’s tacos, burritos, quesadillas, Tex-Mex casseroles, PBJ on tortillas, or just plain tortillas.  In the past when I’ve tried to make them they haven’t turned out well.  Now that we are totally out of tortillas, I finally gave making tortillas another shot.

I’m happy to say that it went really well!  I used this recipe that Jennifer suggested that you can make in a stand mixer, so it was super easy.  The tortillas were a huge hit.  The kids were seriously asking, “Why are these tortillas so good?”

The only problem was that it took a long time.  I used the cast iron skillet so I could only do one at a time.  Eventually one of the kids came in to take over for me.  Next time I’ll use the griddle or get several pans going at once so it doesn’t take so long. I doubled the recipe since we have several big eaters, and we only had three left over.

Making Homemade Cheese

I tried two different cheese recipes.  One was a fresh cheese from powdered milk that was super simple.  Besides the powdered milk that I was using, I only needed lemon juice (or vinegar).  It turned out pretty good, but a little dry since we squeezed out too much moisture in the final step.

The second kind I tried was a mozzarella.  I did a small batch because I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out, especially since I was using powdered milk.  In addition to the milk, it also called for rennet and citric acid.  The process is more complicated and different recipes use completely different processes.  It didn’t quite turn out right. It was fine until the final step where the instructions had me put my ball of cheese into salt water in the fridge overnight.  In the morning it had turned weird and slimy and overly salty.  We’ll try again some time soon.

Making Wheat Hot Cereal

We tried a new hot breakfast cereal this week made with whole wheat.  You can do this with either whole wheat or cracked wheat.  We used the whole wheat kernel.  The friend who suggested this great way to use wheat said she used her rice cooker, so that’s what I did.  For every cup of wheat, you add 3 cups of water and then cook in the rice cooker on the brown rice setting.

Our rice cooker has a delay timer that I love!  I put 2 cups of wheat and 6 cups of water in the night before and told the rice cooker to have it ready at 8am. That’s a great feature.

Though most of the family liked the wheat cereal, two kids did complain that the texture was weird.

To Try Next Week

This past week a friend asked if I had ever tried SOS Mix.  What’s SOS Mix, you ask?  It’s short for “Soup or Sauce” Mix.  It’s a mix of a few dry ingredients including powdered milk, cornstarch, chicken bullion, dried onions, and italian seasoning.

As the name implies, it can be used for soups and sauces.  In fact, 1/3 cup of the mix whisked with 1 1/4 cup of cold water and then heated, will sub for a can of cream soup in any recipe.  There are lots of recipes using the mix and I’m planning to try at least one of them out this week!

I also want to try making homemade graham crackers like Julie suggested last week and chocolate cream of wheat like Sarah mentioned.

How about you?

How is quarantine going for you?  Are you planning to get out soon or are you going to stay put for a while? Any more great suggestions to add variety to our food storage menu?

Quarantine Food Storage Challenge Series

Why We’re doing a Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, Pantry, Food Storage, Fridge, & Freezer Tour

UPDATE #1– What we’ve eaten, Food Tips

UPDATE #2– What we ate, Theme Days, Baking Supplies, Snacks, Seeds

UPDATE #3– What we ate, Trying New things, Garden Expansion?

UPDATE #4– What we ate, Food Storage FAQ

UPDATE #5– What we ate, New things to try

UPDATE #6– What we ate, New Things we tried

UPDATE #7– Pantry Update after 2 months of our challenge

UPDATE #8– What the kids think of the food storage challenge

What we Learned from our our food strorage challenge

The post Quarantine Food Storage Challenge- Update 6 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

It has officially been two months since our last monthly grocery haul.  When I went shopping on March 7th it was before the pandemic panic buying and any talk of quarantine at home.  It was just a normal monthly grocery haul where I stocked up on the staples that we were running low on.  You can see exactly what I got in that last grocery haul here.

I don’t typically shop from a menu, and I don’t buy everything every month.  I just buy what we’re low on, trying to stock up on things when they’re on sale or in season.  I try not to wait until we’re absolutely out of something before we restock, except for the case of fresh produce where we’re careful to not buy more than we will eat before it goes bad.

In addition to our normal pantry groceries, we’re also eating from our long-term food storage.  I have videos that show what we had in our pantry, food storage, fridge, and freezer at the outset of this challenge.

In short, I’d say that our challenge to eat from our pantry and food storage instead of going to the store is going great.  We have been eating from home all this time and we still have plenty of food.  Of course there are things we miss for sure, but we’re making do and still going strong.

There are lots of good things coming from this challenge and I’ll go into them all in the future.

We were blessed with some fresh produce from a friend who I’m pretty sure has no idea about this challenge.  She was going out of state to visit her grandkids (including an adorable new grandbaby) and she had some romaine and a bag of apples she wasn’t going to finish so she gave them to us.  We were all thrilled!

What We Ate This Week

Breakfast

Our breakfasts this past week were pretty simple.  We had eggs with salsa a couple of times, cream of wheat, oatmeal, pancakes, and sourdough waffles.

Lunch

Our lunches are pretty routine around here.  I have friends who say their kids complain that they are tired of PBJs or don’t like sandwiches.  Thankfully all of us love peanut butter and jam.  I don’t know what I would do with a kid who didn’t like sandwiches!  Every day that I can remember we had sandwiches on whole wheat bread with string cheese and orange or apple slices.  Actually I think one day when the bread wasn’t made yet we just sliced up some pumpkin bread to eat (plain, not as a sandwich).

Dinner

Burritos– We finished off our tortillas with bean, egg, rice, and salsa burritos.  We didn’t have any cheese on our burritos, but we had some sour cream, which we all love.

Sweet Potato Curry on Rice with Naan– I used our last two sweet potatoes, a couple of onions, a jar of home-canned tomato puree, a can of coconut milk, some frozen peas, and some spices to make this meatless curry.  We served it over brown rice made in the rice cooker. And everyone loves homemade naan to go with it.  Our 5-year-old got a kick out of telling daddy, “There’s naan left!”

Spaghetti with Salad– We had regular spaghetti with regular meatless sauce, but having it with salad made it exciting.  I made a salad from the romaine that we got from our friend and added pineapple, raisins, and parmesan.

Creamy Taco Casserole– This is a recipe I grew up eating and has been a favorite for generations.  I used a half pound of ground beef and less cheese than normal, but it still had that comfort food feel to it.  I made another small salad to go with it.

Scrambled Eggs with Refried Beans– Mike makes the best scrambled eggs.  He added some cheese which made them even more delicious.  We had refried beans with them.  That might sound like a weird combo, but when we lived in Guatemala for a while, where it’s totally normal to have eggs with beans, we realized it’s a great combo!

Leftovers– We had leftovers for a couple of dinners (and sometimes Mike had some for lunch too).  It turns out the sweet potato curry is even better the second or third time around (and that’s saying a lot because it was good the first time around too!).  Creamy Tacos makes great leftovers too!

Snacks

Crackers with peanut butter— The crackers are high up in the pantry where no one sees them at a glance, so I’ve been able to stretch them out a long time.

Graham crackers with frosting— I love making homemade frosting like my mom always did.  Sadly I think we’re on our last sleeve of our last box of graham crackers.  I guess we’ll have to just eat plain frosting!! (I’m mostly kidding!)

Oatmeal raisin cookies— My oldest made a big batch of these yummy cookies.  Thankfully we froze some dough in balls for cooking later. Otherwise we would have inhaled them all!

Banana chips— Among some cans of food storage we were given, there were banana chips in a can.  They were sliced thinner than the banana chips I’ve had before and everyone liked them.

Rehydrated peaches— We also had some dehydrated cubed peaches that we rehydrated for a snack.  They sure did not look appetizing– they were really dark brown even after rehydrating, but they tasted fine.  When I saw how unappetizing they looked, I thought I would make them into an easy cobbler with one of the random cake mixes in our pantry (how could the kids resist something like that!?) but our 8-year-old, who can sometimes be a complainer when it comes to food, loves them, so we’ve just been eating them plain.

Apple/Orange Slices— We probably have another week’s worth of fresh apples and oranges left!

Things to Try Next Week

I thought this week I would share a few things that I’m planning to try next week, both to hold myself accountable and to get your input.  These are new things for me, so if you have any experience or advice to offer, I would love to hear it!

Making tortillas

We use both corn and flour tortillas regularly at our house.  With as many things as we make from scratch, it might surprise you that we don’t make our own tortillas.  I know lots of people do it with great success.  I’ve tried a few times, but it’s never been very time effective for me with a big family and frankly they weren’t as good or useful as the store-bought ones.  The homemade version wasn’t as flexible as the store-bought type.  They would always break when we tried to roll them up.

But now we are completely out of flour tortillas, and we have about one more meal’s worth of corn tortillas, so it’s time to figure out how to make them well.  Do you make tortillas?  I would love to hear your secrets!

Making mozzarella cheese

Back in the law school days, I went to a women’s activity at church where I learned to make homemade yogurt in the crock pot and how to make mozzarella cheese.  Well, I have made yogurt many many times since then.  It’s super easy and cost effective. But I never actually made any mozzarella on my own.  I did buy some rennet tablets.

Since we aren’t going to the store or doing grocery pick-up, just eating from our food storage, we’ll be doing this with powdered milk.  I have read that it can be done from powdered milk, so now I just need to give it a try!  Wish me luck!  Have you made mozzarella?  Any tips?

Cracked wheat cereal

A friend shared with me a few new ways to use wheat, including cracked wheat hot cereal.  You can make it on the stovetop, but she suggested using a rice cooker or instant pot for hands-off cooking.  My kids like steel cut oats, oatmeal, and cream of wheat, so I’m going to give cracked wheat a try!  She said she tried the same thing with whole wheat berries (not cracked) and it was also good.

I will give it a try this week and report back on how it goes!

Do you have any questions for me (or my family)?

Okay friends, if you missed last week’s FAQ go check it out and leave me any other questions you have regarding the challenge and our experience and I’ll answer them in a future post!

Stay safe out there!

Quarantine Food Storage Challenge Series

Why We’re doing a Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, Pantry, Food Storage, Fridge, & Freezer Tour

UPDATE #1– What we’ve eaten, Food Tips

UPDATE #2– What we ate, Theme Days, Baking Supplies, Snacks, Seeds

UPDATE #3– What we ate, Trying New things, Garden Expansion?

UPDATE #4– What we ate, Food Storage FAQ

UPDATE #5– What we ate, New things to try

UPDATE #6– What we ate, New Things we tried

UPDATE #7– Pantry Update after 2 months of our challenge

UPDATE #8– What the kids think of the food storage challenge

What we Learned from our our food strorage challenge

The post Quarantine Food Storage Challenge- Update 5 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

I’m back with another update on our Quarantine Food Storage Challenge.  Today I’m also answering lots of your questions about our experience with this food storage challenge.

We’ve been staying home for 7 weeks now.  Our last monthly grocery haul was on March 9th, so almost 8 weeks ago.  On March 25th we decided to start doing a Food Storage Challenge where we don’t go to the store at all.

Since we have long term food storage (that we have stored for years and years), we figure that now is a great time to see what it’s like to live on it and learn from our experience so that we can improve our what and how much we store in the future.

In this update I’m going to be sharing what we actually ate this week and I’m also going to answer some frequently asked questions about our food storage in general and our experience so far with this challenge.

What we ate this week

I won’t go into as much detail with what we ate this past week because I have lots of your questions to cover, but here’s the short version:

Breakfasts

Oatmeal, cream of wheat, fried eggs, cinnamon rolls, and sourdough waffles.

Lunches

PBJs, PBH tortillas (one day when we didn’t have bread baked yet), string cheese, orange slices, apple slices, pumpkin bread

Dinners

Spaghetti squash with sauce–  This is a spaghetti squash I got at the local u-pick farm last summer, like in july I think!  That’s the great thing about winter squash– it lasts so long!  If you’ve never had spaghetti squash it’s pretty cool how it cooks up and can be served just like spaghetti.

Shepherd’s Pie– I forgot to get a picture of this.  It’s one of my go-to quick meals when I make it from instant mashed potatoes, stuffing, whatever veggies we have, whatever meat we have, and cheese, except this time we didn’t really have much cheese on it.

Stir Fry with Rice– This was kind of a vegetable stir fry but with homemade sweet and sour sauce and pork stew meat.  I cooked the frozen stir fry veggies so they were a little softer than a normal stir fry. That’s how the kids and I prefer them.

Beans, cabbage salad, and pasta– This was a somewhat random meal, but it was fun to have a cabbage salad.  I bought the cabbage in march’s monthly shopping trip with the intention of making egg rolls.  I thought I had a big bag of carrots, but realized I didn’t!

Picnic with G & G— We went to my in-laws to play for the evening.  The kids cooked hot dogs over the fire.  We had diced seasoned potatoes and green salad that Mike’s mom made and I brought jello with pineapple and deviled eggs.  We had pumpkin custard and brownies for dessert.  It was all delicous!

Leftovers x 2— I love leftover days because I don’t have to cook and everyone can choose the thing they liked best to eat.

Dessert

Brownies, apple pie (homemade pie I froze), lemon bars

Some Food Storage Challenge FAQ

In the past few weeks as we’ve shared our Quarantine Food Storage Challenge updates, I’ve had lots of great questions in comments and emails and even from local friends.  I’ve tried to answer them individually, but I figure that if one of you asked, probably more of you have the same question.  If I don’t cover your questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll get back to you (and maybe eventually do a FAQ part 2.

Are you keeping track of what you’re using up?

Yes.  It’s not an exact science, but it’s more or less accurate.  When I took inventory at the outset of this challenge I tallied up how much of each food storage item we had. I added a column where I tally what we’ve used in a different color.

What do you do about fresh produce?

Well, once our fresh produce is gone, it’s gone.  We have tried to stretch it as much as possible so we could enjoy it longer.  Even without fresh produce, we can still eat healthy foods.  We have fruits and vegetables that are frozen, canned, dehydrated, or freeze dried.

Do we miss fresh produce?  Of course!  We’re looking forward to having salad on the menu regularly once our garden grows or we get back to the store, but until then, we can still have fruits and vegetables in our diet.

What about dairy products?

Running out of milk is probably the number one thing that sends people to the store, even when they have a pretty well-stocked pantry.  In our long-term food storage we have powdered (non-fat dry) milk.  Do I love to drink it?  Nope!  Using it as an ingredient doesn’t bother me though.  We even make homemade yogurt with powdered milk!t

Do the kids mind?  Not a bit!  In fact I usually assign one of the three older kids (8,10, and 12) to make it.  They all drink it without a problem!

We have cheese frozen that I rationed out into containers and put in the freezer, but the rations are definitely smaller than our normal cheese use.  We’re eating it very sparingly.  We miss it for sure!

We started the challenge with on open container of sour cream and an unopened 3 lb container of sour cream.  We just opened that new container this week, which was exciting.  We’re big sour cream fans around here!

We also miss ice cream!  Though making frozen yogurt with our homemade yogurt is a great substitute!

Why do you have foods in your food storage that you’ve never eaten or cooked with before?

In Quarantine Food Storage Update #3, I shared that we had a 45 lb bucket of split peas.  I had never cooked with split peas before and was a little hesitant about it at first. Well, it turned out great, but it raised the question of why we would store such a huge amount of something we had never cooked before.

I definitely recommend storing what you eat and eating what you store.  Being in a stressful emergency situation isn’t the best time for acquiring new tastes or learning to cook new foods.  Plus, you don’t want to spend money on foods that  might end up wasted because your family doesn’t end up liking it!

Our situation is a little different.  We have been pretty diligent at acquiring and using food storage since we were first married (nearly 15 years ago!).  In addition to what we have bought ourselves, we have also been the recipients of food storage items from friends who moved and for whatever reason couldn’t bring their food storage with them.

This has happened on multiple occasions over the years.  I’m not sure how we got so blessed, but I think it’s partly because people know that we will graciously accept it and actually use it.  We’ve also been taught in our church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) to be self-reliant and prepared for unexpected situations. This includes having food stored for things like an emergency, a natural disaster, a job loss, or (who knew?) a pandemic. Because of that, many of our friends and acquaintances from church also have food storage.

All that to say that we have been given food storage items that we have never tried before.  Since we have the space to store it, we gratefully accept it and this food storage challenge is giving us a great opportunity to try some of those new things!

What do you do with all of that wheat?

If you’ve seen the hundreds of pounds of wheat we have in our garage, then you might also wonder what we do with it.  It’s an ingredient that not everyone keeps on hand, especially in such large quantities.

We have an electric wheat grinder that we love that we use to make freshly ground whole wheat flour.  Then we use that flour for everything you can imagine using flour for… baking bread, muffins, bagels, cookies, cakes, naan, etc.  The possibilities are endless.

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There are other things you can do with wheat, but (so far) for us it’s just baking.

The great thing about wheat is that it stores forever (30+ years).  We have some wheat that we purchased in bulk ourselves and some wheat that we were given by older friends who were moving.  The older wheat we’re using is from the 1980s!

Won’t you have to majorly re-stock your food storage when this is all over?

Yep!  We’re actually looking forward to it!  Like I said, a lot of our food storage that we got from other people is pretty old, so we’re glad to make good use of it and then replace it with new stuff!

In our time in quarantine, I’ve even re-organized our garage food storage spaces after being inspired by my mother-in-law’s extensive food storage.

Are you setting aside money for stocking up after this is over?

Yes!  I’m putting what we otherwise would have spent on groceries into a “preparedness fund” that I will use to restock our food storage once we get back to shopping.

Do you have any recommendations for where to buy food supplies in bulk?

The first place I always look is the food storage through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS church).  You don’t have to be a member to purchase the food.  Look here to see if there is a home storage center located near you.  You can also order online.  The prices are great and the products are in number 10 cans so they are perfect for storing long-term.  They are out of lots of things right now, so I would check back in a while after things calm down.

Sam’s Club is another great place to find bulk items like flour, sugar, rice, and canned goods.

Winco has lots of great bulk foods with tons of variety and great prices.  They have some 25 pound bags of the most commonly purchased bulk items readily available for purchase, but if you call ahead you can get any of the bulk items by the bag.  They even give you a discount at the register for a bit off of the normal bulk per pound price.

Ask around for bulk food suppliers in your area.  There’s bound to be somewhere!

Well, that’s a lot to cover! If you have a question that I didn’t hit on, feel free to ask and I will answer!  I’ll see you back here next week for our monthly budget update!  It was a pretty epic budget month!

The post Quarantine Food Storage- FAQ and Update 4 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

Are you ready for another Quarantine Food Storage Challenge update?!  Our family is challenging ourselves to stay out of the grocery store for as long as possible, which means we’re eating from our pantry and long-term food storage.

Not only will this keep us and others safe, but it will give us a chance to test our long-term storage and figure out what things we want to add to our food storage inventory.

In this update, I’ll share what we ate this week, including trying something totally new, some things I ordered, and our garden expansion.

As usual, you can either watch the video or keep reading below!

What We Ate

Breakfast:

Oatmeal, cream of wheat, cold cereal, fried eggs, pancakes, scrambled eggs

Lunch:

PBJ/PBH sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, oranges, apple slices, leftover pizza

Dinner:

Baked Potatoes: We finished off the last of our potatoes.  We had them with butter, sour cream, and green beans.

Hawaiian Haystacks: I used some shredded turkey from the freezer to put in the homemade sauce.  We had pineapple, peas, raisins, and crunchies (chow mein noodles). It wasn’t the same without cheese and tomatoes, but it was still good.  Normally the kids complain a little about brown rice (instead of white rice), but not one of them mentioned it!

Pizza: Everyone loves homemade pizza around here because we each make our own.  Our pizzas were very light on cheese since we heavily rationed it a few weeks ago (there’s cheese in the freezer but we’re stretching it).  We had pepperoni and pineapple though.

Macaroni and Cheese: Mike made cheese sauce with powdered milk and the cheese powder from our food storage. Our 5-year-old is a big fan. For the rest of us, it’s not our favorite, but it’s palatable.

Taco Soup: With pinto beans cooked in the slow cooker, I added onions and taco seasoning to make a pretty boring taco soup.  The highlight was that I got out a bag of tortilla chips to eat with it along with some sour cream.

Split Pea Soup: keep reading below for the details…

Desserts:

I made homemade brownies twice – once with peanut butter frosting and once with chocolate frosting.  I have to share the recipe with you soon because they are so good!

We made blueberry frozen yogurt with homemade yogurt and some blueberries from the freezer (like this “recipe” except substituting raspberries for blueberries).  We paired it with unfrosted brownies for a family night treat.

Trying New Things: Split Peas

Among the buckets of food storage we have in the garage (shown in this video) there was one with 45 pounds of split peas.  I have never cooked with split peas before.  Frankly they don’t sound very appetizing to me at all (don’t tell my kids).

We decided to invite Mike’s parents to have dinner with us when they loaned us their garden tiller.  They are essentially the only people we have interacted with in the past six weeks (and they’ve been staying home too).

And I made… split pea soup.   In addition to the split peas from our long-term food storage, I was using dehydrated potatoes and carrots from our food storage.  I diced up one of the sausages from the freezer and added it too.

Most people probably wouldn’t make a new food storage meal for company, but my in-laws were gracious guinea pigs.

Mike’s mom is a pro at cooking from her food storage and brought sweet potatoes (from last year’s garden harvest) and cornbread (made from wheat and corn she ground in her wheat grinder).

And the soup was a hit among those who tried it (the younger kids didn’t and I didn’t fight them on it).

Ordering a Few Things

I had to order a few non-food things online from Walmart this week for our family this week.  They have free shipping for orders over $35, so I added in some food items that we will likely need in the near future.  I keep a mental list of the food things that we will likely need to replenish first, so I compared prices and looked around to see if any of them had reasonable prices that I was willing to pay.

Here’s what I bought:

Salt– We are running dangerously low on salt considering all of the baking we’re doing.  In-store a 24 oz container of salt costs about $.50 at any store.  I paid $3.50 for a 2-pack. That’s heavily marked up over the in-store price, but it’s just a couple of dollars and it kept me out of the store.

Jam– I’ve told you that we eat a lot of PBJ sandwiches around here and I’m not kidding. I found a decent price on a 2-pack of Welch’s natural jam that would ship.

Peanut Butter– I didn’t get much, just a 3-pack of 16oz jars of honey peanut butter.

Starburst– Our 2-year-old and 5-year-old have trouble staying in their beds at bedtime, but they are sometimes motivated by “earning a Starburst” in the morning if they don’t come out of their rooms after they’re supposed to be in bed.

Adding those things to the non-food items I needed to get brought my total up to $35 for free shipping.

Garden Expansion?

Last week I told you that we were going to try to plant as much as we could using one raised bed that we threw together last year and some space we have in our back patio.

Most of our property is really rocky, but we found a spot that we think will be good for our melons and viney things.  We even started planting there.

We are considering using our stimulus check to build the garden that we want.  We haven’t wanted to invest the money into terracing a hillside, building raised beds, buying dirt, and setting up irrigation and fencing, since it will take away from our current financial goal of paying off the house.

We haven’t decided for sure, but we’re running the numbers and trying to decide.  Right now we’re waiting for a quote on what a bulldozer and operator would cost to do the terracing.  If we go ahead with it, I’ll share the details in posts and videos.

Quarantine Food Storage Challenge

Well that’s all I’ve got for this update!  For more on our Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, check out these posts:

Quarantine Food Storage Challenge Series

Why We’re doing a Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, Pantry, Food Storage, Fridge, & Freezer Tour

UPDATE #1– What we’ve eaten, Food Tips

UPDATE #2– What we ate, Theme Days, Baking Supplies, Snacks, Seeds

UPDATE #3– What we ate, Trying New things, Garden Expansion?

UPDATE #4– What we ate, Food Storage FAQ

UPDATE #5– What we ate, New things to try

UPDATE #6– What we ate, New Things we tried

UPDATE #7– Pantry Update after 2 months of our challenge

UPDATE #8– What the kids think of the food storage challenge

What we Learned from our our food strorage challenge

How is quarantine eating going in YOUR family?!

The post Quarantine Food Storage Challenge- Update 3 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

It’s time for another Quarantine Food Storage Challenge update!  For those who are new here, we are doing a food storage challenge during this time of sheltering in place.  We are challenging ourselves to not go to the grocery store until the pandemic passes, or as long as we possibly can.

Not only will this keep us and others safe, but it will give us a chance to “try out” our food storage to see how it goes and learn what things we need to add to our long-term storage inventory.

Last week I shared lots of the meals we’ve been eating so far, as well as some of the struggles we’ve had and how we’re facing them.  If you missed that update, you can read it here.

Today, I’ll talk about how we’re planning our meals, what we’re having for snacks, and a few things we’re doing to ensure that we’ll be able to stretch our food storage challenge even longer. If you would rather watch or listen to me tell you all about it, feel free to watch the video below instead.

Making a Menu with Theme Days

Last week I made a menu with theme days to help prevent me from having a mental block when it was dinner time.  They weren’t necessarily the same sort of categories I would have picked in pre-pandemic, but they focus on main categories of meals that we can make from our food storage.

I brainstormed 4-5 meals in each category to make sure it was a viable category, and came up with:

• Soups
• Rice
• Beans/Mexican
• Breakfast for dinner
• Potatoes
• Pasta

I also assign a day for leftovers, because we always have lots.  One of the things I love about leftovers is that everyone can choose what they want instead of complain about what I made (does that ever happen at your house?). I also love that I don’t have to cook every day.  And it’s great that eating leftovers a lot means we don’t waste any food!

I wrote out a little whiteboard menu of what we would be eating since I made the last video.  As you can see below, plans changed.

Turns out we had some form of leftovers four times!  But the food was good the first time, so eating it a second time wasn’t hard!

The meals that weren’t leftovers were:

Potato and Sweet Potato Curry with Homemade Naan

Pork Loin, Mashed Potatoes, and Peas with Homemade Bread

Creamy Taco Casserole. I didn’t get a picture of that, but there is a picture in that ancient linked post.  I promise the photo really doesn’t capture the deliciousness.

To keep the leftovers exciting, on the first leftover night I got out some tortillas to go with all of the different beans we ate last week.  We had leftovers from the meals above on a couple of the leftover nights.

Another night, I made some whole wheat French bread and we ate it with leftovers.  Plus I made some tuna to go along with it.  We had open-face Tuna sandwiches and curry on bread.  Some of the kids prefered to have beans with their bread.

Snacks

Cake mix waffles– Our 8-year-old made cake mix waffles from a red velvet cake mix.  It’s such a fun way to use a cake mix.  It’s like cupcakes only less crumbly. I might have chosen a less colorful option, but this was his project.

Homemade Cookies– We froze some of the cookies we made last week so they wouldn’t immediately disappear. Basically that means hiding them from myself! It worked, so we had cookies this week too.

Dry Cereal– We have some sugar cereal we got at Grocery Outlet pre-pandemic.  For a snack, the kids sometimes have some in a bowl without milk, just for a sweet, crunchy snack.

Graham Crackers and Frosting– My mom always made the best homemade frosting for graham crackers. Whenever I make frosting for any occasion, I always try to make enough so there is extra for graham crackers.

Popcorn–  We don’t normally eat much popcorn, so it’s a special treat when we get it out. It’s also great because it’s super cheap for a treat! We have two #10 cans of popcorn.  It’s from my grandma’s food storage so it’s old, but it still pops. Mostly.

Oranges– We are still eating the oranges that we got a few weeks ago from our friends’ trees.

Chocolate No-bake Cookies– Around here we all LOVE chocolate no bake cookies!  A LOT.  We haven’t made them in a while, so everyone was excited.  Want to know our favorite way to make them?

Update on Baking Supplies

Last week I told you how I ordered some yeast, baking soda, baking powder, and cocoa from a bulk foods store online.  Since I had never ordered from them before and everywhere is out of things like yeast, I didn’t want to get my hopes up until the order was actually in my hands.

I’m happy to report that BulkFoods.com didn’t disappoint!  Their prices were reasonable and they had $5 shipping for orders of $75+, which is partly why I added the extra cocoa to the order. The other reason is … well… chocolate!

Before quarantine started, I had 3 gallons of oil, 5 lbs of butter, a wee bit of coconut oil, and just enough shortening to grease bread pans.  Wanting to increase my oil supply, I ordered some vegetable oil from Amazon (they also have canola oil, but it was a little more expensive).  I also got some shortening online from Walmart.  I usually only use shortening for two recipes (pie crust and molasses sugar cookies), but we will make some exceptions during quarantine when we run out of butter.

Now I realize that this is spending money on food, but it didn’t require us to go to the grocery store, so I’m deeming it okay–everyone gets to make the rules for their own challenge!  Plus, these purchases weren’t just random wants or cravings.  They are staples that will allow us to use the other long-term food storage that we have.

If you’ve watched our pantry and food storage tour, you know we have hundreds of pounds of wheat.  Our storage was lacking enough fat and leavening to go with all of that wheat.  Adding oil, yeast, baking powder, and baking soda will make that wheat go a LONG way.

Planting Seeds

We weren’t planning on a full garden this year, just a few tomato plants in one raised bed that we put together last year.  The majority of our property is pretty steep, so we need to do some terracing, build raised beds, and haul in real dirt (ours is mostly rock).

That wasn’t in the plan for this year (and still isn’t), but realizing that this coronavirus craziness (and all of the hardships that come in its wake) will be lasting into the summer, we thought it prudent to plant as much as we can.  We started some seeds inside and some out on the back patio.

We had a collection of seeds from years past, but I also ordered some more varieties on Ebay.

Here’s what we’re planting:

Lettuce and spinach— for salads, tacos, smoothies

Tomatoes— for eating fresh and canning

Carrots— for eating fresh, adding to soups

Zucchini, yellow squash— for eating plain and baking with

Watermelon— what’s summer without watermelon!?

Pumpkin, butternut squash, banana squash— great for baking

Peas— a fun veggie for munching

Berries— We planted some raspberries and blackberries last year and earlier this year.  We shared most of last year’s harvest with the birds and deer, so we’ll see what we can do about that this year.  Hopefully having dogs will at least help with the deer.

Nothing will be picture perfect this year.  It’s all a little thrown together, but with the real understanding that what we grow will be a more serious contribution to our eating than it has been in the past.

How about you?

Are you planting a garden during quarantine?  What will you grow?

What are your favorite make-at-home quarantine snacks?

Do you have menu theme days?

Quarantine Food Storage Challenge Series

Why We’re doing a Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, Pantry, Food Storage, Fridge, & Freezer Tour

UPDATE #1– What we’ve eaten, Food Tips

UPDATE #2– What we ate, Theme Days, Baking Supplies, Snacks, Seeds

UPDATE #3– What we ate, Trying New things, Garden Expansion?

UPDATE #4– What we ate, Food Storage FAQ

UPDATE #5– What we ate, New things to try

UPDATE #6– What we ate, New Things we tried

UPDATE #7– Pantry Update after 2 months of our challenge

UPDATE #8– What the kids think of the food storage challenge

What we Learned from our our food strorage challenge

The post Quarantine Food Storage Challenge– Update 2 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

For those who missed it, our family is doing a 100% food storage challenge.  We are challenging ourselves to not go to the grocery store until the pandemic passes.  This will not only keep us and other safe, but it will give us a chance to “try out” our food storage to see how it goes and learn what things we need to add to our long-term storage inventory.

At this point the kids have been out of school for 4 weeks.  Mike has been working from home for 4 weeks.  The last time I went grocery shopping was March 25th, when I stopped by Grocery Outlet before I decided to quit going out altogether.  So as of today it has been 17 days since we last went to the store.

Normally that would be no big deal, but since we don’t know when this will end, it’s a little more challenging. We definitely want to ration out the exciting food so we don’t eat all the “good” stuff first and end up with just a bunch of wheat to eat.

If you want to see what our pantry, food storage, freezer, and fridge looked like at the beginning of this challenge, check out the videos in the post that introduces the challenge.

In this update, I’ll go through some of the things we’ve eaten in the past couple of weeks.  Then I’ll talk about some things that have been hard as well as some surprise blessings.

If you’d rather watch the video than read, you can watch the coordinating video below (there are lots of food clips in the video):

What we have eaten so far in quarantine:

Breakfasts

Oatmeal: We are actually low on oats in our long-term food storage.  They are something we eat very regularly, but we hadn’t restocked up recently. We usually buy oats as 25 lb bags at Winco and had about 35 pounds left when we started. We also have some instant oatmeal packets.  Normally the older kids would eat 2-3 of the packets each for breakfast, but to make them stretch, we add 1/3 cup of regular oats to the instant oatmeal packet (and increase the water) to make a heartier serving.  We also sometimes make a pot of oats on the stove and add brown sugar and raisins.

Cream of Wheat: Mike and the kids call this “bear mush.” I think that’s a Goldilocks reference.  We buy it from the bulk bins at Winco.  We don’t have a lot on hand, just what we buy on a monthly grocery haul.  We will just keep it in our breakfast rotation until it’s gone.  We add brown sugar and raisins.

Sourdough Waffles: Mike’s mom often makes sourdough waffles (from Mike’s grandma’s recipe) when the family gets together.  Everyone LOVES them.  Mike started his own sourdough start about two weeks ago.  His mom also gave us some of her start in case Mike’s didn’t work (but it did!).  I made some syrup to go with them.

Eggs: Mike makes the best scrambled eggs in the electric skillet.  Some mornings we have fried eggs.  We have 17 hens, so the eggs keep coming, though I assure you, with the price of chicken feed, they are not cheaper than store bought eggs.

Cold cereal: If you watched the video of our food storage tour (or saw our recent Grocery Outlet haul video), you know that we got lots of rice crispy cereal at $.50 per box.  When we ran out of regular milk, we started making powdered milk.  Thankfully the kids don’t mind at all.

Baked French Toast Casserole: Using leftover dried bread we found in the freezer, we made a huge pan of Baked French Toast Casserole.  It was delicious!

Pancakes: We make pancakes from our own whole wheat pancake mix.  The three older kids know how to make them, so it’s a breakfast that they can start in case mom and dad are still in bed (not that that ever happens ).  We eat canned peaches, pears, and applesauce on top of our pancakes.

Cinnamon Rolls– For a special birthday breakfast, I made cinnamon rolls with cream cheese and blueberry frosting.

Lunch

Peanut Butter and Jam Sandwiches– Once we ate through the five loaves of store bought bread that were in the freezer we started baking bread.  I usually bake 4 loaves at a time.  We’ve made our regular whole wheat sandwich bread, soughdough bread, and French bread from whole wheat flour. We have lots of wheat in our food storage. Some is pretty new, and some is from as far back as the 1980s.  The really old stuff doesn’t rise as well, so we grind it up with some newer wheat to get a medium-rise whole-wheat flour.

Egg Salad Sandwiches- We get a dozen eggs or so from our chickens every day, so egg salad is a great option for lunch.  Sometimes I’ll make both kinds of sandwiches and slice them in halves and let everyone choose what they want.

Orange Slices- We have orange slices almost every day. We picked boxes of oranges from a friend’s trees and these makes a great addition to lunch and work as snacks between meals.

String Cheese- My younger kids love string cheese, so I started breaking them in half to stretch them so they’ll last longer.  We don’t have them everyday, so we still have some left.

Pretzels– We ate a bag of pretzels we had on hand.

Graham Crackers– We’ve eaten a few boxes of graham crackers. The kids love these for snacks.

Smoothies– We make smoothies for any meal, but lately we’ve had them for lunch.  We add homemade yogurt, oranges, frozen fruit, spinach, and milk.

Dinner

Bean soup– I cooked up some pinto beans in the crock pot along with some dehydrated onions and other dehydrated veggies from our food storage. I made a giant crock pot full, so it lasted for several meals.  We added some sliced sausage to half of it. We ate it with a little sour cream and cheese.  In one of its appearances as leftovers, I made cornbread in a skillet to go with it.  Another day we had more leftover beans with rice.

Lentil tacos– To make lentil taco “meat” in the instant pot, put 1 cup of lentils, 2 cups of water or broth, and 2 Tablespoons of taco seasoning in the instant pot.  Cook on high pressure for 15 minutes with a quick release.  Easy peasy!  We double it.

Spaghetti– We used one of our cans of spaghetti sauce and had a canned grean beans along with our spaghetti.

Macaroni and cheese– In our food storage I found a #10 can of cheddar cheese powder that we inherited from someone.  I had never used it before so I wasn’t sure what to expect.  It turns out it looks just like the pwedered cheese packets that come in boxed mac and cheese, so I used it just like that.

Salad– We made sure to make salad from all of the romaine lettuce that we had in the fridge.  We had a couple of dinners of salad with bread and saved some lettuce for tacos.

Butternut Squash Soup– We have a wonderful recipe for butternut squash soup.  We enjoyed it with freshly baked french bread.

Bean Burritos– We had several variations of burritos depending on what kind of beans we had leftover.

Orange Chicken and Rice– When I was cleaning out my fridge and freezer, I found an orange chicken freezer meal I had made before our last baby.  It was delicious!

Desserts

Plum sauce cake– We have lots of plum sauce that we canned several years ago, so I looked up a recipe for applesauce cake and just substituted plum sauce. I put walnuts on half of it for those of us who like them.

Sponge Cake– Since we have plenty of eggs (but are running short on other leavening agents) I tried a sponge cake with some homemade chocolate frosting.

Brownies– In our family we prefer brownies to cake just about any day, even birthdays.  We made fudgy brownies from a jar one day.  Then we had a birthday in the family and made a brownie layer “cake.”

Orange Glazed Cookies– I found a recipe for orange flavored cookies with orange glaze. The kids were surprised that the grated orange peel was actually delicious in the final product.

Surprise additions to our food supply

While we haven’t made any trips to the store in the past 17 days, we have had some surprise additions to our food supply which have been a huge blessing!

Sweet potatoes— A friend from church left us a few sweet potatoes in our mailbox

Butternut squash and banana squash—  Mike’s dad dropped off two butternut squashes and a giant banana squash (which cooks up like pumpkin) from their garden harvest last fall.

Oranges— A friend whose house is on the market invited us to go pick some citrus from their trees.  We have been loving and appreciating them!

How We’re Feeling About Quarantine Food

When we first did an inventory of our food storage, freezer, etc, I was feeling pretty confident about the challenge of living off of just what we have at home.  Not long after that, I started to get a little stressed every time I thought about food.

The trigger of the stress was that we were lacking in a few important areas, primarily leavening agents.  I realized that we only had about a pound and a half of yeast, a little over a pound of baking powder, and about two and a half pounds of baking soda.

While that would last us a while under normal circumstances, with baking everything from scratch we could easily go through that really quickly, so I knew we needed to ration it.  The problem is that we don’t know how long we need to ration it for.  Rationing our leaven over two months would be a lot easier than rationing over six months.

The stress was really starting to affect me, so I looked at some bulk food sites online and found somewhere that I could get those items in bulk.  I made an order and hopefully it will come through.  Until I have it in my hands, I’m still being careful with rationing.

Aside from that, I’ve been feeling pretty good.  As the weeks go by, I’m realizing that we are barely making a dent in what we have.  I’m glad we started incorporating the boring things in now, so that we can spread the interesting foods out.

A Few Tips From This Week’s Food Storage Challenge

–Ration out good ingredients so you’ll be able to enjoy them down the road. I rationed out our remaining cheese into 5 containers and put 4 of them in the freezer so we can spread out one of our favorite add-ins.

–You can use HALF the amount of yeast that a recipe calls for and just let it rise longer. I did this with French bread and cinnamon rolls and it worked perfectly!

–Having even a simple dessert really makes you feel like your life isn’t so bad. We have made several desserts lately, which helps keep things exciting and helps encourage kids who are suspicious of eating foods that aren’t their well-loved favorites.

–Be conscious about how much you’re eating and stop when you are satisfied.  It’s so easy to keep eating because something tastes good.  This has always been a struggle for me as I’m trying to lose all this baby weight, but now that we are trying to make our food last, I have another reason to not overeat and it has been effective!

How are YOU managing?

I hope this was helpful to take a look at what our family is eating from our food storage during this quarantine time. I would love to hear how YOU are doing?

• What are YOU eating?
• What are some of your go-to food storage meals?
• What ingredients do you wish you had more of?

Stay home!  Stay safe!

Quarantine Food Storage Challenge Series

Why We’re doing a Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, Pantry, Food Storage, Fridge, & Freezer Tour

UPDATE #1– What we’ve eaten, Food Tips

UPDATE #2– What we ate, Theme Days, Baking Supplies, Snacks, Seeds

UPDATE #3– What we ate, Trying New things, Garden Expansion?

UPDATE #4– What we ate, Food Storage FAQ

UPDATE #5– What we ate, New things to try

UPDATE #6– What we ate, New Things we tried

UPDATE #7– Pantry Update after 2 months of our challenge

UPDATE #8– What the kids think of the food storage challenge

What we Learned from our our food strorage challenge

The post Quarantine Food Storage Challenge– Update 1 appeared first on Six Figures Under.

It’s official. No more shopping for us! Well, at least until life is back to normal.  Maybe that’s just a month or maybe it’s through the summer.

I’ll explain why we’re doing this, then show you what our food situation is at the outset of this crazy challenge.  I’ll update you with new posts and videos throughout however long it ends up being,  showing what we’re eating (and describing what we wish we were eating) including recipes we’re making to keep our food storage staples interesting.

And of course we invite any of you to join us!

Why are we choosing to eat what we have and NOT go to the store?

Yes, I know stores are still open.  I’m not worried that they will run out of food.  Sure, there will be hiccups in the supply chain and they might not have all of the things you’re looking for, but I imagine there will still be food.

That being said, there are two main reasons we are choosing to live off of our storage and not shop for food through the duration of the coronoavirus pandemic.

First, we are taking this health situation seriously.

It may not turn out to be as terrible as the experts have predicted.  That would be great!

But it might.  And if we can do a little something for the greater good, then we are happy to do our part by keeping eight people from getting infected and possibly transmitting the disease to others.  We’ll just stay home.

Thankfully, we are all healthy and don’t have any pre-existing conditions that would make us particularly susceptible.  Still, we feel like the responsible thing for our family to do is just stay home.

Since grocery stores these days are one of the highest trafficked places, they are a great place for transmitting stuff.  I would feel especially sad to contribute to the problem when we have actually prepared for this day.

Not this specific day per se, but we have prepared for events in which we would need to have food storage (natural disaster, job loss, crazy world health crisis, etc).

Which brings me to the second reason we’re choosing not to visit a grocery store for a while.

Second, this is a great chance to test our food storage preparedness.

We’ve done no-spend challenge months where we have gone the entire month without grocery shopping. We managed just fine.

If you’ve checked out any of our monthly grocery haul videos or posts, you know that we don’t shop from a particular menu, but rather just shop to replenish the ingredients and staples in our pantry.  That way we can cook any of our normal meals.

Since we keep a pretty well-stocked pantry, going a month without shopping isn’t too bad, but we haven’t tested out what it would be like to live on our long-term food storage (you know, wheat, rice, beans, etc).  We want to see how it goes and learn what things we would like to have in our food storage so that after this is all over we can work on improving our family’s food preparedness.  

In short, we will treat this experience as our “dry run.” Surely this won’t be the last time food storage has the chance to save the day.

How long will this food storage challenge last?

I wish I knew!

But part of the challenge is not knowing.

Not knowing how long it will last encourages us to ration the “good stuff” and get creative with the boring stuff right from the beginning.

So depending on how long this all lasts, this challenge may be easy (if it lasts for a month of so) or difficult (if we’re sheltering in place until July).  Only time will tell.

Our pantry, food storage, and freezer inventory

As I was taking inventory of what we actually have in our pantry, food storage, and freezer, I made videos to document everything.

Want to see?  Here’s what we have in the deep freeze in the garage:

Here’s what our pantry, cupboards, and long-term food storage looks like

And here’s a current look at our fridge and freezer. This one is a little embarrassing as I didn’t clean anything before taking this video, so it gets pretty real.

Updates and an Invitation

I plan to share updates to show you what we’re eating as well as what we are missing. Hopefully we can all learn from this experiment.

If any of you are in a position to do a similar challenge I invite you to join me!  I would love to share ideas on how we’re using our long term food storage during this crazy time.

Stay healthy out there friends!

Quarantine Food Storage Challenge Series

Why We’re doing a Quarantine Food Storage Challenge, Pantry, Food Storage, Fridge, & Freezer Tour

UPDATE #1– What we’ve eaten, Food Tips

UPDATE #2– What we ate, Theme Days, Baking Supplies, Snacks, Seeds

UPDATE #3– What we ate, Trying New things, Garden Expansion?

UPDATE #4– What we ate, Food Storage FAQ

UPDATE #5– What we ate, New things to try

UPDATE #6– What we ate, New Things we tried

UPDATE #7– Pantry Update after 2 months of our challenge

UPDATE #8– What the kids think of the food storage challenge

What we Learned from our our food storage challenge

The post How We’re Living Off Our Food Storage– No More Grocery Shopping For Us appeared first on Six Figures Under.