She’s the most renowned food storage genius in the southwest. In light of all of the craze about food storage I thought I’d let all of you in on this little secret that my friend Emily passed on to me (thanks Em!).
Sister Dewitt was called as the regional welfare specialist for the southwest region. She takes a slightly different approach to food storage but I think it makes food storage much less formidable. The idea is to select 14 breakfasts & 14 dinners that your family enjoys. Then you just get enough of the ingredients to make those meals 26 times and there’s a year’s worth. Now preferably these are meals that have ingredients that can be stored easily. So for example, one of the meals I chose was spaghetti.
So I decided to get 13 jars of Ragu and then 13 packets of dry sauce (something I discovered the other day at Walmart because I realized I didn’t have a place for 26 jars of sauce). And then 13 lbs of spaghetti (which, thanks to Wendy’s handy conversion chart is about 2.5 cans from the cannery). So I’m still accumulating, but soon I’ll have year’s worth of spaghetti. I opted not to devote an entire pint of canned meat to it but I could probably save some from the previous day’s meal and throw it in the sauce.
She also suggests making a loaf of bread a day for lunch or snacking. Here’s what I love about her method: I know what I’m going to make with my hundreds of pounds of flour, wheat, sugar, etc. I know that I have the ingredients to make those meals. I’ve thought through the ramifications of those meals…if the power is out, I can use my solar oven, if I don’t have water, I can use the Ragu sauce first and boil the spaghetti in that. She helped me to think through my meals and be prepared to make them under different circumstances. Emily helped me to learn her methods for canning meat and bottling butter (that’s what I’m doing in the picture). She’s also really creative and she bakes cakes in jars in solar ovens. I’m not storing desserts yet but it sounds good to me :). Anyway, the booklet she distributes during her presentation is online at http://theideadoor.com/Preparedness/everything_under_the_sun.htm
If you give it a try, I’d love to know what your meals are. And I’d be happy to send you the meals/calculations that I’m using too. Happy Preparing!
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