Do you have family members who are reluctant to try your food storage experiments? Are you worried about having tons of food in your basement that no one will eat? Try out these 7 tricks for getting your family to eat food storage … and like it!

1. Cook your regular family meals
Don’t crack open a food storage cookbook and make something totally foreign for your family. Take your regular recipes and try substituting out one or two items with “food storage” items. Chances are no one will even know the difference. Click here to check out some ideas for substitutions using some of our favorite recipes from a food blog we love.

2. Make a dessert!
Jodi’s dad (and Julie’s father-in-law) swears that he can taste whole wheat in everything and then promptly refuses to eat it and says it’s gross. Well we played a big trick on him last Thanksgiving in our “Great Cake Debate” experiment. We took one of our family favorite pumpkin cake recipes and made two versions of it (one with whole wheat and one with all-purpose flour). Read the post to see the results 🙂

3. Don’t be afraid to bake
One of the BEST ways to use up the hundreds of pounds of wheat in your storage is to start baking homemade goods. This is not something you have to do every day, or every week even. But if you find yourself with a free couple of hours some day, try making a batch of homemade bread. I don’t know ANYONE who doesn’t like fresh warm homemade bread out of the oven, even if it IS made of whole wheat. This Honey Whole Wheat Bread recipe is great to start with since it uses half white and half wheat flour (see tip #4 below). If bread is too intimidating, or you don’t have a wheat grinder yet, try cooking up some blender wheat pancakes or homemade corn bread.

4. Mix half and half
If you cook using all-purpose flour, you can always swap half of the flour (or 1/4 if you are really nervous) with fresh ground whole wheat flour. If you use hard white wheat you will get even less of that “wheaty” flavor. By mixing it half and half you lessen the chances that your recipe will fail, and also lessen the chances that your family will notice!

5. Get the right tools to help you
Julie had a bean problem for a long time. She (and her family) hated beans and it was mostly because she could never get them to turn out right. Jodi had a similar problem with rice so she was always using minute rice instead of the bulk rice from her food storage. Both of us solved our cooking dilemmas by buying (and overcoming our fear of using) an electric pressure cooker. Check out Julie’s bean tricks for perfect beans and how Jodi now uses rice as part of her food storage diet.

6. Use vegetables in soups or stews
If you have decided to stock up on freeze dried or dehydrated vegetables as part of your food storage plan it is a good idea to sneak them into some soups or stews first. Once you let out the secret that you used food storage in the meal, you then have a better chance of getting them to try some of the vegetables as a plain side dish at a future meal. (“These are the same carrots I used in that beef stew you loved honey”).

7. Get your family INVOLVED!
Julie’s boys are always helping in the kitchen (her 4 year old son wanted to buy his Grandpa a pressure cooker for Christmas). And Jodi has her kids help with all of her canning projects and love harvesting from her garden. When kids (or spouses) have helped contribute to a meal or to preserving your foods they are much more likely to give it a try. It’s hard to pull the “That looks gross” card when THEY are the ones that cooked it. So get your family to participate, and then watch as they proudly sample (and most likely ENJOY) the fruits of their labors.

-Jodi Weiss Schroeder
http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net