Food For a Year

Picture from the Costco website
My husband just told me a few days ago that Costco is selling a year's supply of food for one person for $800. That's only a little over $15 per week. I just looked it up and turns out that is a sale price, but the regular price is $1,000 and still a pretty good deal.

My friends that already think know I'm crazy are probably about to start thinking I've gone off the deep end completely, but if the funds are available, buying a packaged deal like this sounds like an easy way to build up food storage to me. One order could feed a family of four for about 3 months (probably a little longer since the kids won't eat as much as the adults). If nothing else, such a thorough food storage would protect against a big part of the uncertainty that can come with sudden job loss. I've mentioned before that it is tangible things like shelter and food storage that make me feel physically secure. I'm not completely sure why, but once I had children and realized I was responsible for protecting them no matter what, I also became acutely aware that at the end of the day money is nothing more than fancy paper.

So back to this package from Costco. According to their website, the order includes:

Grains

* 8 Cans of Instant White Rice (48 servings per can)
* 12 Cans of Hard White Winter Wheat (44 servings per can)
* 3 Cans of 6 Grain Pancake Mix (50 servings per can)
* 2 Cans of Elbow Macaroni (45 servings per can)

Vegetables

* 6 Cans of Dehydrated Potato Chunks (42 servings per can)
* 1 Can of Freeze-Dried Sweet Corn (46 servings per can)
* 1 Can of Freeze-Dried Green Peas (41 servings per can)
* 1 Cans of Dehydrated Chopped Onions (45 servings per can)
* 1 Can of Freeze-Dried Mushroom Pieces (48 servings per can)
* 1 Can of Freeze-Dried Broccoli (47 servings per can)

Fruits

* 2 Cans of Organic Apple Slices (48 servings per can)
* 2 Cans of Freeze-Dried Strawberries (45 servings per can)
* 1 Can of Freeze-Dried Blueberries (50 servings per can)
* 1 Can of Freeze-Dried Blackberries (49 servings per can)
* 2 Cans of Freeze-Dried Raspberries (48 servings per can)

Dairy

* 6 Cans of Powdered Milk (43 servings per can)
* 3 Cans of Chocolate Drink Mix (48 servings per can)

Proteins/Beans

The taste and texture of TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein) is consistent with real meat, making it a great addition to vegetarian diets

* 3 Cans of Bacon TVP (47 servings per can)
* 3 Cans of Beef TVP (44 servings per can)
* 3 Cans of Chicken TVP (45 servings per can)
* 2 Cans of Taco TVP (42 servings per can)
* 6 Cans of Pinto Beans (49 servings per can)
* 1 Can of Black Beans (49 servings per can)
* 2 Cans of Lima Beans (49 servings per can)
* 3 Cans of Lentils (52 servings per can)
* 6 Cans of Whole Eggs (236 servings per can)

Cooking Basics

* 2 Cans of White Sugar (46 servings per can) Information from the Costco website

Each of the cans is a #10 sized can (gallon-sized), so you can see it's quite a lot of food. It's all also shelf stable for many many years. Of course, ideally, you would add this food into your food rotation and periodically replace it with fresher items both so you have fresher food in your storage at all times and so you get comfortable cooking with the ingredients. One of the bigger "problems" I can see is there is no flour. They provide you with wheat instead, which is the only feasible way to store flour long term, so you would need a food mill. They also don't specify if the milk is fat free, but I'd suspect it is, and I'm not sure if you can make cheese from non-fat powdered milk. Not that cheese is a necessity, but it's something I'd sure miss if I had to give it up completely. And lastly, I wouldn't truly use this as a full food storage, you would want some other things like salt, oil, vinegar and baking soda that would come in handy. Overall though, it's a dang good start that's easy to buy.

Some websites that would help you out on how to store and use this food:
Everday Food Storage
The Food Storage section of the Daily Survival Blog
Food Storage Made Easy

Cherries

When we were back in Montana, it was the height of cherry season. We could easily find cherries for $1.50/pound at the grocery store. At the farmer's market, cherries picked the day before at a local farm were $2/pound. Since they run more like five or six dollars a pound in Texas, we had never preserved cherries before and decided we should give it a try. We went with cherry jam and cherry leather for our first try.

First we washed all of the cherries and picked off the stemsPitting cherries can be messy business, so to avoid creating a murder scene motif in my kitchen, Sierra and I put on old clothes and went outside to do the pitting. Once the cherries were pitted, we brought them back inside and I chopped them in the food processor For jam, we followed a basic sweet cherry jam recipe from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving using powdered pectin
For the cherry leather, we followed the same basic steps we used to make the peach leather: we pureed the cherries, added some lemon juice and some honey and put it on the dehydrator. This is where things got a little interesting. The peach leather was ready about 12 hours after we put it on the dehydrator, but the cherry leather just kept being tacky, it never seemed done. Finally, after about 36 hour on the dehydrator, we decided it wasn't going to work and we just turned the dehydrator off and let it sit, hoping it would harden up enough to at least be easier to clean. Lo and behold, once it cooled, it peeled off the tray just like the peach leather had. In the future, it think it will work better to leave it on for 12-24 hours, then let it cool before trying to package it up (as opposed to the peach leather, which does best if we take it off the tray right away, before it cools).

Hoping to get back to regular daily posts by Monday!

Yogurt!

Josh finally convinced me we should make our own yogurt. He frequents the Backyard Chickens message board and had been reading a particular thread all about homemade dairy products. We used the recipe listed in the first post there as our guideline. Here's the run down of what we did:

Materials:
1 small cup good yogurt (we used Stonyfield Farms vanilla because plain wasn't available. It's a 6oz cup)
1/2 gallon milk
6 one quart jars
water
medium cooler that will hold all the jars

Directions:
1. Fill cooler with the hottest water from the tap
2. Start a large pot of boiling water and put two quart jars and lids in it to sterilize
3. In a separate pot, slowly heat milk to 185 degrees (a digital thermometer with an alarm works great for this and so many other things)
4. Turn off the heat and allow milk to cool to 110 degrees
5. Stir in entire cup of yogurt and mix well until completely dissolved
6. Pour milk into your 2 sterilized jars and cap
7. Pour hot water out of cooler and place jars of milk in cooler.
8. Pour the boiling water you used for sterilizing into the other quart jars and also place these in the cooler.
9. Close the cooler and let sit for 10-12 hours (until milk is set), then refrigerate.

Our yogurt came out great. We stir in homemade apple butter, peach jam, granola, and/or strawberries from the garden. It was a little bit runnier than the store bought stuff, but next time we will try the trick of adding additional powdered milk (2/3 cup per half gallon of milk).

An explanation of why you're doing these steps: Heating the milk to 185 and sterilizing the jars kills off competing bacteria. Adding the yogurt gives you the bacteria that are used to make yogurt. Warming the cooler initially, and then placing the jars of hot water in there with the milk creates an incubator that allows the yogurt cultures to thrive and turn your milk into more yogurt.

Price run down: We see gallons of (non-organic) milk for $2.50 pretty regularly and the yogurt is about $0.80, so that means the cost ends up being about $1.03/qt for plain yogurt. We usually pay $1.79/qt (again, non-organic). For organic, your own yogurt would cost you about $1.70/qt and store-bought tends to be a little over $3 for slightly less than a quart. So this does save money. If you have a free source of milk, you'd only be paying $0.40/qt. Health-wise, it's always nice to know exactly what's going into your food and you can avoid the sugar and high fructose corn syrup if you want. Sierra LOVES go-gurt, but did you know that stuff has more sugar per ounce than coke? She's just as happy with the homemade yogurt mixed with homemade apple butter (which we put sugar in, but we have a lot more control over how much she gets this way).